While that number pales in comparison to Battlefield 6’s 7 million units in mere days, Clair Obscur did it all on a budget of less than $10 million, and with a tiny development staff. The game was hugely successful for its budget, letting the studio continue without resorting to painful layoffs. Sandfall’s success isn’t a one-off. Look at Supergiant Games’ Hades duology, AdHoc Studio’s Dispatch, or Mintrocket’s Dave the Diver for more evidence that studios and labels should focus on smaller but richer gaming experiences.
The Not-Quite Bleeding Edge
Another major benefit of aiming smaller is that it lets companies mitigate rising development costs for themselves and consumers. The memory crisis is forcibly extending the hardware life cycle, delaying new console generations and blocking supplies of powerful PC graphics cards, leaving many players without the means to reap the benefits of the most demanding games.
As Final Fantasy VII Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi—no stranger to hugely ambitious games with incredibly long development cycles—says, “There isn’t a single console that you can say, ‘As long as I have this, I’ll be able to play everything, to do everything.’ Personally, I think that over the course of the next 10 years, if someone said, ‘Here’s the next generation of consoles,’ the market and the audience are not necessarily going to just jump over.”
Hamaguchi says the industry will still straddle the lower-spec options, like a Steam Deck or Nintendo Switch 2, providing broader experiences to a wider base. It won’t be so much about cutting-edge technology, but how developers can compete in game design. “I think we’re going to be entering an age where that’s really the focus of competition,” he says.
Sadly, this approach has one big problem: Developers are already trying it but failing to draw investment. There’s no easy answer—investors follow the money, and the money points to GTA-scale games, even though AAA development increasingly leaves carnage in its wake.
Even Rockstar appears to realize the current approach is unsustainable, with studio veteran Phil Hooker telling Bloomberg that “the engine, the tools, and the team we’ve built during the [GTA VI] project will allow us to do things more quickly” in the future. Hopefully, good news for fans who fear another decade-long wait for GTA VII.
Grand Theft Auto VI will be a success, and its longevity is already certain. But when every other publisher sees the inevitable slate of sales records the game will shatter, they’d do well to think twice before chasing it—the games industry might not survive if they do.