AAA retail model 'crushing innovation' -

Heavenly Sword, Enslaved and DmC developer Ninja Theory says it can't wait for digital distribution to take centre stage, claiming that the current "big retail model is creaking". When asked by GamesIndustry.biz about the possibility of the developer working on multiple smaller titles rather than one big one at any given time, creative chief Tameem Antoniades said that something has to give both at his own company and in the industry more generally."It's something we talk about often," he said, "We're in this kind of AAA bracket, I guess you could call it."High budget, high stakes retail model - the barriers to entry for that are so high, so difficult, that we seem to be getting, being offered, decent work in that area. It's hard to say no when you've got a team of 100 and you have to keep the payroll going. Another big project comes along, you tend to go for it. "There's always an opportunity between projects to explore things, a lot of team members are hobbyists, they create their own iPhone games and things like that so I can see us kind of taking a punt with that," he continued. "The whole digital revolution is happening now and it can't come soon enough. The model we're under, the big retail model, is creaking."It's such an opportunity for fun creative games to reach a target audience, there's this stranglehold that the AAA retail model has which I think is just crushing innovation and access to creative content."If you're paying that much for a game, you don't want to take chances. You want everything to be there, all the feature sets. You want it to be a known experience, guaranteed fun. That's not healthy."The health hazards of a AAA dominated industry were considered by Naughty Dog co-founder Jason Rubin last year, who came to pretty much the same conclusion as Antoniades. Tom Pakinkis