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this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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E33 did not just get lucky. They used a completely different formula.
~10M€ development cycle with 30 full-time devs + outsourcing is one order of magnitude smaller than what the big studios consider to be the "standard". AA vs AAA.
30-40 hours of main story and no open world keeps the development resources focused and gameplay/story loops tight in a way that can't be achieved in an "expansive" open world without unfathomable resource expenditure. But modern games from major studios literally cannot get greenlit if "open world" is not in the feature list because execs see it as "standard".
Smaller budget also means that they did not pour 50 %+ of their capital into marketing, which allows mores resources to be put into the game and lowers the barrier to profitability. That's an understated issue; AAA games can't afford to fail, which is why they all end up bland design-by-committee.
Those parts above were not risks Sandfall took, they were actually basic risk mitigation for an indie studio that big studios aren't doing based on the overstatement that bigger = more chances for "THE hit game" = better.
Where E33 took some risks was with the strong creative vision and willingness to ignore genre trends and focus group feedback (going turn-based and not lowering the difficulty to "baby's first video game"). But for the cost of 1 Concord a big studio could afford to make 10 E33s at which point it's really not a matter of "luck" for at least one to be (very) good. E33 would have been profitable with 1 million units sold, it did not even have to be that good.
The industry has absolutely noticed that E33 wiped the floor with their sorry asses, and I predict that in ~5 years we'll see many more AAs popping up.
They were always going to receive at least some critical acclaim. This is a AA game from a well-known and respected publisher (Kepler Interactive), so it couldn't have gone entirely under the radar. They had a decent enough marketing budget and initially were included in the Microsoft Gamepass specifically to secure the studio's financial future in an uncertain market. The game was objectively good so with all that help, by release day there was no way that the game was going to be a complete dud à la Concord, and I recall Broche saying in interviews that profitability was essentially expected even though the stratospheric success was not.
Also they did get "unlucky" because the Oblivion remaster not-so-coincidentally shadow-dropped a couple days before E33's release. It's not much of a stretch to say that Microsoft knew the game was good and (mostly unsuccessfully) tried to drown it out.
If E33 was going to truly flop, it would have been earlier in the development process IMO. They could have relinquished voting shares to investors and been forced to "ubisoftify" the game into bland nothingness. Key creatives could have left. Going all-in on UE5 might have been a technical quagmire. But when the game went Gold, there was very little that could have impeded an at least modest amount of success.
Where the industry is truly unforgiving is single A games. There's too much to keep track and it's entirely possible for the "media" (journalists, youtubers, streamers, etc.) to miss a very good game. Single A doesn't pack enough of a punch to force enough eyeballs on trailers to get a critical mass of fan following, and in that context I fully agree that even a perfect game can still be a complete flop.
There's plenty of games that you could say the same about that didn't get the traction. It's still a hit based industry. It's not a knock against the game, it's a reality of the industry.