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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
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Yes, that's why I said
Kojima is NOT an AAA studio; the fact that it's named after a single person whose vision drives the company is proof enough of that. Larian is an AA studio that is putting out AAA-grade hits in what is normally considered a niche genre, but with none of the watered-down pandering to the lowest denominator that AAA studios have fallen into. The same could be said of FromSoftware. Owlcat DEFINITELY isn't an AAA studio.
Using Blizzard as an example is very much a misdirection, as ActiBlizz is very much one of the biggest offenders today; of course they were great back in the day, before AAA studios became what they are now. Then they became what they are now. So is playing as 'a cat girl sorcerer'; not only is that failing to even scratch the surface of what makes Morrowind the weird masterpiece it is, but also, I can do that in Final Fantasy 14.
CD Projekt and 4A are the exceptions that prove the rule. The publishing arm and the developing arm of CDPR are closely tied, similar to how Steam and Valve are. Even CDPR, however, has fallen afoul of some of the AAA pitfalls with the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk - they just managed to course-correct their way to victory after the fact, and were probably able to do so partly because the company is so cohesive. 4A, meanwhile, was founded specifically to avoid the money-obsessed thinking that I'm complaining about here.
Even then, I wouldn't really call them big publishers. They don't churn out games, they just make their own stuff.
And Nintendo, of course, is doing its own thing. They seem to be changing only as much as is necessary to stay relevant as time goes on, and it's working for them.
Mind you, I agree with many of your points, and I look forward to the next Morrowind; it's just probably going to take a good long while for the conditions for it to arise, and it's not going to come from Bethesda, or ActiBlizz, or Ubisoft, or Microsoft, or Sony, or EA, or Epic. Or Valve, or 4A, because they don't make those kinds of games. I'd include Nintendo in that list, but they made Tomodachi Life, so I wouldn't put much of anything past them if one of their big names got a bug in their ear.