Kingdom Come: Deliverance II director says AAA games risk becoming "corporate products"

It's hard to ignore that there has been a certain shift in how a lot of gamers perceive AAA titles that fill out the year in recent times. Whether you want to blame the culture wars, grifters, or the head honchos behind big companies, some people are growing tired of what they're getting.

But, then there's always a game or two that manage to show the industry what people are looking for. According to Kingdom Come: Deliverance II's director Daniel Vávra, the split that sometimes occurs between what publishers put out and what people play can be explained by a comparison with Hollywood.

"If you look at the movies, at least in the past, Hollywood studios [operate] very differently than games companies. You have producers who choose some script, then they try to find money, and then they assemble the team and give a lot of control to the director," he told The Game Business. "Basically, the people who control everything is the director and the producer. And the producers often give chances to very young and sometimes inexperienced people. Bryan Singer was very young when he did the first X-Men, for example. They gave him a very important franchise. So Hollywood was, at least in the past, willing to risk, and to try to do new stuff with new people. And they knew that it's about a good director rather than some committee."

"While in games, you have a company and there is a board of people who are deciding stuff, and the director or writer is just one of them, and very often doesn't have the final word. And that makes it a much bigger risk that it will become, basically, a corporate product rather than a piece of art," he continued. "This environment also repels creative people. A lot. For a big game that's similar to ours or Red Dead Redemption, or whatever, you need a lot of money, a lot of resources... much more than for a typical movie. It takes much longer. You can shoot a movie very quickly, there's a lot of post-production, of course, but you assemble a big team for a short time. While in games you have a large team for years. This work-for-hire that works in Hollywood doesn't work in games industry."

Do you agree with Vávra?

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is out now on Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC.