“AAA is not dead because some exec says so”

What is AAA?

It’s a question we’ve asked a lot on The Game Business, and it’s one that Glen Schofield is wrestling with during our conversation this week.

Schofield has led the development on some big games. His CV boasts blockbusters such as Blood Omen 2: Legacy of Kain, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, 007: From Russia With Love, Dead Space and three Call of Duty titles (2011’s Modern Warfare 3, 2014,’s Advanced Warfare and 2017’s WWII).

Call of Duty is the most clearly AAA out of those. “Call of Duty is really expensive,” Schofield says. “But it has three modes. When you’re making a mode for Call of Duty… it’s a freaking game.”

But what about the rest?

“Do you know how much Dead Space cost? Maybe $32 million. Something like that,” Schofield says. “I don’t know when I started hearing that my games were being labelled as AAA. Do you have any idea what making Dead Space was like?”

Schofield was looking to leave EA after he finished James Bond, but EA president Paul Lee sought to keep him. He agreed to stay if he could have 20 people and be left alone for a year. That team would create Dead Space, but with around 60 other EA projects on-the-go, getting the green light would take persistence.

“You end up marketing inside your own company. I made a scary freaking calendar, with just the concept art that we had. I must have spent $4,000. We gave it to the executives… holy crap did I get in trouble for that! But at the same time… now they’re starting to hear Dead Space.

“Then we made posters and we’d put them up when there were big internal meetings. The executives would get together, and we put these posters in the [toilets], so whenever they went to the bathroom, they were seeing Dead Space. We did this gorilla marketing to stay relevant.”

He adds: “That’s about as indie as you can get inside a giant company, having to fight for your dollars.”

The battle for EA support didn’t end there.

“They do this internal thing. The chief creative officers come in and look at all the games. They compare our game to Mirror’s Edge, because that was the other new one coming out that year.

“We’re about five or six months before shipping. Something like that. They give Mirror’s Edge a 90, and Dead Space is 72. This is internal. The team is devastated. And we’ve got five or six months. It just sucks the wind out.

“But what does that do? Internally, they give Mirror’s Edge more marketing money than Dead Space. I think we had $12 – 14 million. I know there’s people going ‘that’s more than my budget for the game we’re making’. Is that what AAA is? I don’t know.”

The Callisto Protocol was audited twice

Regardless of the definition of AAA, Schofield makes big games. His last project was 2022’s The Callisto Protocol, which was a spiritual successor to Dead Space. It was a solid game, but it reportedly cost $160 million. It was a budget so high that the game’s publisher [Krafton] audited Schofield’s studio (Striking Distance Studios) twice.

“They couldn’t believe that we spent $100 million,” he explains. “We had to start everything new. We started a studio in the United States, and all those costs are lumped in there. Then we were PS4, and they go ‘We got to switch to PS5’. I come back a few weeks later with the cost, and they were like: ‘What? You’re just going to PS4 to PS5?’ And I’m like: ‘Are you kidding? You want to do that at no cost?’

“And then we had to build a publishing company. They did have one, but it had only done PUBG. So, we built one from scratch and put them in Striking Distance. That was a major overhead.”

The Callisto Protocol was expensive. Horror games can be successful, but unless you’re called Resident Evil, they typically sell below five million units. Schofield says that The Callisto Protocol was an exception.

“From what I heard, the game sold between six and seven million copies. It made a lot of money for a first game. I’ve heard those numbers a couple of times. But even if it’s five million, it’s made its money.”

But he stresses, Krafton never asked him to cut costs.

“Nobody said to me, ‘I need you to get $40 million down’,” he insists. “No one said that.”

Why are we spending so much time talking about budgets? Well, because Glen Schofield makes big games, and nobody is signing them. In fact, some companies are dropping them. Just last month, Microsoft ended almost all of its third-party publishing contracts.

Schofield has been sharing his efforts to get signed on LinkedIn. Towards the end of 2023, he went looking for $100 million to fund a new project called Hellion.

“The market hadn’t gone south yet,” Schofield remembers. “I had my VC and my agent, and they hadn’t seen it yet.

“We started hearing it after we had put together a Powerpoint. But people were lining up to see it. I’ve been pitching my whole life and I get pretty passionate and animated. There are people out there that just enjoy my pitches. So, a couple of them just wanted to hear what I have. But there were quite a few that became two meetings, three meetings.

“Now we get into 2024… and we’re feeling it. We’re not being told get down to $10 million. Not yet. It was just… ‘oh you want $100m? That’s a lot.

“I was looking to do something big. But even then, we were getting the price down. I thought maybe I could get it to $85 million. But now I’m reading these articles that were saying that AAA is dead. You’re dead. Anybody who is in AAA, ought to retire. And some of this was coming from executives in the game industry.”

Schofield was dismayed by the anti-AAA rhetoric.

“AAA opened the door for every new console for years and years,” he says. “The big AAA games will go first. They’ll use the new engines. They’ll do tones of tech. And then every game in the company after that gets to use what they had done. There was so much good that AAA has done.

“I was just getting upset at some of these guys. How can you turn your back on people like this? Because it happens all the time. There are not a lot of cartoony, hoppy, jumpy games anymore [unless] your name is Nintendo. We have seen things come and go.

He says: “[I want] to show people it’s not dead yet. It’s not dead because some freaking executive says so.”

There was one partner who seemed eager to sign Hellion, and even held six meetings with Schofield.

“Then we got on the seventh, and they say, ‘Thank you, but we’ve decided to say no at this time.’ I thought we were becoming friends,” he recalls.

“It was a rough time. We all just agreed… I don’t want to do this anymore. Could I take a game and make it smaller? Yeah. But that’s not the game we’re making.”

Schofield’s Egyptian mystery

Since then, Schofield worked on getting another project off the ground with his daughter, but he ran into the same challenge. Potential partners said the game was too expensive, and the concept was abandoned.

But Schofield is always creating. He recently put on an art show in San Francisco, and there is another game concept in the works. After noting increased interest in shorter, story-driven titles, he’s developed a pitch centered on an old Egyptian mystery.

“I read a long time ago that Ramesses VIII is the only Pharaoh never to be found,” he tells us. “They don’t know where he is buried. They’re still looking in the Valley of the Kings, but my premise is… it’s not there. It’s a dark action adventure. I can’t get into it too much.”

But… can he do it on a budget?

“Not necessarily, but it’s conservative for what you’d call AAA,” he concludes. “It’s under $100 million. My agent and his group are working through the budget. They’re all ex-devs. I don’t want to quote it yet. But I can get it much cheaper.

“I’m really excited about it. I was thinking about retiring. Not from games industry, but from directing. But you can’t just put your shovel down and say ‘I’m done’. You’ve still got ideas. You want to make stuff. I’m still looking forward, I’m not looking back. “

“Callisto Protocol was really tough. We had to transition 200 people all over the world [because of COVID]. You got to get 200 dev kits out, and there were no chips at the time. It was a freaking mess. I had two major operations during COVID, a knee replacement and shoulder. I put on a lot of weight. I was not myself. But I’ve lost 90 pounds. I got in shape.I go to the gym again. I’m getting back to do one more marathon, at least.”

And here are some other key moments from our interview with Glen Schofield…

If there’s one thing Schofield would have changed about The Callisto Protocol, it was the rush to get the game out before Christmas 2022.

“I freaking love making games,” he tells us. “I don’t like when the politics get in the way, which they did with Krafton. There was no doubt about it. They told me that the game has to ship in December because of the Korean stock market. I should have just shut it down right there. I’m mad of myself on that one.

“When it came out it was a shit show on PC. So, we got labelled with that. And we should. I was upset.

“[Krafton] stopped talking to me on December 10, right after ship. And didn’t talk to me again until next May. During that time, I took the team and we did all our DLC. We did 86 patches. We had a regiment every time we were going to do a patch. 12 of us would get in a room, every department, and if all 12 didn’t raise their hand that it was ready, we didn’t send it out.”

Schofield is a big fan of Midjourney in helping him create art.

“Everybody’s spouting out about AI. I am in the thick of things. The one thing that they always tout is that you can make great concept art and cinematics. Do you know the last thing the fans were telling us? Don’t make cinematics.

“Someday, 10 years, five years, it’ll be here. But is it going to be an engine? Right now, it’s a whole bunch of things that just kind of suck it in… and into what? It’s going to have to settle down a bit before we actually use it.

“So, we got to continue to make games. I look for clever ideas to make games cheaper. But I’ll always be looking for tools. We’re always trying to make it cheaper, more efficient, faster and better.”

Is he concerned about the impact on industry jobs?

“The creative profession is right in the cross hairs of this discussion.

“I remember when Photoshop was coming out. Now anybody who did airbrush or anything like that, they were out of work, right? Because computers are going to make it faster. I know how to undo. I now could add airbrush techniques within seconds and all that… but everything just got more complicated.

“I remember when motion capture was going to take jobs away. I look at animation departments now, it could be 30 people. It always raises the bar. It’s raising it now for me when I’m coming up with ideas and worlds.

“I wish I could predict what jobs [will come out of it]. I hear people going we’re going to want prompt engineers. And we probably will.”

He adds: “I am 100% behind AI, because I’ve been there for a lot of these [moments]. I was there for the beginning of the internet when they said everyone would have a website. And now everybody does. AI is here, just work with it.”

During our interview, Schofield tells us how he misses E3.

“Every time I went down there, which was every year, I came back with something that made my game better. We all did. Because we were so excited to show each other. My friends down in Naughty Dog are like, ‘dude, you got to see this new game. You got to see this new tech’. When we’re down there, we’re not competition, we’re this brotherhood and sisterhood of developers.

“And it’s so good once a year, that you would show each other what you’re working on, and then you’d go back and make your game better. It was also a forcing function. We all had to get our game into a position. I’ve heard the company saying ‘well, we don’t want [developers] having to worry about this every year’. But I think it was more about money.”

Ultimately, he acknowledges, there was no measurable financial benefit for E3.

“There’s no ROI. ‘Glenn here said he got a new mechanic’… I don’t know how you can write that done. It’s not quantifiable, but it’s real. A lot of things in creative are not quantifiable.”

Check out our full interview with Schofield above, on YouTube, or via your podcasting platform of choice. We’ll be back tomorrow with an exclusive interview from Gamescom. Until then, thank you for reading.

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