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Assassin's Creed lead calls AAA push "cancerous growth"

Striving to make games bigger, better and more sales-friendly is poisoning the industry, Assassin's Creed creative director Alex Hutchinson has said.

"We think about [this push] as kind of cancerous growth. I think that will leave the AAA blockbusters as nothing more than the last of the dinosaurs," Hutchison said, speaking at a GDC 2012 presentation called Designing Games to Sell, as reported by Gamespot.

Hutchison described two possible "dystopian" avenues for continued growth in games - designing games based on analytics to make money, and relying on increased scale and better graphics in a "massive arms race".

"In my mind video games need to have the goal of educating people, entertaining people, or at least being artistic," he said, adding a warning:

"If you're not pushing any of these things…then I think we’re in for a rough patch."

Interestingly, Hutchison's own project, Assassin's Creed III, has been described as taking a huge leap in terms of scale and gameplay. It's due in October on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

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Brenna Hillier avatar

Brenna Hillier

Contributor

Based in Australia and having come from a lengthy career in the Aussie games media, Brenna worked as VG247's remote Deputy Editor for several years, covering news and events from the other side of the planet to the rest of the team. After leaving VG247, Brenna retired from games media and crossed over to development, working as a writer on several video games.

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