It’s a double-edged sword. But f2p has become so dominant that certain types of games almost NEED to be f2p to be relevant. See Concord for a recent example.
You’re probably on point with the branding (and that’s probably why Nintendo reportedly delayed their official announcement when Sony announced the PS5 Pro).
Source: bitter owner of a switch, will not consider this due to Nintendo’s response to defective design/hardware (never fixed it) and the lawsuit happy attitude they had towards fans (banning streams, tournaments, etc.)
I could take one look at those models and animations and tell you it wasn’t cheap. Then probably a lot of money went into those CG cut-scenes that were intended to be rolled out weekly.
Just heard the story. Apparently it cost 200m by the point they presented the alpha and it was absolute crap. So Sony put another 200m into outsourcing the work asap to fix it.
Yeah it seems like a podcast saying a number like after talking with a staff member of concord. I would have thought that people below executive/finance suite wouldn’t have that information. Not sure if they talked to someone in there but $400 million is just a bit steep.
Not impossible with tech salaries being what they are, maybe it includes the buyout of the entire studio by Sony in that number though.
8 years of development under multiple publishers will bleed a lot of money. They also hired on a lot of “experienced devs” from different game studios to head the different departments, and presumably paid them well enough to get them to leave their original companies.
This is probably the biggest lesson against the gamer mindset of “Give the developers time to work, and they’ll polish it to a shine.” Sometimes, even time doesn’t improve the end product if the idea wasn’t great. It might even indicate that on some instances where publishers scrapped a ‘cool’ project that was in the works, it was actually the right call. It might have been a Concord waiting to happen.
Absolutely, and especially at a Corp as big as Sony, you have a lot of office politics in play also. Folks pushing personal agendas because it advanced their career.
Yeah, but we have seen a lot of examples where it was clearly a lack of time. An example would be the Gollum game. It had some very good concepts(making decisions between both of his personalities), but it didnt had any impact. This seems like something where if they had more time they could have formed this into a very good game mechanic.
I’m hoping most of that money was spent on developers and salaries since it would appear they didn’t spend shit on advertising. Silver lining to a failure is that at least people had jobs for a good while
Sony apparently saw this as their “Star Wars moment”, and went all in. Apparently there was also a culture of “toxic positivity” there where people were too reluctant to criticize things.
When are publishers going to realize there is only a market for like 2-3 Live service games at any one time?
You cannot underestimate the stupidity of games publishers. I’d be willing to accept that sunk-cost alone is the explanation for this outrageous budget. It probably started out as “what’s $200m for the next Fortnight?” and just went in $5 or $10 million dollar increments from there.
Or you could do a 60 fps bloodborne remaster that people would actually play for orders of magnitude less money, but what do I know I’m just a plebe who didn’t lose 400 million dollars
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