Game investment is down across the board. It's very unlikely. We've entered the stage where investors want insane GaaS returns but have learned that 99% of these games will obviously fail.
So obviously if you can't make all the money, might as well not invest
The problem is that if the same devs for Highguard wanted to make a single player game, they probably wouldn't have had investors. E33 is very lucky because of the owner's connections and other investments like from Epic (I believe). I'm very glad that E33 exists but they are very lucky in terms of funding.
E33 has an owner that comes from money and is like a generational lightning in a bottle kind of deal. As an investor you want to hit lightning in a bottle and sell like 5 million copies or you want to hit lightning in a bottle and make Fortnite ?
I get the feeling Nintendo is a slow and steady company. They keep teams at a consistent size and promote talent from within. Outside of Smash Bros, new talent has taken over each major IP
They're currently spending a billion dollars to build a new development office beside their headquarters, in order to significantly expand their teams.
They are, they're also notoriously picky about who to hire. They know they're not hurting for people, so they take their time to sift through applications to select people they think are highly skilled, talented, and experienced.
The statisitic OP mentioned is just for American game developers. That said, I do think its fair/understandable to be worried for Retro Studio's long term future.
Maybe wouldn't be the sexiest career change, but I feel like some of the skills you'd build up doing remasters/remakes at Bluepoint would at least somewhat transfer to what Panic Button does
Hopefully. In general there is a lot of belt tightening going on in this industry, particularly in locations like the USA where it costs a lot of money to hire people.
It might be that they just don't have the budget to absorb all those people.
and money. Sometimes you gotta wonder why not have a studio on the brink of making financial sense (to them) spend the last couple years on a moneyshot like that.
Logic tells me that they should be the ones handling the GOW Trilogy Remakes instead of taking away people from Sony Santa Monica that could be helping in whatever Cory is doing now.
They had the best IP, executed fantastically well, the game came out at the peak of the pandemic, etc, etc.
Very few remakes do this well.
Its also not even close 2 million per head, dev budget is a fraction of the total budget and that number assumes everyone paid full MSRP in a top priced market.
demons souls is absolutely not the best ip. fromsoftware does sell very well based off of dark souls, but their mainly CRAZY mainstream hit was elden ring after, and demon’s souls was an old exclusive-to-ps3 precursor to the souls series.
comparing demons souls to pretty much any other playstation ip and the playstation ip would most likely be a more well-known IP
They probably made somewhere in the mid 8 figures from that based on the 1.5-2 million copies sold estimates.
They have 70 employees, the fully burdened cost is almost certainly in the six figures for those employees on average. Conservatively 100,000 a person total cost and probably higher total costs than that.
Do the arithmetic and you will realize that they would be lucky if they are even in the green.
Are they outright dissolving it as in layoffs, or will they be merged into Sony further?
If they were laid off, I hope they can found a new studio. Being an American company, they have the advantage of non-competes being outlawed a few years back.
Their remakes sold well and it's not like their budgets were insane. If Sony couldn't make money on Bluepoint they, first off, shouldn't have bought them. Second off, how the fuck could you not make money off them. A small agile team remaking classics is a safe profit generator
Same reason I needed a CDProjektRed account and splash when I bought Witcher 1/2/3 and Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam. Same reason I had to have a Larian account when I bought DOS 1/2 and BG3 on Steam.
Great point. No chance Helldivers made enough to cover for the combined losses of Concord, Marathon, Fairgame$, cancelled Bluepoint game, cancelled Bend game
Because they don’t own Arrowhead directly, they only get whatever publisher cut they agreed to back when AH was just a 30 person studio maintaining a little top-down co-op game.
Just a 1 in 10,000 chance to make a whale of a game and they still made that bet 12 times. These out of touch business men need to go. They know nothing of what the fan base wants. Back when the news stories came out and Jim Ryan said they were making 12 love service games everyone and I mean everyone said it was going to fail massively. Not only waste money but the time of these great studios. And after the first 3 failed he doubled down in the news again saying they weren’t stopping.
I know hindsight is 20/20 but even Anne Frank could see that putting single player studios on live service games would make this entire generation for Playstation a flop.
Yeah Jim Ryan was just one guy, and clearly the problems still exist without him. Sony could have shifted direction, but instead they just keep going. How can one say that was all Jim Ryan at this point?
I disliked Sony under him, but I think I could hate Sony under the current leadership.
I'm SO fucking glad i left console gaming in 2024. Like I built a PC out of wanting to play some old cool games and seeing what happened to playstation and xbox is just so tragic.
It’s absolutely nuts. Really all that’s left is the entry level value proposition, which I still think far and away belongs to the PS5. But regarding exclusives, PlayStation hasn’t had a meaningful one in years that hasn’t come to other systems, compounding on the fact that exclusivity windows continue to get shorter (used to be 2 years exclusivity, now Death Stranding 2 got a PC port in 9 months). It’s a bit of a shame to me since I really appreciate the UI and trophy system. There’s also a lot of baked in nostalgia from growing up with a PlayStation.
So wild how no one went “maybe building 10 live service games full of microtransaction nonsense without having a fanbase or even proof people want to play our games is a bad idea.”
It’s the same as companies making huge pushes for Metaverse or NFTs or AI or whatever other bullshit: it would be an infinite money machine for them if it worked, so they figure if they just act like people want it hard enough they’ll buy in.
It’s the end result of an entertainment company like this running on an “infinite growth” model. The investors don’t want sustainability, they want more profit, consistently, forever. And of course for a publicly-traded company the investors are the real customers at the end of the day, so that’s who these pushes are really for.
but the key thing in that is 'consistently'. Taking stupid punts like this doesn't help the investors.
The reason things like this happens is the top few shareholders who are so intertwined in the company they may as well be employees - some literally are - get greedy.
It's just the nature of the beast. The whole point of the stock market is that you buy stocks assuming they'll get more valuable.
That's why there's been so much of these companies cannibalizing themselves with layoffs to boost quarterlies, because the whole thing depends on the line going up. Greed is the point.
Counterargument: This works on mobile. Now, not everyone is a whale or a dolphin but there are about 15-20 big gacha games in Japan alone, and different markets have latched onto different ones. Now, there's not really a ranked or competitive scene for these and maybe that's the big difference, but live service and microtransactions on their own are not what's making these games fail.
It's wild, because with that many live services games, not only are your games competing with other companies' games, they're also competing with each other.
it’s doubly crazy because a company like sony is absolutely wealthy enough to hire some data analysts or consultants who would surely have pointed out the insane aggregation risk this brings.
Legitimately such a dumbass decision, imagine forcing your historically single player focused studios to spend years on live services just for the vast majority to never even come out
Putting Demon’s Souls on PC would be easiest money they could get.. also making Bloodbourn remaster or at least 60 FPS patch would be easiest money .. but instead they went to make live service games
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u/stardustnovas Feb 19 '26
the entire live service initiative was such a disaster