Huge Marvel's Spider-Man developer hack

Kotaku has a nice writeup of the whole thing, focusing on the balancing act of managing costs and profits.

These and other presentations provide a clear sense that Insomniac, despite its successes and the seeming resources of its parent company, is grappling with how to reverse the trend of ballooning blockbuster development costs. “We have to make future AAA franchise games for $350 million or less,” reads one slide from a “sustainable budgets” presentation earlier this year. “In today’s dollars, that’s like making [Spider-Man 2] for $215 million. That’s $65 million less than our [Spider-Man 2] budget.” Another slide puts the problem more starkly: “...is 3x the investment in [Spider-Man 2] evident to anyone who plays the game?”
Click to expand...
Some of their games had to sell over 7 million copies at full price to just break even...!

They also want to cut staff costs:
“To remove 50-75 people strategically, our best option is to cut deeply into Wolverine and Spider-Man 3, replacing lower performers with team members from Ratchet and new IP.”
Click to expand...

AAA development is going to break the industry.
 
I'd rather have a 480p and $30 titles, than 4k and $70 titles.
 
username and 23 others said:
Kotaku has a nice writeup of the whole thing, focusing on the balancing act of managing costs and profits.


Some of their games had to sell over 7 million copies at full price to just break even...!

They also want to cut staff costs:


AAA development is going to break the industry.
Click to expand...

Crazy numbers but not really new news. It's expensive to hire ±400-500 devs a year to work on a project for 4-5 years. Throw in marketing costs, QA, etc. The very fast and lose calculation I've seen around is something like: number of devs * months of projects * $10,000. It was estimated Halo Infinite had a budget of $500 million.

CDPR said Cyberpunk's DLC cost $120 million to make, just for the DLC.
 
username and 23 others said:
Some of their games had to sell over 7 million copies at full price to just break even...!
Click to expand...
This must be even more difficult to pull off when those sales can only come from people who have a ps5.

I do not understand the push to buy semi bespoke hardware to play a Sony first party game on launch. A similar argument can be had with Microsoft.

Yeah they are finally waking up to the PC market, so that's nice. I will buy forbidden west and Ragnarok when they appear. But it's their own fault that they have to wait for my money for a year or more after release.

The problem isn't cost of making a AAA game. It's the self inflicted cost of exclusivity.



NathanDrake said:
I'd rather have a 480p and $30 titles, than 4k and $70 titles.
Click to expand...

I got you fam. And it's free!

prod said:
lt was estimated Halo Infinite had a budget of $500 million.
Click to expand...

What a waste of $500mil. Especially if a fat chunk of that went to the campaign.
 
mr_norris said:
This must be even more difficult to pull off when those sales can only come from people who have a ps5.

I do not understand the push to buy semi bespoke hardware to play a Sony first party game on launch. A similar argument can be had with Microsoft.

Yeah they are finally waking up to the PC market, so that's nice. I will buy forbidden west and Ragnarok when they appear. But it's their own fault that they have to wait for my money for a year or more after release.

The problem isn't cost of making a AAA game. It's the self inflicted cost of exclusivity.
Click to expand...

Thing is, they sell well (also consider below figures are a year old):

SM, Horizon and GoW is at 20 million each
SM2 sold 5.5 in just 10 days. Now already over 6 million

And nowadays there are 50 million PS5s in the wild. The PC will always be secondary for them because truth be told, they seem to sell well enough on one platform
 
prod said:
Thing is, they sell well (also consider below figures are a year old):

SM and GoW is at 20 million each
SM2 sold 5.5 in just 10 days. Now already over 6 million

And nowadays there are 50 million PS5s in the wild. The PC will always be secondary because truth be told, they seem to sell well enough on one platform
Click to expand...
Yeah I agree. My point was it's really on them when they focus on a portion of the market.
 
The saddest thing of this whole thing: WTF happened to Insomniac? Have they just become a comic games studio? Looking at their Wikipedia page they state
They thought the studio should not specialize in one genre. This new project was part of Insomniac's expansion; the company wanted to have multiple projects in parallel development
Click to expand...

Sadly, it seems they just became that. For a single AAA studio to have multiple AAA projects in parallel is just undoable nowadays. Sony needs to diversify their IP and development teams. They are basically churning out one genre: single-player-cinematic-story-driven games.

Yeah, I'm butt-hurt for PS1 and PS2 era Sony.
 
username and 23 others said:
The saddest thing of this whole thing: WTF happened to Insomniac? Have they just become a comic games studio?
Click to expand...
If their other Marvel games are as incredible as the first Spider-Man (only one I've played so far), then I don't mind tbh. One of the best games I've ever played. And this from someone who absolutely hates all this comic book/superhero crap in general, especially the movies.

But there's still Ratchet and Clank though so it's not all comic book stuff.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X