Prototyping and design documentation was likely started a decade ago, but they wouldn’t have fully ramped up to a larger team size that’s more expensive to sustain for a full decade. In the interim, they put out Anthem, Mass Effect: Andromeda, and remastered the original Mass Effect trilogy. So there is a world where they didn’t spend $200M on it, but it also wouldn’t surprise me if they hit that number either; and if they did, they’d have to sell about 5M copies to break even (assuming a 70% cut and that not every copy sold is at $70).

This deadline was set once the money was coming in more slowly than it was going out.

It’s all going to be relative to what they spent, which I don’t know. If they only spent $70M, they already made their money back. It’s looking like they’ll probably make their money back regardless, unless they spent an entire GTA6 on this thing, which I doubt. These are also only the Steam numbers that I’m calculating based on how many reviews it has; the PS5 version likely did quite well too.

Alan Wake 2 took an upfront buyout in exchange for appearing on a less popular platform. That would be an exception to the normal use case. A thousand companies will go bankrupt trying to make Candy Crush even though someone already made Candy Crush. And you can replace Candy Crush with Call of Duty, World of WarCraft, Destiny, or whatever you like. Those games take up all of your time by design rather than allowing and encouraging you to move on to another game.

For all we know, there may be no way this sci-fi future Porsche gets damaged, because it may not even be part of the game’s loop, as opposed to a driving game where we know for a fact you’re going to drive. When the appeal to a driving game is to be able to drive whatever brand of car you want, the car brand has the power in the negotiation. This is a game that takes place in retro future 80s sci-fi and doesn’t feature the actual real world car.

The way Kojima was probably able to get Monster to pay him was either he has a friend at the company/ a friend is a shareholder or he was somehow able to convince them that the deal was film product placement, which is a different kind of license and comes with different rules, but often means the brand does pay the prodution studio. I am going to assume he just has a friend that works at or owns stake in Monster.

Does he also have friends at CalorieMate, PlayBoy, and Apple? Sure, we know he has at least one friend at AMC, but this is a long line of product placement in Kojima games, and they do it for the same reason they do it in film; it’s an advertisement. I think it would be pretty absurd for an already expensive production to then license Porsche for their story when they could have easily, in 20 seconds or less, established a fictional car brand to plaster on the back on their space ship.

If the problem was a woman lead, how come The Witcher 4 also didn’t get brigaded?

It did.

Even if what you are implying is true, the same thing happened to Concord, people brigading it for being “woke,” and we both know how that ended.

People did the same for The Last of Us II, and that game sold over 10 million copies. A lot of its negative reaction was even pre-release from people who hadn’t played it but read the script. Concord was a game no one wanted from frame 1, before we even saw pronouns in a character select screen.

Back of the napkin math says they’ve already sold about 1.5M on Steam so far. A handful of sales like they one they’ve got right now should help them easily blow past 3.

Baldur’s Gate 3 was only last year. Metaphor just set records for Atlas’ fastest selling game this year. Even amidst the tremendously troubled launch, Cyberpunk 2077 went on to be one of the best-selling video games of all time, and its DLC did very well too. God of War: Ragnarok sold at least 15 million copies. And these are just a few examples off of the top of my head that don’t fall into gray areas like GTA where they’re also a live service.

Titan Quest II is around the corner too.

I’m expecting the licenses resulted in the money flowing in the other direction. Monster paid Kojima for Death Stranding, not the other way around.

Dislike ratios are fake these days, as it just polls people who use the browser extension. Don’t put too much stock into it. Some segment of people get told that the game is woke because it stars a woman who shaves her head in the opening seconds, so they brigade the video and mash dislike.

I’m not underestimating how much Naughty Dog spends on their games. That stuff all leaked, so we can put an exact number on Last of Us 2. People dig the games that they make though.

Concord selling themselves as having developers who worked on Destiny reminds me of a trend I’ve observed though, though maybe there are outliers that have slipped through the cracks that would prove me wrong. When a new studio pitches its inaugural game as being from developers of X, Y, or Z, it pretty much never goes well, especially if it’s aiming for AAA. Maybe there are difficulties building a game and scaling up to that team size simultaneously. Any of a number of things can be the case, but at this point, it’s a red flag for me. The difference between that and “from the makers of The Last of Us” is that Naughty Dog is still Naughty Dog, and that’s more or less the same band sticking together. The Last of Us didn’t do it for me, and neither did Uncharted 4 honestly, but their games keep seeing the same levels of acclaim and success release after release.

You’re inferring a whole lot from a mock-up of gameplay that isn’t actually gameplay. A single player Naughty Dog game has a huge leg up over Concord in that you can play it regardless of how many other people bought it. Just saying “from the makers of The Last of Us” buys a few million copies sold where Concord didn’t clear 50k. If you want actual candidates for the next Concord, it’s going to be Marathon and, even more likely, Fairgame$.

Well, this is misleading. My mind goes to the likes of Sony first party titles in reading this headline, but the examples that the article uses as a metric for “PlayStation exclusive” are more like the games that either were paid to not go to Xbox or didn’t see the fiscal sense in doing so. It doesn’t rule out first party titles, but that’s far from the most likely. Of Sony’s first party games, the ones most likely to come to Xbox, if at all, are the live service games, and that’s looking increasingly like a strategy that Sony regrets anyway, so why even bother with Xbox when it’s not going to move the needle?

They run the gamut from the long-standing outlets like IGN to the Patreon-funded stuff like MinnMax.

The people who review the games are the same people who vote for the winner, and Astro Bot was the best reviewed game of the year.

It may very well be, but the impetus in the article of Outer Worlds 2 and Square Enix/Ubisoft’s strategies seem to be the wrong way to draw that conclusion. Square Enix is pivoting because being Sony exclusive wasn’t working. Ubisoft has pretty much always done simultaneous launches, so I’m not sure why they’re even listed here. The first Outer Worlds was third party before Microsoft acquired Obsidian and was published by 2K, so who knows if any agreements had to be honored or were more expensive to break.

Kunitsu-Gami was this year. Like it or not, Exoprimal was last year. And Capcom’s got a ton of IP that would work really well in the modern era and/or deserve compatibility with modern x64 hardware. I’d personally love to see Viewtiful Joe and Darkstalkers come back.

I’m no stranger to this in fighting games. It doesn’t mean you’re a second class citizen per se. It means they don’t want people to hold on to the beta version for months between the beta and the release, and they don’t know how to stop it.

There’s a warning on Dauntless’s store page saying that it uses EAC for kernel level anti-cheat.

That is a perfectly valid use case for a video game that I paid for though. I do exactly that with games like 007: Agent Under Fire (in split-screen), and I played games like Rainbow Six 3 long after the official servers weren’t there anymore. Agent Under Fire in particular is a lot of fun with all of the modifiers on, like moon gravity, and I wouldn’t mind playing some multiplayer games with friends with cheats like that one on; things that you wouldn’t want on in a ranked queue, but things that I should 100% be able to do with the product that I paid for.

A lot of cheats send completely legitimate information back to the server, and that’s what they’re seeking to stop with the client side implementation; I don’t think it has anything to do with costs. I haven’t heard of any data mining happening, and surely someone would have caught it with wire shark by now, but there are enough things that we know for sure about kernel level anti cheats to make it offensive.