This is pretty awesome to see, yeah this game doesn't really hold a candle to the GameCube titles but it was one of my favorite games to play on my mom's 3GS growing up so it's cool to see a way to play it again
-PC sales are nothing spectacular for Sony with Horizon Zero Dawn being their biggest seller with 3.3M units sold after 2.5 years
-The cost to make Spider-Man 2 was apparently $315M, so they only made $75M in profit, about 28% of the ROI compared to Miles Morales
-The Spider-Man 1 Remaster cost $39M to make and produced a profit of $11M
-Miles Morales had $104M in profit but had a $20M lower net sales USD than TLOU2. We know now from these leaks and the failed redactions from the FTC trial that TLOU2 cost $70M more in development costs, so that means TLOU2 was likely in the ~$50M ballpark in terms of profit.
-They outright state that CoD disappearing is a nuclear threat as that's a revenue stream of upwards to $1.5B that will disappear by 2027
It's pretty wild that a week ago all the normies were completely convinced that Playstation was this unstoppable juggernaut and now it's stated in no uncertain terms that Playstation has a noose around its neck by 2027.
They outright state that CoD disappearing is a nuclear threat as that's a revenue stream of upwards to $1.5B that will disappear by 2027
It's pretty wild that a week ago all the normies were completely convinced that Playstation was this unstoppable juggernaut and now it's stated in no uncertain terms that Playstation has a noose around its neck by 2027.
It's hilarious their fate is in the hands of one franchise they don't even own, and instead of trying to make good games they just keep pumping out repetitive, generic slop and pack it to the brim with woke shit.
It's hard to believe I'm saying this, but I would actually welcome a return to the glut of CoD-clones and attempted CoD-killers from yesteryear at this point. Anything but more 3rd-person action/walking sims. But with development times stretching out to infinity, I don't even know if we'd see a course-correction in time to fix things. If you've got about three years, and your studios take five or six to shit out another cookie-cutter game, what do you do?
Surprised it's HZD that sits on top of Sony pc sales but I guess it was the first in the wave of shit brought to pc. I recently played it and while game looks alright and the combat is ok, eventually you get good enough coils to inflict status hell super easily, trivializing everything, and everything else is utterly uninspired. They'd have been better off making their own version of robot MH. Gimme proper drawn out boss fights that require prep. I'll probably pirate Forbidden West when it makes its way to pc just to see if there were any improvements but I'm not expecting anything.
Port Bloodborne to pc ffs. No one gives a shit about Horizon or Returnal or TLoU.
It's hard to believe I'm saying this, but I would actually welcome a return to the glut of CoD-clones and attempted CoD-killers from yesteryear at this point. Anything but more 3rd-person action/walking sims. But with development times stretching out to infinity, I don't even know if we'd see a course-correction in time to fix things. If you've got about three years, and your studios take five or six to shit out another cookie-cutter game, what do you do?
I think the funniest part is that the revenue stream of upwards to $1.5B or $1,500M from CoD is ANNUAL . Now consider Sony's current biggest franchise, Spider-Man.
-PS4 Spider-Man Net Sales USD was $827M
-Miles Morales Net Sales USD was $427M
-Revenue of Spider-Man 2 - $390M
-Revenue of Spider-Man 1 Remaster - $50M
-Total of Revenue and Net Sales comes to $1,694M throughout the LIFETIME of this franchise.
Now let's look at costs. I couldn't find the development costs for the PS4 Spider-Man but all the others were pretty open.
-Miles Morales Costs - $156M
-SM1 Remaster Costs - $39M
-SM2 Costs - $315M
Because I couldn't find the dev costs for PS4 Spider-Man and we know now not to trust any public info that Sony puts out on this, let's just assume the PS4 Spider-Man cost the same amount as Miles Morales to produce, so that's another $156M.
-Total of costs comes to $666M. This means the profit of this franchise was at most $1,028M and that's not knowing the exact price of the first Spider-Man game, which by all means was likely higher than Miles Morales, the glorified expansion they released where they reused practically everything for a much shorter game.
And then I looked at the slide about their contract with Marvel. That slide sounds like the details were solely about their X-Men contract but they likely have a similar deal with Marvel for the rights to the Spider-Man games. As per the slide, Marvel Royalties are 9-18% of net sales from digital games and 19-26% of net sales from physical games and any DLC. Marvel also gets 35-50% of the whole bundle price.
Now if we were to just play with numbers and theorycraft that they have a similar deal regarding Spider-Man, let's assume for Sony's sake that the entirety of PS4 Spider-Man's net sales from "not digital games" was just the physical game and not the bundle, that means 43% of their net sales was digital and 57% was physical. If we were to average the rate of their royalties fee, we'd get 13.5% for digital and 22.5% for physical games. So that would mean that 18.6% of PS4 Spider-Man's net sales went to Marvel to pay for royalties. Miles Morales had a similar rate of 44% of net sales being digital. SM1R and SM2 had probably much higher rates of digital sales because of PC sales (1.7M units of SM1R's 4M units) and there's a disc-less PS5 but the point remains, a massive chunk of their net sales goes to Marvel.
But wait, there's more! According to SEC documents, Sony spent $229M to buy Insomniac Studios in November 2019, more than a year after the first game came out.
So Sony's profit from this franchise drops to $799M and that's again excluding the costs of royalty fees, which was likely $250M+. Seeing as how Sony bought Insomniac a year after PS4 Spider-Man was released, they likely saw an even smaller return on the PS4 Spider-Man's sales, which accounts for 48% of the franchise's total revenue and net sales. So it is very likely that their annual profits from CoD was 2-3x more than the entire lifetime profitability of their biggest franchise right now, which they don't even own the rights to.
It's hard to believe I'm saying this, but I would actually welcome a return to the glut of CoD-clones and attempted CoD-killers from yesteryear at this point. Anything but more 3rd-person action/walking sims. But with development times stretching out to infinity, I don't even know if we'd see a course-correction in time to fix things. If you've got about three years, and your studios take five or six to shit out another cookie-cutter game, what do you do?
It's hard to believe I'm saying this, but I would actually welcome a return to the glut of CoD-clones and attempted CoD-killers from yesteryear at this point.
Considering Sony increasing game prices to $70 caused the rest of the companies to do it as well, I wouldn’t be surprised if this gets normalized when Sony does do it. Fuck that shitty company.
It was already lunacy to standardize $70, it is even more lunacy to try and push $80. If they have money problems, perhaps they just need to make good games for once.
Or shit like Killzone. It's been 10 years since that last title launched with the PS4, but now Guerilla is sitting there making Horizon. Is there really no other company that Sony can get to bring that series back? Is a PSVR2 title like Call of the Mountain really going to get more money for Playstation Studios than an FPS they can put multiplayer and cosmetic MTX shit into? I didn't play stuff like Shadow Fall, so maybe the series deserved to die out, but it just seems so backwards in terms of priority.
Honestly, I would love a hardcore tactical FPS version of SOCOM on PC, as I think the first person would add to the atmosphere. But, knowing modern day Sony they would fuck it up with Micro-transactions or something.
It was already lunacy to standardize $70, it is even more lunacy to try and push $80. If they have money problems, perhaps they just need to make good games for once.
And this is almost always $70 for a game with day one DLC, on disc 'DLC, tons of micro-transactions, paid multiplayer, season pass, battle pass, cosmetic pass, deluxe edition exclusive content, pre-order exclusive bonuses, timed bonuses during release window. You rarely can just pay a flat fee for a game anymore and just play it forever.
Considering Sony increasing game prices to $70 caused the rest of the companies to do it as well, I wouldn’t be surprised if this gets normalized when Sony does do it. Fuck that shitty company.
The new trick that industry has figured out is to sell a premium version that unlocks like 3-5 days ahead of time. "Oh, we're not increasing the price to that point that everyone complains about! But here's a $90-100 version that lets you play it 2-3 days early!"
Their movie games now cost as much as movies. We're now at a point where AAA developers are setting themselves up for a self-implosion if their 1 game in development over 6 years flops.
