The Last of Us Franchise - Because it's apparently a franchise now. This thread has been double-DMCA’d by Sony Interactive Entertainment.

I want this game to fail as much as the next guy. But theres no way this game doesn't break 5 million sales.
Note, 5 million sales is still likely a net loss.
5m sales = 300m gross income. Only about half of that goes to the publisher, so 150M. The bare minimum cost of DEVELOPMENT is 100M, with estimates ranging as high as 150, and doesn't include marketing.

My best guess for their internal 'break even' is 6-6.5, with nothing less than 8 being considered a financial success.
 
Lol, you're not wrong. We bongs are responsible for some of the bleakest, grimmest things in modern media.

Kes, for instance. A lad growing up dirt poor in a coal mining town called Billy Casper whose own mother sees him as a lost cause and who is bullied by his big brother Jud and whose teachers at school think he's not much cop and who dreads having to leave school and go work down t'pit finds an injured kestrel in the woods. He nurses the kestrel back to health and learns all about falconry and falconing and finds, finally, something he's good at. Kes becomes his only friend. One day, Jud asks him to put some money on a horse at the bookies, and Billy reckons it's not going to win because it's a rank outsider and forgets. The horse romps home and Jud misses out on winning quite a lot of money (ten quid, which was a lot in the 1960s when this was set). So Jud gets revenge by shooting Kes with an air rifle and stuffing its corpse in the bin. The end. As an added bonus, this takes place in a town called Grimethorpe.

Threads. It's 1983, and the Cold War goes tits up. Global thermonuclear war occurs. We are clinically informed "Total yield hitting the UK: 80 megatons." We follow two families from Sheffield before and after the bomb goes off. After it goes off, it's basically literally looting and brawling over the juiciest rats. A girl belonging to one of the families is pregnant at the time and has her child in a ruined barn. The kid survives. Fifteen years later, it's obvious that her child is suffering from malnutrition and fallout-caused brain damage and after battling with some other teenage lad over the corpse of a dog to eat, she and the lad fuck, she gets pregnant, and she finds her way into one of the few functional medical settings left in the country. She has the child and the final freeze frame is looking aghast at the horrifically birth-deformed (which we don't see, just her expression of ultimate horror) offspring she's just given life to. The end.

Red Riding. Comes in three episodes, set in 1974, 1977, and 1983. It's about police corruption in West Yorkshire and how Sean Bean and a bunch of his mates played by Warren Clark and Paddy Considine are covering up a child prostitution ring and using the construction of a shopping mall to launder the money from same. Tagline, "This is the North, where we do what we want." Each episode centres on someone coming close to the truth and undergoing a horrible fate as a result. The only hope spot is that Sean Bean gets shot at the end of the first episode.

Trainspotting. It's about heroin addicts in Scotland. Infamous scenes include one character who fucks a girl, declares afterwards that he has never cum so hard since Archie Gemmell scored in the 1970s, finds out she's underage. The Worst Toilet in Scotland. And so forth. Oh, and Begbie exists.

The Wicker Man. Sumer is icumen in. Scottish police officer with deeply held Christian beliefs goes to remote island to try to track down a missing child. Gradually discovers that the island is under the sway of a murderous heathen cult led by Lord Summerisle and all the islanders are in on it. Including the allegedly missing child. And it's all a ruse to get him to come to the island to be a virgin sacrifice in a hideous fertility ritual. He burns to death. The end.

Day of the Triffids. Sentient mobile plant creatures that look like a sort of three-legged Venus fly trap / pitcher plant are discovered in a jungle and kept and bred because they produce loads of vegetable oil that promises to solve all energy crises. Unfortunately they are smarter than they are led to be, can communicate over long distances by rattling their branches, turn the tables, and start capturing and breeding humanity to act as fertiliser for them.

Don't forget our grim as fuck cartoons as well: Plague Dogs, Watership Down, Animal Farm, Animals of Farthing Wood and When The Wind Blows.
 
I doubt with how negative the response to this game is that it will sell millions.
It's already there if this holds.

The Last of Us Part 2 has shot to the top of the UK boxed charts in significant fashion.

The action horror game is Sony's fastest-selling release this generation, narrowly beating the opening week of 2016's Uncharted 4 by just over 1%. Download sales are not included in this data, so when we factor in digital sales, it's possible the game's launch was even bigger.
Uncharted 4 First Week Sales Surpass 2.7 Million
 
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No since returns come out of game stores pockets I believe, plus how would you even track that?

wait really, no wonder digital goes on sales less often
It runs under the same premise as a "Defective product" being returned, which in the U.S. at least can be charged back to the product creator. Its... a bit more messy than that makes it sound, but the short answer to a long situation is "yes".
 
This game's ending reminds me of this episode of MST3K which featured a story where a sad ending comes out of nowhere to kill off the movie's most sympathetic character. The bots get mad and Joel reminds them that they don't have to take the movie's ending at face value: (Linked clip goes to relevant segment.)


Of course, it's a lot easier to shrug off and mentally rewrite a vintage movie you didn't pay 60 dollars for which wasn't part of a hotly anticipated franchise featuring sympathetic characters beloved by millions who waited for years to see the continuation of their story.
 
So I honestly don't understand who this game is meant to appeal to.

For fans of the original: the first The Last of Us was a story of the endurance of the human spirit. It had some beautiful things to say about finding the light in the darkness; the importance of connection to other people and how you don't need to be blood related to be a family; the bond between father and daughter; redemption, sacrifice, the greater good, so on. It definitely ventured into dark territory at times, but there was always an underlying feeling of hope.

This sequel is a bleak mess that becomes so grimdark that it loops back around to being funny. The game's tone is so nihilistic that I honestly can't bother to give a shit about any of these people. Characters from the original are either killed off or suffer from such severe character assassination that I honestly don't get why they didn't just make a sequel set in the same universe but with different characters. They really thought it would be a good move to kill off the most beloved character from the original, then make you play as, and try to sympathize with, his murderer, and handwave it with "well he did some shitty things in the past." (For survival. In an apocalypse.)

For the woke: This game is devoted to putting a lesbian through as much misery as possible. Her girlfriend is a bisexual woman, so of course she's written as a huge slut and a cheater, and she looks like a /pol/ big nosed Jew cartoon to boot. The trans boy is presented as having only transitioned to escape from being made a child bride, and you also get to see him getting decked in the face. The trans woman character (let's be real, Abby is a trans woman) is a serial killer, a generally unlikable petty bitch, and a skank who seduces a pregnant woman's boyfriend.

The Last of Us 2 is the latest in a line of various franchises' sequels made to ~subvert~ and ~challenge expectations~ that ends up just taking a massive steaming shit all over the original, then shaming the fans. Every character that fans loved in the original is either dead or utterly broken. And again, we are not only asked, but expected to like the characters responsible. Ffs Abby literally gets crucified like she's supposed to be fucking Jesus.

Tl;dr To call this thing hot garbage is an insult to garbage.
 
No since returns come out of game stores pockets I believe, plus how would you even track that?
Well here is the Dirty Secret about Video game and DVD returns.

If the product is open you can't return it because of the DMCA, you can only trade it in for the exact same thing.
 
So I honestly don't understand who this game is meant to appeal to.

For fans of the original: the first The Last of Us was a story of the endurance of the human spirit. It had some beautiful things to say about finding the light in the darkness; the importance of connection to other people and how you don't need to be blood related to be a family; the bond between father and daughter; redemption, sacrifice, the greater good, so on. It definitely ventured into dark territory at times, but there was always an underlying feeling of hope.

This sequel is a bleak mess that becomes so grimdark that it loops back around to being funny. The game's tone is so nihilistic that I honestly can't bother to give a shit about any of these people. Characters from the original are either killed off or suffer from such severe character assassination that I honestly don't get why they didn't just make a sequel set in the same universe but with different characters. They really thought it would be a good move to kill off the most beloved character from the original, then make you play as, and try to sympathize with, his murderer, and handwave it with "well he did some shitty things in the past." (For survival. In an apocalypse.)

For the woke: This game is devoted to putting a lesbian through as much misery as possible. Her girlfriend is a bisexual woman, so of course she's written as a huge slut and a cheater, and she looks like a /pol/ big nosed Jew cartoon to boot. The trans boy is presented as having only transitioned to escape from being made a child bride, and you also get to see him getting decked in the face. The trans woman character (let's be real, Abby is a trans woman) is a serial killer, a generally unlikable petty bitch, and a skank who seduces a pregnant woman's boyfriend.

The Last of Us 2 is the latest in a line of various franchises' sequels made to ~subvert~ and ~challenge expectations~ that ends up just taking a massive steaming shit all over the original, then shaming the fans. Every character that fans loved in the original is either dead or utterly broken. And again, we are not only asked, but expected to like the characters responsible. Ffs Abby literally gets crucified like she's supposed to be fucking Jesus.

Tl;dr To call this thing hot garbage is an insult to garbage.
Honestly, it feels like it was made for people like me, who really didn't find the first game hot shit. Not to play mind you but to see everyone one start to reexamine the first one and see what made it good. Which once again, as someone who didn't really care for the first game, this one made me appreciate it a hell of a lot more then I used to.
 
So I honestly don't understand who this game is meant to appeal to.

For fans of the original: the first The Last of Us was a story of the endurance of the human spirit. It had some beautiful things to say about finding the light in the darkness; the importance of connection to other people and how you don't need to be blood related to be a family; the bond between father and daughter; redemption, sacrifice, the greater good, so on. It definitely ventured into dark territory at times, but there was always an underlying feeling of hope.

This sequel is a bleak mess that becomes so grimdark that it loops back around to being funny. The game's tone is so nihilistic that I honestly can't bother to give a shit about any of these people. Characters from the original are either killed off or suffer from such severe character assassination that I honestly don't get why they didn't just make a sequel set in the same universe but with different characters. They really thought it would be a good move to kill off the most beloved character from the original, then make you play as, and try to sympathize with, his murderer, and handwave it with "well he did some shitty things in the past." (For survival. In an apocalypse.)

For the woke: This game is devoted to putting a lesbian through as much misery as possible. Her girlfriend is a bisexual woman, so of course she's written as a huge slut and a cheater, and she looks like a /pol/ big nosed Jew cartoon to boot. The trans boy is presented as having only transitioned to escape from being made a child bride, and you also get to see him getting decked in the face. The trans woman character (let's be real, Abby is a trans woman) is a serial killer, a generally unlikable petty bitch, and a skank who seduces a pregnant woman's boyfriend.

The Last of Us 2 is the latest in a line of various franchises' sequels made to ~subvert~ and ~challenge expectations~ that ends up just taking a massive steaming shit all over the original, then shaming the fans. Every character that fans loved in the original is either dead or utterly broken. And again, we are not only asked, but expected to like the characters responsible. Ffs Abby literally gets crucified like she's supposed to be fucking Jesus.

Tl;dr To call this thing hot garbage is an insult to garbage.
The game probably would have been a lot better had they made an entirely new set of characters with some cameos of characters from the first game and did away with the generic revenge begets more revenge plot.
 
I’m still honestly confused as to if we were intended to like Abby or not. Even in the flashbacks she’s a shitty person.
VERY clearly supposed to like. She pets animals, and has a 'functional' love life, and does real life things rather than constantly suffering like Ellie.

What you are seeing is a narcissist making a narcissist. Nothing Abby does is bad, in Druckerman's eyes, because she does what HE'D do and therefore its good.
 
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