It's also funny how many people seem to think executives and managers at these companies do absolutely nothing to contribute and just leech on the "real" devs. Were that really the case, then surely there would be examples of many large successful devs that have no executives, managers, or producers, and that just operate as worker cooperatives. But in reality there are only a few indies that operate like that (Dead Cells' developer Motion Twin being the key example, and I t...
People are constantly revealing the ways they don't understand money. They hear "2 million dollars," and think "wow, millions is a lot, you could have paid a lot of other salaries with that." But as you note, on a grand scale in terms of a large business, 2 million is nothing. They don't stop to consider that with salary and insurance and everything, the average employee probably costs Bungie over $100k a year (and that may be conservative).
Now,...
@Notellin
"This money didn't come from earlier in his career it came from the Sony deal he made with a golden parachute."
The Sony deal is based on what he had done earlier in his career. Sony didn't buy Bungie because they thought Bungie is bad; they saw Bungie as a valuable asset at that time, obviously. The people who put Bungie in a position to have that value at that time, including him, deserve credit for that.
&...
Most available numbers/estimates put the bestselling Killzone games (2, 3, and Shadow Fall) as selling between 2-3 million each. The franchise doesn't have strong name appeal; if anything, there's a huge segment of gamers/media that think they gain credibility by hating on Killzone without ever playing it (or by playing for ten minutes so they can say it sucks). If Sony were to remake/reimagine the first one (more likely than a sequel at this point), it would probably only sell a few ...
Yeah I'm not sure I believe people are really as simple as they are pretending to be on this point. Does everyone who thinks that the money he spent on cars should have gone to employee salaries believe that he has been paying employee salaries out of his personal bank account before? Do they think that the employees Bungie is not cutting are being paid their salaries from his personal bank account? Do they think that when Bungie was successful and expanding and adding these jobs that are...
@thorstein
Instead of assuming you are just being intentionally obtuse, I'll assume you just don't have all the information.
This guy has been in executive/manager positions at Bungie for many years (basically since the time the studio was making Halo 2). Of course, that includes many years where the studio was making games that were almost universally acclaimed, and the studio was expanding its workforce and adding jobs (I'll assume you under...
"Could have saved so many jobs if he'd just put that money toward people's careers instead."
I think people have a pretty serious misunderstanding of how companies work. Except in cases where the company is fully owned by one person (or a small group, like a family), the CEO's personal money is totally separate from the company's money. So while bragging about expensive cars might be in poor taste during this time, the idea that he used Bungie'...
I think the calculation is a little different when you are talking about bigger budget remakes of games from the PS1-PS3 era. In those cases I think the publishers are banking on the idea that there are a lot of games from those eras that have very established names and that lots of gamers are very aware of, but that didn't sell in the kind of numbers that more games started to hit in the PS4 era. A great example of this working out is Resident Evil 2 Remake (original RE:2 sold 5ish milli...
Having your studio depending on this rerelease just feels like a massive misread of the state of indie games right now. In today's market, a game like Braid might easily have had minimal success even if it had been new, and they were relying on people to buy it again. There may have been a few indie games from the late 360/PS3 to early PS4/XONE indie heyday that have the cache to get people to buy them again in mass numbers, but I don't think there are many.
@anast
Good point, GOG is the better example.
As far as your second scenario, that's true, but you can also backup digital games on external drives (at least on PC and PlayStation, no clue about Xbox). So in your "bike generator" scenario, if you had your GOG files backed up, you could restore them. Meanwhile you could just as easily lose or damage your discs, or your disc drive could mess up. Heck, a quick internet search would show you exa...
It's nice to see someone point this out. That generation (360/PS3) is fondly remembered as this golden era (and there were many good games during that time), but it is also the generation that either started or planted the seeds for almost all the negative aspects of the games industry that we bemoan today.
I will note though that I'm pretty sure paid online started with the original Xbox, not the 360. But since it had such a small install base and many people then ...
@Vits
The thing is, I don't begrudge people for preferring physical games. There are valid reasons to prefer physical over digital.
The issue I have is when people who have decided that they dislike digital games and always online DRM treat the arguments against one as equally applicable to the other, simply because they have personally decided to bundle them together. It would be like if a person disliked snakes and income taxes and decided that any ...
For whatever reason, gamers seem completely unable to distinguish between downloading digital games and always online DRM. Anytime a story crops up that demonstrates the pitfalls of always online games or systems, you inevitably see a comment like this one that follows the "and this is the reason I'm sticking with physical games."
The problem with that is that physical games can, and often do, rely on always online DRM as well. You can have a disc for an onlin...
This reminds me a lot of when Sony finally put together a decent PS Vita bundle that includes several games and a memory stick and sold it for under $200. They couldn't keep it in stock. https://www.pushsquare.com/...
But unfortunately these moves that boost their secondary platforms tend to come too late, after Sony has already mostly stopped p...
I think this game is probably too high profile as a timed Xbox exclusive for this to happen, but you do have to wonder if/when a game is going to come out that runs well enough on the X and is just a trainwreck on the S.
I have found that the more recent FC games work better as what I call "background games." Basically what I mean is it's nice to have an active save in one of them going for those times you have 45 minutes to play games and just want to have fun and don't want to get bogged down playing a game online or starting a new game and spending all your time into an annoying tutorial. Like I haven't touched FC4 in years but I know if I had 30 minutes to an hour to play I could hop...
I find it fascinating how modern gamers can't or won't distinguish between games in a series that come out every few years and an annualized series. It's fine to not like Far Cry, but to act like it's annualized series is just counter factual. 6 came out in 2021, and 7 won't be out until 2025 at the earliest. 4 was 2014, and 5 was 2018. So even if you throw in the spinoffs, it isn't an annualized series.
Meanwhile we constantly look back on the 1990s...
Yep. Unfortunately there has been so little since then that has scratched the same itch. Really the closest thing has been BOTW, which uses a lot of similar systems (though ironically FC2 came out before Ubisoft put the Assassin's Creed towers in Far Cry, while BOTW had Ubi towers). Obviously it isn't a shooter though. I keep hoping that that some indie dev will put an FC2-esque game out on Steam, but so far I've been left wanting.
Yep, 2 is my favorite by far as well, and one of my favorite singleplayer games of all time. It was probably one of the last games Ubisoft made before they started homogenizing their franchises to be open world collect-a-thons with unnecessary RPG mechanics tacked on. I enjoyed 3 for what it was, but it was clearly an attempt to make the franchise appeal to a mass audience (which, in fairness, was successful).
@Outside_ofthe_Box
I mean, I hope you are right. I don't think you are, but I'd like to be wrong on this point. I just know that, except on here, anytime Killzone comes up, people either have no idea what it is (sadly, even people who were active PS3 users at the time), or they assume that everyone hates Killzone and that it should just be the butt of jokes (usually it's pretty obvious these people never actually played Killzone, or they "played it at a fri...