It seems like Sony Entertainment just don't learn from their past mistakes, do they?
In the recent past they spent hundreds of millions of dollars (a commonly-cited figure is 400 million) and 8 years of development time on the biggest flop of the entire history of video games that has ever existed. In other words, Concord: Hundreds of millions of dollars spent, 8 years of development time, the game completely shut down in less than 2 weeks from publication and all purchases (a few tens of thousands of copies) refunded. Literally zero revenue, no exaggeration.
As mentioned in that blog post, one would think that a budget of several hundreds of millions of dollars would mean the game was an absolutely massive open world experience with an absolutely enormous amount of assets and content, an absolutely massive amount of NPCs with scripted lines, a massive amount of quests and missions and so on and so forth. Nope. In actual reality it was just a so-called "hero shooter" with a dozen-or-so relatively small levels, and a cast of about a dozen-or-so characters. And that's it. Literally something that a much smaller studio with a fraction of the staff and a small fraction of the budget could have created in less than a year, no exaggeration.
Well, the 2026 video game "Wolverine" has turned out to be extraordinarily similar to this.
It might not be as much of a massive flop, especially since it's a single-player game and thus Sony has no reason to completely shut it down and refund all purchases, and who knows, it might even end up selling a decent amount of copies, perhaps even surpassing the 1 million copies sold (which, however, would still not be even close to breaking even.)
But in all other ways it's extremely similar: Over 300 million dollars spent, a massive studio developed the game, and instead of getting an absolutely humongous game with an enormous amount of content, it's a 20-hour first-time playthrough that's extremely linear with pretty much zero exploration, zero branching paths, zero side quests, zero everything. And it's not especially challenging as the entire game seems to have been designed for game journalists. It is, in fact, laughably easy and failure is almost impossible. It plays more like a massive cutscene that's occasionally interrupted by relatively short segments of utterly linear gameplay that's almost impossible to fail. And, of course, it's full of bugs, at least on launch.
The amount of content in this game is absolutely laughable. For over 300 million dollars.
It's exactly the kind of game that a much smaller studio could have literally done with a budget of 3 million dollars, and the end result would have probably been much better. (And there certainly are numerous examples of exactly this out there.)
Unlike Concord, it's still possible that the game might break even, but it's unlikely. (With that budget, and considering ancillary costs such as marketing, and given that Sony will get back only part of the revenue, people are estimating that the game will need to sell at least 5-6 million copies to break even, barely.) However, I doubt that Sony is very happy with this.
Will they ever learn?
Comments
Post a Comment