Topic: The PlayStation Fan Thread

Honestly im kinda tired of devs always getting a free pass. Its not always the pubs fault. The dev is just as much responsible as the pub.

@WebHead I think you're underestimating how much control the publishers have over these games. When budgets are tight, and when deadlines are strict, there's hardly any room for artistic freedom; especially when they also have to meet all kinds of other demands.

@Octane yes but when it cokes to the actual designs and mechanics and such devs are responsible for that. Pubs can indeed be bad but I hold devs just as accountable for bad releases. Devs are not the only people who have to work hard and such.

@WebHead Sure, but that depends on how much time and resources they are given to polish the game.

Anyway, Anthem is barely out and it already got a €20 price cut in some stores. Media Markt is desperate to get rid of their copies it seems:

Considering the long list of studios that EA has killed and the fact that Bioware's output has never been as good as their pre-EA output, I'm confident at laying most of the blame at EA's feet. That said, of course alot of talent left over the years, but again, I would attribute some of that to people not wanting to work under EA.

My 2 favourite Bioware games are actually Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age Origins, both of which were released under EA ownership.

Whatever effect EA has had on them, I think it took a while to manifest.

Yeah but that's often true without a publisher anyway. No company has an infinite bank balance. Very rare companies like Nintendo do a good job of pretending to have infinite amounts of cash, but they only really do that for their most important games. Yoshi's Crafted World would never get the kind of 2 year extension BotW got.

@Dezzy Maybe. Pikmin 3 went through a rough development, and that franchise isn't any more popular than Yoshi. And Yoshi was still delayed by at least a full year. Anyway, all I'm saying is that there's a healthy balance between freedom of development and resource and budget management. Companies like EA and Activision seem to be more interested in the latter as of late. With record profits each year; they're still cutting corners wherever they can. I'm not sure what their long-term plan is, but revenue can't be infinite, and sooner or later their game sales will tank as well.

@Octane I think EA are starting to see that happen. With the exception of Apex Legends, which is a free to download game which they’ve yet to stick their fingers into properly yet (so will see how that game pans out), several games haven’t been meeting expectations as of recently. Star Wars Battlefront 2 saw huge backlash and below expected sales, Mass Affect Andromeda saw bad reviews and poor sales, Need for Speed keeps doing pretty poorly yet there’s another coming this year. Heck, Sim City 2013 and The Sims 4 had huge backlash when launched and neither I don’t think sold anywhere near as well as the predecessors. And now we have Anthem which has reviewed pretty badly and as of yet we don’t know if it’ll meet them lofty expectations in sales of something like 6 million.

@Octane

Yoshi was delayed a year? I thought it was late 2018 to March 2019?

Nintendo's probably not a great example for this stuff anyway because I'm fairly sure they do work on lower budgets than most similarly sized developers, due to the fact they're less obsessed with graphics.
I mean Anthem probably cost more to make than Breath of the Wild, I would guess.

@Dezzy I think you'd be surprised if we knew the average budget of a Nintendo game. I imagine it isn't a lot, at all. Even for something like BOTW.

Yoshi was early 2018 iirc, I could be wrong though.

@Dezzy Breath of the Wild only needed to sell 2 million to ensure it broke even, and that was a game that had an extensive development time and marketing push. Nintendo must work to real small budgets.

@FragRed That's actually quite a lot if you think about it. $40 revenue per game (average revenue for a $60 game, assuming the retailer takes a third; and considering their games don't drop in price, that's a fair assumption. Also excluding digital, where revenue is 100%). 2 million copies * $40 = $80 million. Even if you want to play it very safe and take $30 as the average, it's still quite a lot.

From what we know, Horizon Zero Dawn and The Witcher 3 had budgets of around $40-50 million. BOTW may be a bit of an exception considering it was delayed twice, and they pretty much redid the entire game at some point. I still think that's quite a lot for Zelda; and going back to the original Tweet; it's a bit more ambiguous. It's a translation of quote by a Japanese market analyst who obtained a quote by Miyamoto; and from what I can gather, he more or less said that due to the long development, they expected at least 2 million sales to recoup the development costs. Whether expected 2 million sales was just barely enough to break even, or an excess, wasn't specified.

Anyway, in short, plenty of games are successful after 1 or 2 million sales.

@Dezzy We don't know how long the Yoshi delay and the first Fire Emblem delay were (both were announced as 2018 games with no more precise info) but given the Switch drought between Captain Toad and Super Mario Party, the original planned release dates being one being August while the other is September would seem like a reasonable guess.

@Octane probably even complicated more when you consider R&D and how development of multiple games seems to overlap sometimes. For example we know that Wind Waker HD played a part in developing BOTW.

@Grumblevolcano

When was Fire Emblem 2018? All I'm aware if they've delayed it from Spring 2019 to July 2019. Which isn't even that big a delay given that "Spring" is internationally undefined.

I played Apex hoping I'd get into the BR craze, finally, but idk how people can be so invested when 95% of the time nothing happens and you most likely get killed pretty quickly. It's better than fortnite, but after an hour of roaming around empty areas looking for gear before getting killed from afar, I just got too bored to continue.

@Dezzy The January 2017 Fire Emblem Direct announced that a new Fire Emblem game was coming to Switch in 2018 and it stayed like that until the E3 2018 trailer.

@Grumblevolcano

Oh yeah I see that now. I think that was so vague I just didn't take it seriously. They had no footage and no name for the game, but say "planning for a 2018 release".
I think I just ignore stuff when it's that vague.
That reminds me, I did just buy Fire Emblem Echoes though!

I'll be trying it again with my brother and possibly a friend this weekend (unlikely we'll get all 3 at the same time, though), but yeah....it's one of those games where you need to know where people tend to go, get on comms and coordinate with people, and be just plain lucky in order to have fun, as far as I know. I personally cannot fathom how anyone would get any real enjoyment out of it when most other kinds of multiplayer shooters offer more variety, more immediacy, and yet still reward skilled players.

@Buizel Well, they were just trying out some HD stuff for WWHD; and as a remaster, I'm certain that was profitable on its own. Whether that had any influence on BOTW is hard to tell; but on average it doesn't really matter I think. Unless we're talking about direct sequels/spin-offs which reuse the same assets; then it's a different story. But this was nothing more than them playing around with Wii U computing ''power''.