His sources aren't executives at Bungie, and even if they were, they wouldn't be clued into the global picture in every vertical SIE is involved in. More likely putting two and two together given the other layoffs and senior staff leaving/retiring at the corporate office.
It doesn't take a "prominent reporter" to put this:
Together with layoffs at Media Molecule, Bungie, potential troubles at Firesprite, and deduce that perhaps there is possible an issue with Sony.
I work at a company that does a top down approach. It's really frustrating sometimes.
I don't think the single player games make that much money. They definitely help sell consoles but you need to sell massive amounts of them just to make money because they cost so much and take so long to make. Maybe this is what the EA's were talking about when they said single player was dead. They were wrong. People love single player games, but they don't make much money compared to a popular Gaas. Especially if you invest in a single player game and it's not a massive hit. Gaas could help relive the pressure. They've won the market share. I'm sure they'd like an inexpensive game to make money off that advantage. A good one where they don't have to split any money with anyone else. All their big Gaas somebody else gets a cut.
As one of the most robot-like CXOs I've ever worked for told me once when up against headwinds: you can make plan on revenue or cost, but you have to make plan.
SP games can make a lot of money, but not as much as a high earning GAAS over time which still requires continual development costs. The over time part is really the difference.
Issues in Firesprite would be really something sad and weird, considering that the studio was born from ex-Studio Liverpool employees after Sony shut their studio.
I keep seeing people talk about PlayStation Portal and PlayStation VR2 as being some huge factor on PlayStation.
PSVR2 is a very good headset, but it's not set up like a big loss leader, and it doesn't seem to have a large number of Sony backed developers behind it.
It just kind of comes off to me like someone is using VR as a buzzword, more so than Sony has serious issues with VR.
gaas are more expensive to make and to maintain. and i would argue that a single-player game which only does "ok", will not kill it's studio. meanwhile, a gaas that is not a huge hit, is pretty much doa and taking the studio with it. maintaining a gaas game is very expensive and requires a lot devs/people.
You don't force someone out of a company and then give him six months of runway. That's not how this works.
GaaS may also be born with relatively low investment and then grow and become self-sustainable.
Nah, this is actually incorrect, that I'm surprised people keep spreading especially if it's in reference to AM's which has been long since corrected. Sony's gross margin and absolute profit "is nearly 2x what Microsoft makes" - given testimony.
View: https://x.com/DeekeTweak/status/1704920405213843533?s=20
I don't know, The Last of Us two cost 220,000,000 over six years to make. I hope that's after marketing. That's a long time and a lot of units to recoup that cost. AAA game budgets are insane and maybe we are getting to that point people have been warning us about.
I mean one game has been canceled and another put on ice or potentially canceled and their acquisition of 3.6 billion dollars only game is failing
They recognize that the story is important because they asked streamers to stop uploading cutscenes so that they could have an official archive. But it's definitely not the same.
Bungie has about a billion devs and multiple IPs with transmedia potential, the biggest of which is Destiny obviously.
They also had Marathon in the pipeline and I think a more fantasy like game that is still under wraps too.
I assume he's talking about long term. Yes, things are awesome today, but with development costs rising more, they'll have to sell millions of copies just to break even.
Besides that, they'll soon have to compete with Xbox owning CoD and an inevitable plateau for console sales. Unless they start finding other revenue streams like GaaS, PC, and/or mobile, they could run into growth issues. Consumers don't care about that, but investors do.
Bungie CEO Claims Layoffs Were Due to Destiny 2 Underperformance - IGN
In an internal town hall meeting addressing a Monday round of layoffs that impacted multiple departments, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons allegedly told remaining employees that the company had kept “the right people” to continue work on Destiny 2.
fuck all the way off
I have my grievances with Paul content but come on, he's as much as a speculator as any other journalist that has opinion pieces. He is a journalist, that's the name.
The "single player games don't sell" myth has been thoroughly busted for quite some time now. It's a crying shame to me that instead of making a solid single player FPS Marathon title in the vein of new DOOM or Wolfenstein, they're betting the farm on the continued success of a game that's winding down (Destiny 2) and a GAAS extraction shooter.
Feels like they're sprinting straight into a wall. There's no reliable seller here, only more pits to throw money down.
More info from IGN
We don't know if they expected much. We have no idea how much they expected to make this year compared to previous years. For all we know they expected a reasonable dip but just completely shat the bed.
Outside of Mario and The Last Of Us, movies/series based on video games are mediocre at best.
I doubt Sony paid ~3 billion to make Destiny movies
Yeah. They're tracking 45% down from their forecast, when looking at YTD bookings and pre-orders for the next expansion it looks like.
I hope that if my company ever decides to boot me that they give me a half a year's notice lol
so far
it can still get worse for the rest of the year, particularly as the last season will see the population plumet
Both of these things happened most likely, Bungie "Historicals" and Sony forecast based off projections these. No one is debating forecasting accuracy importance, but its a new company in the organization going into a new area for Sony. Projections in this space are nothing more than educated guesses since some much is dependent on the quality of the game from year to year. I mean Bungie doesnt know whats going on half the time. You think an analyst is going to translate knowing Bungies spotty record expansions releases, which over the last five year overall reviews in order have been good/bad/ok/good/bad to an accurate forecast of a new company to the organization? Even if they did see potential issues, you think it would have been remotely possible that the analyst team would be able to present a forecast where they would be earning less than a year before? It would have been sent back immediately for revision. No one at the top is going to approve a budget where the company they just bought for $3.7 billion is going to earn less the next year. At least we know why Jimbo is really leaving now seeing what going on at Sony, dont for a second think its because its "travel" only. That's PR talk to for him ride out the chute, timing here is way to coincidental.
You sure didn't watch Arcane. Or Castlevania. Or Cyberpunk
It has PvP but the fanbase is pretty niche and it's very slow to receive new content.
It has PvPvE in the form of Gambit which is one of the best game modes of all time but it's even more niche and completely abandoned by Bungie.
I wonder if they keep going back to that fateful meeting when they decided to add TFS and make Lightfall filler, and then the narrative team decided to make a fanfiction to rival Shadowkeep's story.
I remembered reading when Sony bought them it was the equivalent of £1m per person at the studio.
I remembered thinking wow everybody got a payout from the buy out.
Not that I want to jump to conclusions, but did the mgt of Bungie take hundreds of millions for themselves then let a hundred staff go?
I remembered thinking wow everybody got a payout from the buy out.
Not that I want to jump to conclusions, but did the mgt of Bungie take hundreds of millions for themselves then let a hundred staff go?
Mario and The Last Of Us were the only ones that really had an impact outside of people who consume video games.
Cyberpunk maybe could be there.
You're in a thread about a Sony owned studio laying off 8% of its staff because it didn't meet financial expectations by 45%. Spiderman 2 selling well doesn't make up for that or save peoples' jobs.
If you are developing 5 games but only release 3, that's bad. If you were expecting $100 million but only made $75 million, that's bad. If you spent $100 million on making a game but it gets cancelled or it flops, that's bad. People lose their jobs when companies aren't making the money they expect to make. Investors and stockholders don't like hearing about their investments not meeting goals.
45% is a huge miscalculation. No way they forecasts were so off. It's almost like it was inflated so they could get our purchased or something.
I'm also betting this possibly some of the reason the CEO has stepped down. Too many miscalculations. Bungie could be in real trouble if the situation with destiny doesn't be improve
I'm also betting this possibly some of the reason the CEO has stepped down. Too many miscalculations. Bungie could be in real trouble if the situation with destiny doesn't be improve