How many times have we seen these new studios emerge from 2017+ on filled with veteran talent just not producing a quality product? Forming a new studio is hard, game dev is hard. Nothing is certain.
The last gaming history sales record breaking new IPs I know are Assassin's Creed, Watchdogs, The Division and Destiny. They are working in Sony, with people who also worked on the other series I mentioned like Halo or CoD.
I'd say it's the first case we see a veterans studios of such pedrigree making record breaking IPs. Specially in plural: having created not one but multiple top selling IPs. I'd say there's none because I don't remember something of this level.
Yes, to make a new studio is hard, to make games is hard, new IPs more, if GaaS even more and nothing is certain. I know it and they too (I worked with some of the people there, met some of them personally and worked/met some of their former coworkers).
But I -and them- also know that having teams like these, whose leads are very talented and experienced, and have been working together in many games and have been super successful most of the times the chances of achieving a big hit are a ton of times higher than when it isn't the case.
Pedigree is nothing. New studio, new culture.
In the case of FairGame$, the creatives won't have access to the thousands of people from around the world to help them in the production of their games like they did with all the global internal Ubisoft studios.
In the case of FairGame$, since the start they had their studio ready to work in remote and all their tools in the cloud, and adapted particularly well because as Ubisoft veterans they are used to work in all their games with many studios from around the work, meaning that since many years before the pandemic they already worked having many things in the cloud and making daily and weekly conference calls.
As you can see in the game credits in Ubisoft or Sony games (or in pretty much any AAA game), in addition to the internal suppport teams they also use external outsourcing support teams. Which in most cases are the same ones who also work for Sony, Microsoft, EA, Capcom and so on.
The difference is that Ubisoft always properly credits everyone, and that they prefer to have a bigger percent of internal support/outsoucing people to reduce costs and ease to fit their schedule with the one from the many games they develop at the same time removing from the equation the ones from the competition that may keep external outsourcing teams busy.
The work with support teams is pretty much the same independently if the support team is internal or external. If desired I can detail their workflow and material they receive and how the quality is verified.
These are going to be Sony AAA games, so they will have AAA sized internal and external staff. Like the ones from Ubisoft or any other publisher.
Saying two new studios have a high chances of striking gold on their first game(s) in the multiplayer space sounds incredibly optimistic, but maybe that's just me.
I saw it many times, even in first hand with people who worked in my office. Both a group of leads and seniors achieaving many hits with us leaving to create Supercell, or King's currently most successful teams.
Or at individual level seeing someone very talented and successful with us to leave to work somewhere and to keep being super talented and successful, as could be the animation director of Unseen, who after leaving us did work in the Ori games, or some producer who after working with us went back to Guerrilla (before being with us he did work in Killzone 2, Burnout series, the engine that generations ago were used by Gran Turismo or Pro Evolution Soccer) to work in Horizon Zero Dawn.
I have many examples of all kinds, both from people who worked directly with me, or that I know from them working in partner studios. Or simply friends from other studios, that I befriended them from sharing beers and later after doing great job somewhere they headed studios or teams who made the best selling Castlevania or Metroid ever, or ones who during the pandemic made stuff like Baldur's Gate 3, recent Hitman stuff or Lords of the Fallen to name a few random examples more. As an example, some of this people previously worked in stuff like The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Payday 2 plus Ubisoft stuff, or even grew from remarkable great indie or porting teams.
I also know many other cases of people who left and wasn't that sucessful, and in many cases was because weren't that talented and experienced before, or because weren't surrounded by a similarly talented and experienced enough team.
Nah, that shit will never hit 500k ever.
I think it will hit 500K for sure, but not this weekend because of the recent crashes experienced when servers are full and the current capacity.
I think will achieve 500K maybe in a week or two, once they stabilized the servers even more and prepared them even more to scale further. If not, a week later once they add the first batch of new content.