Is Until Dawn going to be a disaster?
I think that no, I bet will be profitable with pretty moderate sales. According to the Insomniac leak, it did sell 4M as of February 2022, which is pretty good for horror/survival horror games that aren't Resident Evil or Five Nights at Freddy's.
It's fair to assume that the remake/remaster will sell less than the original in console, because most people interested on it already had it, and the improvemnts I think won't bring a lot of people more, but pretty likely a big portion of existing fans would pay $10 for the upgrade.
In PC, I assume it should less than the ports/remasters of bigger seller titles like Horizon, GoW or SpiderMan. But in PC some horror games are particularly popular, so who knows.
I think this remaster+pc port is just the first step to grow the IP with upcoming movie and sequel.
But well, for the usual doomers it's going to be a disaster even if it sells way more than Sony expect.
Not only has Ballistic Moon had layoffs ahead of the games release which is never a great sign, but Sony has basically wiped this game off the face of reality electing to promote Silent Hills 2 more than it.
Layoffs pretty much means that the studio didn't have signed another project to work to work on just after the game, so they could move there the people as they were completing the job on Until Dawn. It must be in Gold, meaning most people already completed their job there.
Studios normally have budgeted a few extra months for each project to keep the people after release making a bridge until their next project. But quite often there are delays paid by the publisher until run out of budget, and if goes beyond it sometimes it's the dev studio who pays the extra work outside the budget. Meaning, this extra could have eaten part of the money they had for the bridget.
At the same time, studios normally make yearly appraisal reviews, and also at the end of a project when making a postmortem. And that normally results on some people getting fired or replaced. And well, some people are also hired temporarily for a project.
And well, there's a good chunk of former Supermassive devs at Firesprite, maybe what happened was that as certain people completed their work on the remake moved to Firesprite to work in the sequel.
Regarding the marketing, Until Dawn it's a remake/remaster/rerelease of a game that didn't sell a lot, so I assume they may not see a huge sales potential there. And as such, the marketing effort on it is limited thwn compared to brand new titles or with remakes/remasters of super sellers. It wouldn't make sense to spend the same marketing on this than in the next new SpiderMan, Horizon, GoW etc.
So nothing special to worry about, it's just usual business.
It wasn't even shown during the State of Play despite coming out next month.
Gore content gets censored in Japan, and particularly violent games normally aren't approved in China. So I think it was understandable to keep it away from the preTGS SoP. Maybe that is the reason of why they did use other games fot the SoP. I assume closer to launch there will be the usual launch trailer, reviews, blog post etc.
I'm not sure how they could screw up this remake
Nothing leads to think they screw up anything.
If you expect it to sell like SpiderMan 2 or Helldivers 2, or expected to see a marketing campaign comparable to SpiderMan 2, Astrobot or a remaster/remake/PC port of titles that sold like 15M+/20M+ copies maybe your expectations aren't realistic.
Sony isn't willing to delay the game
There's no known reason to delay it.
nor are they willing to drop the price of the game (a price they just announced recently). 60 bucks is going to kill this game if it is in rough shape. Whereas launching it for between 20-40 might have seen some traction even if it wasn't perfect. They announced this price point barely over a month ago...
They are releasing at the price they consider for the remasters/remakes, full priced. Pretty likely with a $10 upgrade in case of console for those who bought the original one.
I had really hoped Ballistic Moon would represent a 2nd chance for Supermassive Games. It's a genre of games that should be built out more, especially on consoles, but sometimes things just don't work out, I guess.
There's a portion of the Supermassive who made Until Dawn at Ballistic Moon and another one at Firesprite. I assume Sony's plan is to release this not to sell a lot (and particularly now, I see it more as a long term thing) but instead to keep the game more fresh and tweaked specially for the PC port and upcoming movie, and to warm up devs and players for a sequel.
Their idea is to pump the IP with the combo of remaster/PC port/movie/sequel, being this remaster+PC port the smaller step in the combo. Maybe they made it with the idea of selling units mostly in the future with the movie and the sequel, more than now.
