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The cost cutting alone leads me to believe sony would never buy a big publisher like square enix.
More layoffs and a studio closure coming to SIE
- Thread starter Remember_Spinal
- Start date
I think people need to stop making assumptions based on out of context leaks.
Nintendo's low fidelity, no voice acted/mocap strategy continuing to pay off for them, as there budgets can stay cheap due to the lower fidelity. Meanwhile they still can sell them for the same price as Sony's game.
If I was a Sony exec I would've embraced outsourcing for all roles except for programming yesterday. There's 3d modeling/art talent in China, Malaysia and all these other countries. It seems the video game industry doesn't even try to be lean anymore.
If I was a Sony exec I would've embraced outsourcing for all roles except for programming yesterday. There's 3d modeling/art talent in China, Malaysia and all these other countries. It seems the video game industry doesn't even try to be lean anymore.
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They have a support studio in Malaysia that is working on like 5 games at the moment
Industries are leaner nowadays than they were before. In computer engineering, for example, you now have full stack developers, whereas before you'd have an entire team in the place of one engineer.
Prepare for more negative articles when ps5 outsell xbox in December npd too 
It would be sad but justified.
I don't think they have much staff though... So the savings might not be too high.
You can also add the fact the Yen is absurdly weak right now(talking Asian Crisis of 1997 levels of low) even their EPD teams are not costing them nearly as much as most of the big players in the industry no matter the size of them.
They've also increased their sales figures outside of Japan by a lot, so they're reaper the benefit of favourable currency exchange.
If they can manage NOT to fuck up the generational transition, they can continue their ride the gravy train that was the Switch unto the next.
Sony isn’t backing off live service. They miss talked when they said they’ll release 12 GAAS games in 5 years instead they should’ve said they’ll release 12 GAAS games through the gen. Sony is very much all in on GAAS & if you read the ballooning of budgets & profits strictly focusing on singleplayer games is suicide long term Sony needs GAAS. I expect Sony to double & triple down GAAS (probably take a safer route of just buying established GAAS studios like MS did but in a smaller scale)
Sony could've gone in that direction as well, just because they have success with expensive high production value games doesn't mean they couldn't also invest in new studios to work on less expensive titles.
Sony even carries that mindset their GaaS efforts, they seem only interest in AAA GaaS games.
There is definetly room for PlayStation to be adding studios that work on other things that aren't AAA games. It seems to Sony if a game doesn't sell close to 20m on PS it ain't worth their time.
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sony definitely need to start diversifying its strategy to making less budget intensive games.
They can have studios making games in the 50-80 million range. I’m pretty sure thats how much it cost Remedy to make Alan Wake 2
They can have studios making games in the 50-80 million range. I’m pretty sure thats how much it cost Remedy to make Alan Wake 2
The issue is that US and LA gaming studio wages are insanely high
Sony needs more European studios
Yep, I know of them. They should be outsourcing even more than they are, and actually try to keep a reasonable limit on how many in house programmers per game. Or else you get the current situation where budgets are scaling exponentially for not a big visual difference between releases.
Yep, I got into a few arguments on here where I said that they could've followed the nintendo platformer route, and not everything needed to be AAA.
And developing a budget mobile game for tens of millions with Playstation IP likely would've reaped them the same recurring revenue they want from their wasteful AAA GAAS that have been cancelled.
Sony has reached a point where there biggest studios are in the west, with very high salaries and headcounts, while Nintendo is in Japan, with favorable exchange rates and a lot of games outsourced to 2nd parties.
I have no idea of British law but the initial leaks about Free Radical closing said that they legally had to offered for sale first. Could be annoying for them if its MM or London.
Could also be Deviation or some other second party team (Star Wars remake group?) That might involve contract disputes in court.
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Disagree.
IMO if this leak has validity it's about ND shutting down Factions development. There was probably a support studio that closed because the project was axed. The idea that MM is on the chopping block doesn't make sense to be in the Insomniac leak as they aren't important enough, but a support studio closing that might have been leveraged by multiple SIE studios would make sense.
Fwiw, Sony actually doesn't have a lot of internal support studios, just Singapore, the 3rd party co-op ones and I think one in China that mostly does localizations.
As long as they're not in Amsterdam like Guerilla, that's another pretty expensive city, which explains the budgets for the games as well.