250 seems like too much. Is it justified?
I think he's saying $250M as a guess because this is more or less what a AAA cost today, >$250-300M. Remember that the budget of HFW and TLOU2 were 212M and 220M and since every generation get more expensive should be above this (and if it's MP GaaS even more).
And well, the budget normally is considered as confidential, in a big studio basically only the studio head and a few producers and the finances guy know the number and can't be revealed, which includes to former coworkers.
Considering he didn't have a good relationship with the studio boss/bosses, one of the few main studio producers friend of him would have leaked it to him and that person would get in trouble and would be easy to spot.
How's that gonna affect game development and talent retention, though? Do they expect entire teams to move over to the UK or work from home? That can be a bad situation.
I could see Nishino moving back to Japan and running Playstation out of there while Herman runs the studios out of California.
When Hermen did talk about the costs in the west coast he wasn't talking about the SIE HQ, he was talking about the cost of gamedev studios instead, because he was talking about reducing the costs of game development in general and one of the typical ones to reduce gamedev costs.
Their gamedev studios of the west coast have many hundreds of people combined. Most of them wouldn't want to relocate to a different continent and see their salary reduced, even less when that includes some of the most talented people in the world that is working in places like SSM, ND or Insomniac.
And Hermen and Nishino didn't say absolutely nothing remotely close to having plans to relocate anything. Hermen just explained how any publisher reduces costs in AAA game development by outsourcing and codeveloping.
In fact, Hermen is opening a new team in California with former Deviation devs.
First, I've heard no such chatter about relocating their California studios in the UK. It simply doesn't work like that.
Furthermore, that's not what Herman meant. Is California expensive? Absolutely and are they investing in cheaper areas where they can be more aggressive about talent recruiting by not being one of many in the area? Absolutely.
Haven is in Quebec, Firewalk is in Washington, Bluepoint is in Austin, Firesprite is in Liverpool, Housemarque is in Helsinki, and Nixxes is in the Netherlands.
All of these studios are investments outside of California.
In time, these studios can be grown out to similar sizes of Naughty Dog, Insomniac, Santa Monica Studios... but these are still the crown jewels of Sony (with Guerrilla being in Netherlands).
Blundell's new internal studio though... most likely in California...
Blundell's new SIE studio that Hermen is building with ex-Deviation workers is in Los Angeles, California. Same city where Deviation was.
We also have to remember that in addition to acquire new studios, they also heavily invested on growing the manpower of most of their existing studios, which include ones from California like ND, or SSM, now working on more projects at the same time -and having more people per project- than ever were before.
And well, even if in Washington (which I assume shouldn't be way cheaper) let's remember they also almost doubled Bungie's manpower since they acquired them. And well, they also have Firewalk and Sucker Punch there, who I assume also have been growing.
Regarding acquisitions in other locations, they basically acquired talent wherever the team is, teams that deliver good enough projects and maybe some IP they had. This is what it's really important for them when acquiring. I think cost of the studio is secondary but obviously is a plus.
Same goes with being in an area where they don't have other studio: it's something secondary but helps to their HR to don't have multiple studios from their own company competing for the same talent.
He said that but he is now after the fact blaming it on Herman Hulst, saying he had no interest in the IP.
If Hermen wouldn't have interest in the IP then he wouldn't have made a PC, wouldn't have included it in PS Plus Collection and wouldn't be making a movie adaptation.
Maybe they thought that when the sequel was going to start they were already working on a lot of other sequels and wanted a new IP instead, and liked DG so asked them for another new IP.
They can always make a sequel later in the road.