CEOs don't have to be smart or good, they are actually easily replaceable by AI, yet they will probably be the last to be replaced, which is funny.
Spider-Man: The Great Web Trailer Leaked Online |UP| 3/13/24 Second Trailer posted.
- Thread starter Gamernyc78
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They just need to be psychopaths and have the right buddies.
People can say whatever they want but it's a fantastic coincidence that the moment they shifted their development to PS/PC their output slowed down to a crawl and game started being canceled like never before.
Sony doesn't stand out among the likes of Ubisoft/EA/Activision anymore as they once did. Their studios now seem just as unproductive and poorly run.
If it was this advanced into development, couldn't they just pivot to a multiplayer coop game without the live-service stuff?
It's very obviously Sony's doing.
Helldivers is Sony's IP and they paid for development from the start for both the 1st and the 2nd games.
It's very obviously Sony's doing.
What we saw in the leaks of this game was a pitch. It didn't appear in the roadmaps other than in one of them when they werre pitching to add MP expansions of SP games. Meaning this pitch was never greentlighted. In many cases, for pitches they also make prototypes and some video, as seems to be the case of this one.
From what we see here in this video they took Spider-Man 1&2 backrounds, characters and enemies, and made a multiplayer prototype, using as playable characters skins we got from the games with also Spider Gwen and in the concept art we also see Silk. In 0:50 we see a new area in early stages of development.
Pretty likely what they did in playable form was what can be seen in the video and little more. Pretty likely using the same coop MP system they did for Wolverine. It wasn't an "almost finished" game where they worked many years, seems it was just in he prototype/pitch stage that got rejeceted, or maybe got greenlighted and is Spider-Man 3.
When companies think a project must be shut down, they cancel it as soon as possible. Because even if many times they learn things from cancelled projects or reuse stuff to other ones, it's mostly money thrown to the garbage bin. So when a project isn't going to work is better to kill it as fast as possible because killing it faster means less money thrown to the garbage bin.
There are many reasons to decide to don't greenlight this game and kill it: maybe thought they already had a ton of Spìder-Man related games. Maybe they thought that with the Spider-Man ones, the X-Men ones, Ratchet and new IP they already had more projects than they were going to be able to handle. Or maybe their idea was to make their Spider-Man take on the Avengers and Suicide Squad games, but once they did this prototype they realized that Avengers was a total failure and that Suicide Squad potentially waas going to be another big failure, so they decided to play it safe. Or maybe thought they already had more than enough GaaS in the works. Or that the budget of the games from Insomniac was skyrocketing that next games instead it would be better to be shorter instead of expanding to an even larger MP GaaS titles.
From what we saw in the leaks and in this video this game/expansion was in early stages, barely was a pitch and prototype.
They know -we even saw leaked docs analyzing this- successful GaaS are way more profitable and popular tthan SP games. And the revenue from GaaS is becoming bigger than the SP one and continues eating their market share. So this is why in addition to continue making SP games they are also expanding to MP/GaaS games.
Game companies always rejected and cancelled games due to a lot of reasons. They are also constantly changing the games and tweaking their roadmaps every few months due to many things that in many cases can't control. As an example, maybe here Insomniac people sent 2 or 3 different pitches (let's say this and the Venom one) and Sony or Insomniac thought that this project was going to take them more resources than the ones they could greenlight for Insomniac, or that they already had more than enough GaaS in the works, or that it could take too long, and that would be a better fit for them the Venom one because it would take way less resources being a short SP game and could be released faster filling some hole in the roadmap Sony could have.
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But they are making more revenue than ever!
Anybody that has even a semblance of development knowledge could tell them that adding more platforms would lead to more issues and delays, especially short term. Their studios have mostly been focused on their consoles, APIs, etc, for well over a decade.
Maybe in a few years they will catch up, but there will be a decrease in quality, which we've already started seeing with their games being substantially more buggy than before
And yet that's not what I said, especially in context with the whole comment. Don't cherry pick and don't misrepresent my comments.
If you want a clue: Helldivers is not Jimmy's and Hermies work. Is it spelt enough for you?
Edit: here comes the 3km long comment saying fuck all.
More revenue than ever while crying and complaining that they are not very profitable.
If Xbox wasn't as incompetent as they are this decision would have pretty much killed the PlayStation business already.
Well technically revenue is not profit, and with the amount of money they are blowing up supporting their shitty PC ports and developing live service games only to cancel them...More revenue than ever while crying and complaining that they are not very profitable.
Helldivers 1 wasn't a live service game, Helldivers 2 is a live service game.
Why would they not be responsible for a Playstation game becoming live service?
You need to decide whether they're responsible for starting a bunch of live service games at Playstation, or that they don't deserve credits for Helldivers 2.
You can't have both.
Also, there were some Playstation live service games out there before Helldivers 2. GT7 and MLB for example.
or, H2 direction was decided prior what PS decided their direction would be. GT Sport also was live service game. do we credit it to Jimbo and Co?
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What are you talking about?
Helldivers 2 was greenlit BEFORE Jimmy and Hermie™. The original game was an online multiplayer shooter, the step to live service is tiny
GT7 was greenlit BEFORE Jimmy and Hermie™ and follows up on GT Sport, which was live service already
MLB has been on the market since BEFORE Jimmy and Hermie™
If you can't understand the difference between the strategy before Jimmy and Hermie™, which was to have a select few online / live service games, to their strategy, which was to have every single studio working on some live service game or live service component for a game, that's your problem.
Helldivers 2 is a Sony's game. For a very long time was in the development under Jim. So, over 6. years. MLB is a GAAS game. And Marathon and Fairgame$ aren't out yet. I don't see it backfired.
That's unfortunate. But... from a business perspective if you don't provide anything notable to show in 4+ years, just to show, not to release a game, yes, closure is inevitable.
Cut the crap here. Days Gone, GOW, Spiderman and HFW sold well on PC
MLB is a game from ACTUAL Sony studios, same as TLOU 2 Remaster, yes. Also, it is eays and way faster to port EXISTING game than making a new one. I think you know that. That's why they have Nixxes.
How about to wait end of fiscal year and next earning reports, then we will know how much they've missed.
It was actually. For at least 90% of the development time.
These guys made PS better. PS has never before been so profitable like it is know.
So what it was greenlit before. Development time counts. Jim could canceled it, but it didn't.
GT Sport was out way before Jim became CEO, but he takes a credit for Helldivers 2, yes. For very obvious reason. Vast majority of Helldivers 2 development was under him. It was very obvious that it was decided before Helldivers 2 would continue to be a GAAS game like the first one, but surely technical changes were decided during development.
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I once had a pet hermit crab named Hermie.
He was apparently just as effective at making video games as Hulst.
Jim and Hermen got their current positions in April 2019 (Jim) and November 2019 (Hermen). Meaning, they didn't grenlight GaaS like LBP, PS Home, GT Sport, Dreams, GT7, Firewall Ultra, Helldivers 2, Concord, Horizon Online. All these GaaS existed before them.
TLOU Online and Studio London's new IP pretty likely got greenlighted by Jimbo but not by Hermen.
Jimbo and Hermen did sign Bungie (so Destiny, Marathon, Matter and future ones), Haven (Fairgame$), Deviation's game. And did use their expertise to help the other GaaS teams like Helldivers 2. Plus also obviously helping them with the usual 1st/2nd party mocap, Sony creative arts teams for art, sound, design, localization, pr, marketing etc. teams. Helldivers 2 has been under development for almost 8 years, around half of it under Jim and Hermen, period during which Arrowhead (like the rest of 1st and 2nd party teams) highly grew their manpower thanks to Sony's funds.
The first GaaS MLB was MLB21, so it's possible that it was decided to switch to GaaS during the Jim+Hermen era, but maybe was decided before because it requires a ton of work and yearly releases require a ton of work themselves, so big stuff requires time to be added and isn't implemented from a game to the next one.
Hermen+Jim also grew the teams so people like ND could work -in addition to the GaaS not greenlighted by Hermen- on 2 new SP non-GaaS they have under development and were greenlighted by Hermen and Jim. Same goes with Guerrilla, went from working on HFW only to work on HFW/Horizon 3 (greenlighted by Jim+Hermen)+Horizon Online+Horizon CoM at the same time.
We also know that studios like Guerrilla, Insomniac and Naughty Dog under Hermen's command got rid of crunch, or at least they claim so (or to be working on it, at least to reduce it in the most part).
We also know Jim and Hermen, as did all their predecesors or equivalents in other companies, cancelled games. They cancelled GaaS like TLOU Online, London Studio's game, apparently Deviation's game (if not moved to the new secret SIE team made with ex-Deviation devs) and didn't greelight MP Spider-Man and Twised Metal pitches/prototypes.
We also know that most of the games we know were greenlighted during the Jim+Hermen era aren't GaaS.
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The who greenlit what convo has happened for weeks in different threads, why even bother? Some ppl will Hear only what they want to.
Lot's of fallacy's in this:
Live service backfiring would be they spend even more money developing them and bringing them regardless if they were good to market in a overaly saturated market. Look at all the projects that are single player that Sony has canned? They are making changes as the market shifted while they put in place and greenlit a lot of these GAAS titles.
They call it casting a net.
They signed deals, and had multiple people make GAAS titles for them externally mostly. As time goes on they monitor where the projects are and make decisions based on if they see money at the end of the tunnel. Which means they either stop funding to external projects, move it internally or can the project.
- Case in point, Deviation Games on paper was set for success. Was started by ex Treyarch/Call of Duty alumni. But after a while seems milestones were not met and Sony didn't like what they had which also seemed to be why Blundel left.
- Blundel, Tony flame and most of the oldschool top tier talent are now working directly under SIE. I believe they are working either on their own title within Playstation or similar to Bungie deal are advisers for multiplayer titles.
- Look Visual Arts group? They internally had something going on related to a naughty dog IP it then was canned. And studio moved on to being a support studio of some sorts.
- Pixelopus closing was them developing some sort of animated series/game and it was not something that was showing enough to keep the lights on. Had nothing to do with Live service push. Pixelopus made Concrete genie and release it in 2017. They literally have had nothing since then. Same goes for other studios like Manchester and London.
Firesprite took leadership for Twisted metal and that title I guess wasn't even green lit for full on production. Which shows Herman was watching and reporting back to where projects were milestone wise.
To your PC question, they have made more than enough money on PC to show, that its worth doing when the investment on it is smaller porting.
Would not be surprised if Ghost of tsushima is one of the big ever green sellers this year into next like god of war is.
My entire point of this long winded response is herman came in when all these things were already in motion. And seeing in short time were decided on when or where to pivot shows you they are doing their jobs.
Do I wish studios didn't close? yes. But thats video game business. Sony is not Nintendo. They dont use the same IP and do spin offs for decades, they also reinvest in new tech, online services. Nintendo stays the same mostly and rarely have then grown developer size wise compared to the others.
It's not all sunshine and rainbows. But Sony let these people make what they wanted. Some studios for sure Sony pushed or gave incentives in doing a live service. I would argue its on Sony and the studio to be budget concsious.
Which new CEO seems to imply they are going to do going forward. Which is how most Indie developers are like Arrow Head.
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