they think, that you need to sell 10M+ to have a profit or to be successful.. MM is a small studio, it is basically an own Playstation Indie studio size wise.
Why Doesn't Sony Buy More smaller Developers like the Kena and Sifu studios?
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We need to move on from this obsession with acquisitions that Xbots created.
It doesn't matter if Sony owns the studio or not if they are working whit them as long as MS doesn't try to buy them or poach the devs.
What we should be asking Sony is why internal games from studios they already own are taking so long to be announced and released.
It doesn't matter if Sony owns the studio or not if they are working whit them as long as MS doesn't try to buy them or poach the devs.
What we should be asking Sony is why internal games from studios they already own are taking so long to be announced and released.
Yes, Media Molecule had around 50 people or less until around 2019/2020 or so, shortly before releasing Dreams and where Jim and Hermen started to grow all the teams. MM grew that time to well over 100 people.
Since always, many of them were juniors recently graduated or hired from their community. Not being hired as experienced devs means their salary is way cheaper. Last year they fired a couple dozen people, so should be around 100 people now.
Relatively small team with cheaper than usual salaries means less units are needed to be profitable. Specially when they also must get some additional revenue from the stuff made with their IPs, like Sackboy Adventures even if not developed by them or merchandising and stuff.
Media Molecule's profits were roughly £3.5M in 2016 and 2015. For FY2019 they were like ~ £1M and in FY2020 profits were £313,000, I assume due to the costs of the studio growing for the Dreams release and Dreams release related costs. I the past I did read the docs of that grant from some year, but now I did a quick search and only did found someone in Resetera quoting the numbers I posted. These numbers were public because they receive a local public grant. But yes, all their games must have been profitable as their bosses said multiple times.
Maybe until the previous fiscal year or so and this is why they fired back then around 8% of their staff, some time before the recent 900 people layoff at Sony. Possibly they wanted to go back to be a bit smaller to improve their profitability, specially now that wouldn't need certain people until they release their next game.
Yes, Tearaway and Tearaway Unfolded were profitable too. That Dreams data doesn't say a shit about their sales or profitability.
You have no idea what are you talking about, so better shut up than mading up stuff and insulting other people.
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So TearAway was profitable? No it wasn't so you need to shut the fuck up and stop being a fucking Chat GPT mouth piece for a corporation.
Dreams sold around 240k in early accesss and then the game barely charted upon official release, miss me with the corporate propaganda.
All very true
How much of the revenue do they keep from something like Helldivers 2? Especially if there will be DLC and in game purchases?
It's a per case scenario, every publisher normally has their own formulas with different approaches, or even a same publisher depending on the IP or dev may change it.
But the typical scenario is that the publisher funds all the costs of the development and marketing teams (in this case Arrowhead being one between a couple dozen teams or so working in Helldivers 2) until the game gets shipped.
When released, 100% of the revenue left after taxes, refunds, chargebacks, retail/store costs, shipments costs, server costs, etc goes to the publisher until they recoup 100% of the investment they made. Once it breaks even, there's a publisher vs dev revenue split that often is 50%-50% or 70%-30%. In cases of smaller games specially when the publisher didn't fund the game it's often 70%-30% instead.
In some rare cases -cheaper ones, or when the publisher didn't fund the game- that revenue split starts at the start or when they recouped a certain amount of money, not waiting to.
In case of GaaS, in the game budget it's also included a portion of the post launch development, normally its first post launch year. If the game recouped the investment and is profitable then every year post launch they review their post launch roadmap according to the results of the previos year and part of the revenue to fund the next year of servers and support.
Meaning, as the game revenue declines they also spend less in the amount of post launch staff people working on it, eventally not havin anyone working on it, plus also doing some stuff to spend less in servers. And at some point the games doesn't generate enough and they end shutting down the servers.
When I say game revenue I mean revenue from game sales + passes + DLC + MTX + merch etc., Every dollar generated by the game in any way and source.
I estimate that they should be around 10M units solds combining PS+PC. Regarding Warbonds and microtransactions their revenue should be way under the average in GaaS, because the in-game economy is very generous, relaxed and not aggressive at all.
But they won't care, because 10M units sold at 40 bucks each already is a ton of money. The game, including bigger than expected post launch support for let's say 5 years has been already recouped and they are genereting profit. So any game sales, warbond or MTX sales going forward durin the next years will be profit.
The game, at least in Steam, also features an insanely successful user retention bigger than most GaaS hits. The percent of users that it loses after the first day, week, two weeks, a month is super small. And amount of time spent in the game is also larger than usual. Exceptional user retention implies long term game longevity and better sales of MTX and Warbonds in the long term and in average.
Meaning, on average each player will spend way less on warbonds+mtx than usual per day or month. But they will stay way longer, that would compensate it making its addons revenue better in the long term.
And in any case, even if their addons revenue sucks they'll have minimum $40 bucks per user, which is way better than the average F2P player pays.
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a lot of them can’t successfully scale up
I think Hello Games would ahve been a good buy though. Companies actually have to want to sell too
I think Hello Games would ahve been a good buy though. Companies actually have to want to sell too
True, being profitable doesn't mean being being a hit, and LBP was their only big hit in terms of sales.
But regarding reviews and awards the studio always has been very successful, to a rare levels, and it is not common to find studios where all their games are profitable. And on top of that, relatively cheap to run.
And well, it's even more rare when the studio does very creative and unique games.
Their games are good and unique but they also have an ability to take a billion dollar idea and squander it
LBP and Dreams could have been so much bigger
What is the point of having too many studios? It will just turn into a big mess, there is a limit to how many you can control and manage before fumbling.
It is much better for Sony to order games from external studios and retain the IP of those games.
To get more first party games per year, cover more game types and niches, diversify the offering to be better positioned for potential changes in the future.
It shouldn't be an issue at a management level. If the number of games would be too high then fans wouldn't be able to buy all the games they want. This already happens, but maybe could overshadow them more than desired.
The IPs aren't worth much if you don't have appopiate free teams to work on them. I mean, Ready at Dawn could have been the next Naughty Dog or Sony Santa Monica. They could have made Uncharted 5 or a home console GoW. Or turn The Order on a top IP improving a few things in sequels.
With Until Dawn at least they found Ballistic Moon, which have many former Supermassive devs. But with let's say Quantic Dream: what do you do with their IPs without them other than ports or remasters?
Sure, it's key to keep the IPs, but Sony has a gazillion of great ones and nowadays games take forever to be made, so it's important to have more the adequate teams to work on them.
Sony has many key dormant IPs that could be addressed with other teams, they need manpower.
On top of that, Sony invested a lot in teams like Ready At Dawn or Quantic Dream, who did a great improvement from before to after working with Sony. But they lost them. Acquiring them would secure that investment.
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Why some people on here treat Sony like their papa and mama, asking them to buy studios like goodies?
So Sony should have like 100 fucking studios under their umbrella, is that what you are suggesting. If not then your point is invalid because you still think there should be a limit. Also, giving IPs to external developers to develop the games for you is totally a fine option.
No, I never said that.
My point is perfectly valid, Tencent has a gazillion teams and no issue to manage them. Also, there are publishers like Ubisoft with over 40 studios.
I'm perfectly ok with making 2nd party games, hiring external studios to make game for them. But they must secure the important ones to avoid what happened with Quantic Dreans or Ready at Dawn getting both by someone else, or even with Kojipro making games for the direct competition instead of for them.
These threads man... I don't want to believe people can be this moronic but alas, the threads are at least useful for litmus test for who to ignore.