From what I can find, around 700 employees work continuously on Fortnite, that’s quite a lot of devs for only 1 game that have to stick to that game in order to make it appealing to gamers. Also, you have 1 in a million chances of your game making Fortnite money as many have already tried and failed.
Destiny 2 makes like 300-400 million a year maybe. I don’t have last year’s figure, but in 2021 they made over 5 billion in a year with Fortnite. Sony would be lucky if any of their other GAAS reaches even Destiny 2 levels.
This is why I feel Phil needs to stop being “nice” and get more aggressive. Xbox has more “tools” than Sony who only mastered AAA cinematic blockbusters.
It was really easy to see that this was gonna be the case from just seeing the trailer IMO. When you see action gameplay and it looks like a cinematic then it’s almost certain that this is gonna be a…cinematic, a QTE/Press A to awesome! section or in the best case scenario an action game with simplistic AF gameplay mechanics.
If something like that trailer was possible gameplay wise without it being QTE or simplistic AF the top-tier Japanese developers that are making these kind of games for decades now (Capcom, Team Ninja, Platinum, From e.t.c.) would’ve done it already…seeing such “impressive” looking “gameplay” from an unknown studio (that previously only made mobile games before too) is a huge red flag for me.
You have to factor the price of third parties on gamepass to know how your scenario is making money. And the bigger Gamepass is, the more costly they are.
It struck me that on most of the showcase discussions on other forums or Sony centric podcasts, people still manage to blame Xbox fans or MS.
In a thread about the Schreier article about Naughty Dog, someone brought Aaron Greenberg and Timdog, as it is relevant to the matter. At least, people responded to him, but it’s really bizarre to me that they always have to blame us somehow.
I guess they don’t like being teased with the Xbox show approaching, but they are trying to pick fight with everyone, even Xbox Era on podcasts.
At least, there’s some reasonable fans like MrBadBit.
The one thing that annoys me is because of PS Showcase advertised GaaS, the whole gaming industry is no longer for us “retro” gamers as in single player focus and what not. I know they’re the market leader, but come on. We got some great titles this year that isn’t GaaS focus. Quit hailing them as God with only one direction. Good God…
The thing is none of those games are eggregious in their monotisation. Does Grounded even have MTX?
Which highlights Microsofts plan is different.
When people say everyone is chasing the GAAS model…why they really mean is recurring revenue model. Game Pass is that and it works for single player games.
Sony wants a bunch of Fortnites, but has none of the patience for it.
Despite Redfall fumbled, at least the leak should have painted Xbox as good when the game had MTX only to be erased. Not saying no game from Xbox will have any, but they are capable of MTX-free games.
They don’t want a bunch of fortnites. They want 1. They have no intention of keeping all these games going. They probably have a 3-5 year (probably not even that long) plan for each of these games and if/when one of the hits it big they will start reallocating resources and start to wind down the others.
Nick did point out that some of the devs of some games shown referred to the showcase as a state of play, and implied that it could just be a state of play starting out but they changed it afterwards.