Merva@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
As long as there continues to be succesful live service games, they will never stop attempting to make new ones, because the succesful ones are the most profitable forms of entertainment ever devised.
Of course there is only room for a limited amount of live service games on the market (since gamers only have one life to waste on them), so most of them will fail, and many of them even before leaving the drawing board it seems.
This is an excellent point. An organisation the size of Sony is simply incapable of not attempting a live service hit as long as they have the resources to do so.
A smaller player can pursue a strategy where they gain profits from their (somewhat specialized) segement of the market. Sony lacks that flexibility due to their size.
Yep, they can make a bunch of games that costs them hundreds of millions to make it they manage to make one that brings in billions in profit… That’s what we call gambling.
That’s what we call gambling.
Most companies call it R&D.
Don_alForno@feddit.org 10 months ago
But then, why do they keep canceling them before release? They don’t know if they’d have been hits or failures.
Merva@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Of course we can’t really know what goes on behind the scenes. But obviously these kinds of games are designed by committee (namely board members). So every single detail is going to be dictated from above, and as new games are released by other publishers with new succesful features these dictates changes mid-production. I can’t but imagine that the development of live service games are a complete shitshow from start to finish.
So perhaps at some point they decide to get rid of the entire mess and start afresh, only for the process to beging again of course.
RedAggroBest@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Also worth noting that getting a live service game with enough infrastructure going to immediately make them millions is a significant startup cost on its own. picking the best project of them and then putting it in its own studio seems like a very smart way to do it.
Don_alForno@feddit.org 10 months ago
I’ve seen project managment in industrial fields, and now that you put it this way I can totally see it.