257
PlayStation is laying off 900 staff across Naughty Dog, Insomniac and other studios
(www.engadget.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
257 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
60052 readers
2853 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Content generation is the largest cost. This means specialized labor with specialized tools from vendors that nickel and dime (Autodesk mostly). On top of that, the two largest contractor firms (KeyWords and Technicolor) are at capacity, and running on the margins.
Engine licensing is a negligible cost at this point, even if the pricing becomes predatory. That said, in AAA spaces, Epic Games owns the space and this means they can control the fate of almost all. Building game engines is extremely difficult even though the commoditization of x86 and ARM removes a lot of technical challenges that are being piled on by Nvidia.
It cost Take Two somewhere close to a billion to make GTA 5 (development, marketing, and sync rights) and not only did they make it back in three days, they turned around and made many more over its lifespan. Everyone wants that level of success. The market can't support it. Developers can't support it. The products can't support it. A crash is inevitable and it will probably take out a lot of capital for indies, further consolidate publishers, and maybe one of the console vendors with it.
Palworld and Helldivers 2 cost less than 5 million to make each and they're the most talked about and played games of the year so far, maybe there's a shift going on.
Don't forget the marketing teams that are massive money sinks that have made themselves untouchable.
Eventually, some risk analyst is going to run their own ROI assessment on marketing and see just how much grift is going on in there.