Comment on EXCLUSIVE - Year 2 Content is Planned for Ubisoft's Skull and Bones
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 2 days agoIm thinking more on licensing costs. Porsche is not a cheap license, especially when considering costs for the details of such a license. The other logos seemed to be Sony owned IP, so they didn’t cost anything, but just seeing Porsche makes me wonder how many other licenses they are paying for, thus ballooning development cost. They may have a license with Porsche for Gran Turismo, but that would not be applicable to other games, so they would have to renegotiate the license, which is always inviting the licensor to demand more the next time.
I don’t doubt it will sell more copies than Concord, but I do believe it will not sell enough to be profitable, and in this way be similar to Concord. The Youtube dislike ratio on the reveal trailer for Intergalactic (91k up, 225k down) is more or less the same as for Concord (8.5k up, 84.5k down) at overwhelmingly negative, and historically speaking this is not an insignificant statistic. Other games I might expect to have similar ratios for various reasons do not have overwhelmingly negative reception, such as the female lead game The Witcher 4 (5k up, 1k down on PlayStation channel - 251k up, 24.7k down on The Witcher channel), anime racing game Screamer (2k up, 75 down), and even The Last of Us Part 2 Remaster (7.2k up, 6.6k down) which I for sure expected to be negative.
I certainly agree with the trend you are seeing. I remember when this happened when ReCore was promoted as “from the developers of Metroid Prime.” ReCore wasn’t awful, but it was far from Metroid Prime. I also didn’t like Naughty Dogs previous titles, but I do think this will be a hard sell. Space themed games typically don’t sell as well as modern or medieval themed games (unfortunately, since I really love space!). I guess the audience for them is not as big, or rather it is big but divided into many niche categories that don’t really like mixing. Star Citizen, Starfield, and StarCraft don’t have a huge overlap of players despite being space themed games. That’s just how space stuff is. Star Wars and Star Trek don’t mix, and while some people are interested in both, most people pick one or the other and stay there forever. I mean look at Star Wars Outlaws, which seems to be in a similar vein to Intergalactic. Sold horribly, despite having the leg up on Intergalactic of being a Star Wars title.
I suppose we will see how it turns out. Personally, I don’t hope the game fails, but I do think Naughty Dog needs to make some big changes to get me and others interested in trying the game again.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’m expecting the licenses resulted in the money flowing in the other direction. Monster paid Kojima for Death Stranding, not the other way around.
Dislike ratios are fake these days, as it just polls people who use the browser extension. Don’t put too much stock into it. Some segment of people get told that the game is woke because it stars a woman who shaves her head in the opening seconds, so they brigade the video and mash dislike.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Okay, so I am in game development, and I talked to Porsche for a licensing agreement (among other car brands) because I wanted to have real life cars in a racing game. Most of the appeal of a racing game is being able to drive cars that laypeople could never afford. As an independant, it is not financially possible to obtain a license from any of them. Even the cheapest brand is multiple millions of dollars with odd stipulations, including but not limited to such requirements as: “you cant show our cars getting damaged,” “our cars have to be faster/better than X brand even when statistically this is not true,” and “you cannot allow the player to customize any part of the vehicle and it can only be displayed in the specific colors we tell you.” The only way you can get around such stipulations is if you can find a company like RUF that buys cars like Porsche, changes them very slightly, and then get the license from them instead since they will usually not have the same requirements. They do not pay you, no company pays you for brand licensing like that. Contact any brand and ask them for a licensing deal where they pay you and they are going to laugh at you. The way Kojima was probably able to get Monster to pay him was either he has a friend at the company/ a friend is a shareholder or he was somehow able to convince them that the deal was film product placement, which is a different kind of license and comes with different rules, but often means the brand does pay the prodution studio. I am going to assume he just has a friend that works at or owns stake in Monster.
If the problem was a woman lead, how come The Witcher 4 also didn’t get brigaded? Screamer also featured a woman as its main character in the trailer and that was not brigaded either. Even if what you are implying is true, the same thing happened to Concord, people brigading it for being “woke,” and we both know how that ended. This isn’t a stat you can just handwaive away because “some people are brigading it for being woke,” literally the same thing happened with Concord.
Also consider TLOU2 had mixed to negative reception among fans, especially by comparison to the first game. Players will be more skeptical in such a situation. They couldn’t have known when they bought the game how they would feel by the end, and people who felt negatively certainly will be less likely to buy the next game from the same studio, regardless of whether it is related to TLOU or not.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
For all we know, there may be no way this sci-fi future Porsche gets damaged, because it may not even be part of the game’s loop, as opposed to a driving game where we know for a fact you’re going to drive. When the appeal to a driving game is to be able to drive whatever brand of car you want, the car brand has the power in the negotiation. This is a game that takes place in retro future 80s sci-fi and doesn’t feature the actual real world car.
Does he also have friends at CalorieMate, PlayBoy, and Apple? Sure, we know he has at least one friend at AMC, but this is a long line of product placement in Kojima games, and they do it for the same reason they do it in film; it’s an advertisement. I think it would be pretty absurd for an already expensive production to then license Porsche for their story when they could have easily, in 20 seconds or less, established a fictional car brand to plaster on the back on their space ship.
It did.
People did the same for The Last of Us II, and that game sold over 10 million copies. Concord was a game no one wanted from frame 1, before we even saw pronouns in a character select screen.