2023-12-25 09:00:05
Insomniac Games, a game development company owned by Sony, suffered a major blow last week when it was hacked and almost all of its business was leaked online. Leakage of the game’s story and personal information of employees before its release can have serious consequences, but apart from that, information leaked from internal documents of the company’s upper management (not personal information or spoilers) reveals that the game It highlights Sony’s plans and struggles surrounding its business, as well as the unsustainability of “AAA” games in general, which are developed with big budgets.
The most surprising piece of information is that Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, released this year, cost $300 million to develop. This is a ridiculous amount of money, three times the budget of the first film. Spider-Man 2 is said to be the fastest-selling PlayStation exclusive title in history, but even then, the initial sales did not cover the development costs. These games tend to sell for a long time (its predecessor, Spider-Man, was the PS4’s best-selling exclusive title), so they’ll probably pay for themselves over time. However, this situation raises serious questions regarding how long this model can continue.
One of the points raised in the leaked documents is the question of whether players will understand that Spider-Man 2 costs three times as much as its predecessor. The game is larger than the first game and expands a bit on its predecessor in terms of more complex missions and two main characters, but it also retains much of the gameplay and much of the city from the first game and its spin-offs. Elements are being reused. So why did it cost three times as much?
Thanks to the large amount of money spent on this work, it became the first Insomniac game to reach a 90-point MetaScore, which is an overall rating from critics, and was well received by fans, but the budget was too large. And no matter how high the rating is, it will eventually become unjustifiable. What if the finished game was of poor quality and didn’t become a big hit? It’s not hard to imagine that if they continue to make games with this much budget, they will eventually fail and cause serious damage to the company.
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