Sony: Our first-party dev is as big as Microsoft and Nintendo's combined

[Squilliam]

wholikeswood said:

Squilliam said:
Since this is coming from the horses mouth I'll assume it is true.

1. Are these studios a drain or are they profiting. I'll assume the former unless corrected with strong evidence because if they have that many employees its got to be a massive drain on their resources if every single HD publisher is losing money pretty much even with some impressive blockbuster releases I have to assume that Sony is as well at this point.

2. Is their pursuit of development excellence causing them to hire huge quantities of staff at the expense of profits. Guerilla games had in excess of 200 staff at points in Killzone 2 development and I heard that Santa Monica had two animators for every programmer and thats a lot of staff and expensive MOCAP.

1. As I recall MakingMusic setting out a while ago, SCEWWS is the most profitable part of Sony's gaming division. Think it's only San Diego that historically hasn't set the charts alight (that said, MLB 09 The Show is sitting pretty at 90 on Metacritic).

2. Please don't do a starcraft. You're coming ambiguously close to suggesting that GG was super-staffed during KZ2 development. As MakingMusic (wow, he's been useful!) has explained countless times, the vast majority of development was done by the original, moderately-staffed group before rising for the last stretch.

Edit: MakingMusic, get yo' ass in here and explain this better.

1. Their break even point = Microsoft + Nintendo for their 1st party developments alone. Remember they have canceled several announced games and im betting many unannounced games as well. Their software output doesn't seem to justify their current development base.

2. I was merely implying that they are pushing production values far into the territory of diminishing returns.