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makingmusic476 on 07 April 2009
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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. I said it's probably one of the more profitable parts of SCE.  Not the most.  And it's pure speculation on my part, based on the probability that every game they publish outside of Lair, the NBA series, and maybe Folklore has made a profit, some a rather hefty profit (look at LBP's sales, then consider that the team was never larger than 37 people 0_o).  It's quite possible that revenue generated from PSP hardware sales could exceed the profit made by SCEWWS.

2. Guerrilla slowly grew to their rather large numbers over parts of late 2006 (when they were acquired by Sony), the entirety of 2007, and early 2008, when they reached their peak.  They were quite heavily staffed for at least the latter half of Killzone 2's development.  However, they never neared, let alone exceeded 200 employees.  They were around 160 throughout most of 2008.

As for Sony Santa Monica, it was said that they have two animators working on each of Kratos' attacks/moves for God of War III.  What exactly that means I couldn't say.  I'd assume two animators work on one move, flesh it out, then start working on another move.