Heavenly Sword sold about 1.5m but devs didn't break even

[Deviation59]

jarrod said:

letsdance said:

jarrod said:

leo-j said:
that's really sad..

the game is 5 hours, and the budget was higher than MGS4s potentially.

Very sad

Eh, more than twice as many people worked on MGS4, and it was in development twice as long... pretty sure it's budget likely dwarfed Heavenly Sword's.

I doubt it. I think Kojima went the more traditional way in developing the MGS4. Ninjatheory was very ambitious in their developing with facial mocap and voicing famous people.

Uh, you know MGS4 used far, far more extensive mocap (including facial capture) than HS, right?  Just check the credits, MGS4's mocap credits alone rival the entire R&D teams for many other games.  MGS4 also had a huge voice cast, extensive CG and the entire network infrastructure R&D for MGO in there.  If you credit check, MGS4 credits almost 400 people!  

And that's just production, we're not even talking about promotional budgets...

Extensive CG? Don't you know that all four of the Metal Gear Solid games eschew traditional CG entirely? Their cinematics are all done in engine and with in-game assets.

iLLmaticV3 said:
Wow...they didn't break even, but Sony probably did? What kind of exclusivity deal was that O.o

Sony fronted the money for development so as publisher, they get paid first. It always works that way with publishing deals.

Sorry for the threepeat in posts but I'm addressing very different points in each.