Sony Investing $20 million in PSN exclusives!

[Zlejedi]

HappySqurriel said:

Zlejedi said:

HappySqurriel said:
In game development, that really isn't that much money ...

Even very low budget games, like those that target smart-phones, can cost an established company that does "unusual" things like pays their employees, provides benefits, and has office space $500,000+ to develop; and, depending on how this money is used, $20 Million could disappear quite quickly with little to show for it.

If that 20milions result in 20-40 PSN games it's still huge amount.

Only if they're good games ...

In my opinion, the risk of a strategy like this is that the studios that would be the most successful on the platform would probably take advantage of a program like this to produce a more ambitious product and turn a profit at the expense of Sony. If I'm the studio that built Angry Birds I would be looking to get Sony to fund the expansion of my studio by getting as much money from them as possible; and if enough studios took this approach Sony's $20 would translate to a handful of titles. In contrast there, are a lot of tiny unknown studios with questionable talent who would take any amount of money in exchange for an exclusive game and if Sony approached a lot of these studios they would end up with a lot of low quality games.

The strategy isn't (necessarily) bad, but with how little money it is you can only really see it as a jump start to try to make the Playstation network more interesting; and it isn't enough money to make it viable without significant interest from small third party publishers who want access to the platform.

And you think noone will be checking how those money are spent? Or looking at game concepts and prototypes before money are spent?