Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios

[mjk45]

Truthstation said:

sales2099 said:

Oh you so funnnnny. The game sold what approx 2 million, I didn’t think that would be enough to sustain the dev costs plus 5 years going forward. But if the financials check out then nm 

The development of LittleBigPlanet 3 was not really expensive. Sony never intended it to be a huge financial success, it was just released to make the holidays line-up stronger in 2014. Dreams was always the big project of Media Molecule since 2013, the problem was that development for that game just took so long. 

MM was started by ex Lionshead developers, and has never had a large workforce in fact it is a core philosophy of the studio not to be big, for much of LBP's development the team size was around 12 or so people and was increased to 24 just after the finish moving to 37 a few months later. even today there are just 57 employees, so they are a lean machine and it's that model that affords them the luxury of being able to take their time to experiment and iterate while keeping to  a budget that meant 1.1 million pounds profit for 2019 and equity of 33 million .

An interesting aside Ninja Theory after struggling with the same headwinds that prevail in the industry regarding independents and the one game to the next   existence  went with a similar strategy that they called independent AAA where they moved to a small 20 person studio but retained AAA values  so it shows that profitability has more than one template.

Last edited by mjk45 - on 07 June 2020