Days Gone vs Ghost of Tsushima, sales vs expectations of Sony

[mjk45]

twintail said:

Qwark said:

Even if Days Gone made enough money, we don't know how the sequel was actually pitched, which is also something to consider. Besides it's not like Sony is closing the studio. They are making a new open world game and they definitely use some of the tech and experience they got while making Days Gone.

Pretty much the most important piece of info we know nothing about.

Yes a sequel was pitched, John Garvin the Creative director and lead writer on Days Gone said the lack of full price sales was to blame for the lack of a sequel.   

We need to remember that World Wide Studios base their greenlighting of sequels off multiple factors and criteria some that we are aware of but also lesser known factors,I will badly demonstrate this by using this hypothetical scenario, where Game A does well and sells x amount and a sequel is greenlit then Game B does well and sells a similar amount but doesn't get an immediate sequel, questions are raised and the answer turns out to be simply one of bad timing where game B fell into a scenario where there was a scheduling squeeze and Game A had taken the last remaining opportunity, so in the meantime game B may either be put on to help with other work or rather than wait in hope for a sequel spend the time on pitching a new game, but no matter the outcome and the reasoning behind it, to the public it is still a black and white case that doesn't add up.

returning to some of those other factors, we have factors like how well the launch phase went when the games are selling at full price, then there's return on investment not just singularly but also against other games because the investment pool being finite means that there is competition for that money , sure the blockbuster games subsides that pool enabling more games to be made Shuey when head of WWS said  that besides their development costs being returned to the pool an amount of profit was also put back into development from each AAA block buster provided funding for around 7 other games per blockbuster but the pool is still finite. so in the end the simple fact is the reason for games being greenlit or not isn't always black and white.

Last edited by mjk45 - on 06 January 2022