| Shatts said: Most of these are assumptions and some are wrong bcuz Platinum is about the same size as Santa Monica, and Santa Monica was also developing multiple titles. Games are a lot more expensive to make nowadays. We have to remember the reason why Wii U had so little third party games was due to how difficult it was to make a game for it. Like u said, development costs are primarily labor costs. If u want to compare, the average interval between God of War games was 3 years, Nier also about 3 years, whereas Bayonetta games are taking 5 years. Anyways, we are just spitting bullshit at each other and all of this is heavy speculation relying on random sources. My point is tho, I wonder where the heck she got 450m from and we can all agree Bayonetta is definitely not that big right? Even u agreed half a billion is ridiculous. |
https://kotaku.com/platinum-games-making-only-original-titles-is-very-dif-1757046346
"Platinum Games talks about how things have changed over the past decade as it went from a staff of 60 to its current 180 or so, tripling in size."
In 2007-2009 Platinum Games only had about 60 employees, yet they were working on three games: Madworld, Bayonetta, and Infinite Space. By that time, Santa Monica already had nearly 200 employees. It took them two years to develop the original Bayonetta as the company didn't exist before 2007, and the game released in 2009.
Santa Monica wasn't developing multiple games in 2009. You can look at their internal development record here.
The time-interval for development only matters if all else is equal (equal number of employees working on the title, equal marketing budget, equal salaries of employees, no or similar start/stops to production, etc.) But you can't make that assumption. For starters, Santa Monica is an American studio and the average American software developer makes much more than the average Japanese one. Bayonetta 2 took five years because it halted production and started again when Nintendo brought in funding. Bayonetta 3 definitely seems like it has a higher budget than the first two, but it is likely going to sell a lot better than they did too.
Yes, half a billion is a ridiculous number for the total revenue of the franchise. It doesn't matter to her argument though. Nintendo could afford to pay voice actors better when the game sells 2 million copies at almost full price.
Last edited by sc94597 - on 16 October 2022
