The lack of first party games from sony in 2024

[Shinobi-san]

the-pi-guy said:

Shinobi-san said:

Not sure why others are not concerned. But something is definitely up.

Been saying this for a while now - a lot of PS gamers have bought into the PS ecosystem specifically for games that come from PS Studios. We have almost nothing announced - with Insomniac churning out games almost yearly or bi yearly. Bluepoint, Team Asobi, Bend Studio, Sucker Punch and Naughty Dog have all had major releases 3-4 years ago. Some might say it takes that long to produce a AAA game, which I would agree with but if many of the games coming are sequels I would say the 4 year+ dev cycle is not okay. Regardless we have nothing announced for 2024, so if games are arriving in 2025 that would be a 4-5 year wait between releases. Are we really saying it should take 5 years to make a new Astrobot game???

There could be many reasons for these delays and excessively long dev cycles. Scope creep, multiplayer/live service focus, creative differences with regards to which IP to invest in etc. Either way Sony is clearly doing something right with Insomniac and something wrong with the rest in terms of game development efficiency. At the rate we are going Insomniac alone would have put out Miles Morales, Ratchet and Clank, Spiderman 2 and potentially Wolverine - before Suckerpunch releases Ghost of Tsushima 2. If you don't see anything wrong with that then I don't know what to say.

Because a lot of these things are normal. 

Nintendo spent 6 years on Tears of the Kingdom, around 5 years on Super Mario Wonder. 

A lot of that game development time is dedicated towards concepts. You make prototypes, figure out what works and what doesn't. Then you get a large team to make everything and polish it up. 

The biggest reason why Insomniac is able to put out games on a practically yearly basis is because they have multiple directors working on multiple things at a time. They've had small teams working on Wolverine and Spider-Man 2 and probably a few other things, for a while. If it takes 6 years to make a game, it helps immensely to have 3 or more teams working on different games; and rotate your development stuff into the other projects.

Astro's Playroom:

>According to creative director Nicolas Doucet, at least 80 tech demos for the DualSense controller had been designed while working on the game.

Astro’s Playroom — Behind the creation of PlayStation 5’s charm-filled platformer

The Last of Us 1 took 4 years in development, it was developed alongside Uncharted 3. The Last of Us 2 started development in 2014 and came out in 2020. In the middle of that Naughty Dog released Uncharted 4 and Uncharted TLL. Uncharted 4 took about 5 years, and Uncharted TLL took about a year on account of using Uncharted 4's assets so heavily. 

Horizon Zero Dawn started development in 2011 to come out in 2017. Horizon II came out in 2022. 

Look at the Xbox side. Avowed started development in 2018. Fable started development 5 years ago. The most recent Forza game spent 6 years in development. 

Take a look at how long Dragon Age: Dreadwolf has been in development. The "New Mass Effect" game was announced 3 years ago, and it will probably be several more years before it comes out. 

As much as it sucks, it takes 4+ years to plan everything out and try new things. It is the norm in the industry, to the point that ~3 years of development was a big enough deal to be written about in Bloomberg:

Electronic Arts’ New ‘Star Wars’ Sequel Was Made in Record Time

"It is entirely single player, has no microtransactions and was made during a pandemic in roughly three years — half the time it takes to produce many of today’s big games."

The big issue with a number of Sony's studios is that they generally only work on one game at a time.

I hear what you saying, and I can fully understand it taking 4-5 years to develop a new IP. I think we need to differentiate between new IP, Sequels and the size and complexity of the game.

If it took 80+ demos to come up with the right format for Astros Playroom - thats perfectly fine and in the case of Astro's Playroom that's a worthy investment as its a perfect game in my eyes. Now that the initial investment has been made - the obvious next step for that team is to build a fully fledged Astro's Playroom based game given the positive reception of the pack in demo. Granted we have no clue what they are building - but if it does turn out that they took 5 years to expand on Astro's Playroom I would say Sony needs to address that efficiency and as a publisher provide further support to bring that time frame down to 3 years especially for the type of game it is - no real cutscenes, or voice overs, story etc.

I think the same applies to Ghosts of Tsushima 2 (again if this actually what Sucker Punch is working on) as a sequel I don't think 5 years is good enough. 

In the next year or two we will know what was in the works and if it was indeed worth the wait.