Kotaku actually had a good article on the Sony leak from last year that revealed what Insomnaic/Sony are thinking, I'd reccomend reading it to anyone who really wants to understand what is happening:
https://kotaku.com/what-hacked-files-tell-us-about-the-studio-behind-spide-1851115233
Key points:
- Spider-Man 2 went over budget, was supposed to cost $270 million ended up being north of 300 million
- Internally Insomniac/Sony are extremely worried about rising costs, trying to figure out how to make blockbusters more like assembly line production (that sounds ... not great).
- Cinematic cut scenes cost a fortune.
- Here's a telling bit straight from the article quoting Insomniac themselves:
“We have to make future AAA franchise games for $350 million or less,” reads one slide from a “sustainable budgets” presentation earlier this year. “In today’s dollars, that’s like making [Spider-Man 2] for $215 million. That’s $65 million less than our [Spider-Man 2] budget.” Another slide puts the problem more starkly: “...is 3x the investment in [Spider-Man 2] evident to anyone who plays the game?”
There it is, Insomniac themselves even wonders if spending 3x the budget is something even that noticeable to gamers. It looks to me like $300 million is the budget range where even Sony is saying "holy shit, we need to draw the line here".
- Another point, they basically are talking about how they're under extreme pressure from Sony to cut costs, will be cutting the costs on future Ratchet & Clank and New IP titles, but it's still not enough and they had to lay people off from the Wolverine and Spider-Man 3 teams:
A more recent presentation in November points to potentially more drastic cuts. “Slimming down Ratchet and cutting new IP will not account for the reductions Sony is looking for,” reads a PowerPoint note attributed to Insomniac head Ted Price. “To remove 50-75 people strategically, our best option is to cut deeply into Wolverine and Spider-Man 3, replacing lower performers with team members from Ratchet and new IP.”
This is exactly what I've been talking about for a while. People who naively think budgets could just go from $150 mill to $300 mill to $450 mill ... no problems don't have any business sense at all. $300 million it seems like is an emergency budget point even for Sony.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 02 March 2024
