| Barozi said: Never heard of it and honestly not at all surprised that it flopped and causes massive financial losses that have to be compensated somehow. |
Yeah, something has to give somewhere. Quantic Dream has like 460 developers, and as far as we know, Star Wars Eclipse and Spellcasters Chronicles were the only games they have been working on since Detroit: Become Human in 2018, 8 years of development on both so far. We're looking at a massive budget on both games for what they are. They were expanding throughout the 8 year period since Detroit, so the budget doesn't include the salaries of the entire 115 on Spellcaster and the entire ~345 on Star Wars Eclipse for the entire 8 years so far, they had 200 staff according to a recruitment press release in 2022, so they've more than doubled in size since 2022 when NetEase bought them, but even factoring in that they were paying half that number of salaries for the first 4 years of development on both games, we are looking at a rather large budget on both games.
Quantic Dream gave full refunds to anyone who bought Spellcasters or microtransactions for it, so it basically didn't make back any of it's budget. They were developing it knowing full well it was a risk, using the money from Detroit's insanely strong legs (12m+ of it's 15m+ sales since release have been since the first year on sale). They could have put that extra money from Detroit's strong legs into savings, but instead they decided to take a risky multiplayer gamble.
As it stands now, Detroit's legs have made enough to compensate for Spellcasters' budget. However, if they move those 115 devs from the Spellcasters team to Star Wars Eclipse for it's final 2 or 3 years of development, like this picketing union wants, Star Wars Eclipse's budget becomes that much higher. At that point we're looking at all of Quantic Dream's hopes and dreams resting on the success or failure of Star Wars Eclipse, if the budget goes that much higher and it flops, Quantic Dream will likely be closed or sold by NetEase, and they won't have that nice saving account of Detroit's legs to use to buy back their own independence from NetEase if that happens, since they spent most of it developing Spellcasters and Star Wars Eclipse.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 28 June 2026
