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Forums - Sony - Sony Investing $20 million in PSN exclusives!

Zlejedi on 15 July 2011
HappySqurriel said:
Zlejedi said:
HappySqurriel said:
In game development, that really isn't that much money ...

Even very low budget games, like those that target smart-phones, can cost an established company that does "unusual" things like pays their employees, provides benefits, and has office space $500,000+ to develop; and, depending on how this money is used, $20 Million could disappear quite quickly with little to show for it.

If that 20milions result in 20-40 PSN games it's still huge amount.


Only if they're good games ...

In my opinion, the risk of a strategy like this is that the studios that would be the most successful on the platform would probably take advantage of a program like this to produce a more ambitious product and turn a profit at the expense of Sony. If I'm the studio that built Angry Birds I would be looking to get Sony to fund the expansion of my studio by getting as much money from them as possible; and if enough studios took this approach Sony's $20 would translate to a handful of titles. In contrast there, are a lot of tiny unknown studios with questionable talent who would take any amount of money in exchange for an exclusive game and if Sony approached a lot of these studios they would end up with a lot of low quality games.

The strategy isn't (necessarily) bad, but with how little money it is you can only really see it as a jump start to try to make the Playstation network more interesting; and it isn't enough money to make it viable without significant interest from small third party publishers who want access to the platform.

And you think noone will be checking how those money are spent? Or looking at game concepts and prototypes before money are spent?



PROUD MEMBER OF THE PSP RPG FAN CLUB

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HappySqurriel on 15 July 2011
Zlejedi said:
HappySqurriel said:
Zlejedi said:
HappySqurriel said:
In game development, that really isn't that much money ...

Even very low budget games, like those that target smart-phones, can cost an established company that does "unusual" things like pays their employees, provides benefits, and has office space $500,000+ to develop; and, depending on how this money is used, $20 Million could disappear quite quickly with little to show for it.

If that 20milions result in 20-40 PSN games it's still huge amount.


Only if they're good games ...

In my opinion, the risk of a strategy like this is that the studios that would be the most successful on the platform would probably take advantage of a program like this to produce a more ambitious product and turn a profit at the expense of Sony. If I'm the studio that built Angry Birds I would be looking to get Sony to fund the expansion of my studio by getting as much money from them as possible; and if enough studios took this approach Sony's $20 would translate to a handful of titles. In contrast there, are a lot of tiny unknown studios with questionable talent who would take any amount of money in exchange for an exclusive game and if Sony approached a lot of these studios they would end up with a lot of low quality games.

The strategy isn't (necessarily) bad, but with how little money it is you can only really see it as a jump start to try to make the Playstation network more interesting; and it isn't enough money to make it viable without significant interest from small third party publishers who want access to the platform.

And you think noone will be checking how those money are spent? Or looking at game concepts and prototypes before money are spent?


In the way you're thinking, the deal would be fairly opaque from Sony's perspective ...

It is likely that there would be a statement of work signed by the two companies that describes what will be delivered, and this might include some milestones to demonstrate progress of the project, but Sony would have little information about how much actual work was being done for the project. Even if Sony wanted greater transparancy and forced the developer into a time and materials contract all they would get is an invoiced statement of the time spent on the project with very limited details on how that time was spent; and any decent management team would offload their technology upgrades that were in any way related to this project to Sony.

 



Zlejedi on 17 July 2011
HappySqurriel said:
Zlejedi said:
HappySqurriel said:
Zlejedi said:
HappySqurriel said:
In game development, that really isn't that much money ...

Even very low budget games, like those that target smart-phones, can cost an established company that does "unusual" things like pays their employees, provides benefits, and has office space $500,000+ to develop; and, depending on how this money is used, $20 Million could disappear quite quickly with little to show for it.

If that 20milions result in 20-40 PSN games it's still huge amount.


Only if they're good games ...

In my opinion, the risk of a strategy like this is that the studios that would be the most successful on the platform would probably take advantage of a program like this to produce a more ambitious product and turn a profit at the expense of Sony. If I'm the studio that built Angry Birds I would be looking to get Sony to fund the expansion of my studio by getting as much money from them as possible; and if enough studios took this approach Sony's $20 would translate to a handful of titles. In contrast there, are a lot of tiny unknown studios with questionable talent who would take any amount of money in exchange for an exclusive game and if Sony approached a lot of these studios they would end up with a lot of low quality games.

The strategy isn't (necessarily) bad, but with how little money it is you can only really see it as a jump start to try to make the Playstation network more interesting; and it isn't enough money to make it viable without significant interest from small third party publishers who want access to the platform.

And you think noone will be checking how those money are spent? Or looking at game concepts and prototypes before money are spent?


In the way you're thinking, the deal would be fairly opaque from Sony's perspective ...

It is likely that there would be a statement of work signed by the two companies that describes what will be delivered, and this might include some milestones to demonstrate progress of the project, but Sony would have little information about how much actual work was being done for the project. Even if Sony wanted greater transparancy and forced the developer into a time and materials contract all they would get is an invoiced statement of the time spent on the project with very limited details on how that time was spent; and any decent management team would offload their technology upgrades that were in any way related to this project to Sony.

You realise that Sony is in position of power in this deal and they can demand almost everything if they are funding project in 100% ?



PROUD MEMBER OF THE PSP RPG FAN CLUB

HappySqurriel on 17 July 2011
Zlejedi said:
HappySqurriel said:
Zlejedi said:
HappySqurriel said:
Zlejedi said:
HappySqurriel said:
In game development, that really isn't that much money ...

Even very low budget games, like those that target smart-phones, can cost an established company that does "unusual" things like pays their employees, provides benefits, and has office space $500,000+ to develop; and, depending on how this money is used, $20 Million could disappear quite quickly with little to show for it.

If that 20milions result in 20-40 PSN games it's still huge amount.


Only if they're good games ...

In my opinion, the risk of a strategy like this is that the studios that would be the most successful on the platform would probably take advantage of a program like this to produce a more ambitious product and turn a profit at the expense of Sony. If I'm the studio that built Angry Birds I would be looking to get Sony to fund the expansion of my studio by getting as much money from them as possible; and if enough studios took this approach Sony's $20 would translate to a handful of titles. In contrast there, are a lot of tiny unknown studios with questionable talent who would take any amount of money in exchange for an exclusive game and if Sony approached a lot of these studios they would end up with a lot of low quality games.

The strategy isn't (necessarily) bad, but with how little money it is you can only really see it as a jump start to try to make the Playstation network more interesting; and it isn't enough money to make it viable without significant interest from small third party publishers who want access to the platform.

And you think noone will be checking how those money are spent? Or looking at game concepts and prototypes before money are spent?


In the way you're thinking, the deal would be fairly opaque from Sony's perspective ...

It is likely that there would be a statement of work signed by the two companies that describes what will be delivered, and this might include some milestones to demonstrate progress of the project, but Sony would have little information about how much actual work was being done for the project. Even if Sony wanted greater transparancy and forced the developer into a time and materials contract all they would get is an invoiced statement of the time spent on the project with very limited details on how that time was spent; and any decent management team would offload their technology upgrades that were in any way related to this project to Sony.

You realise that Sony is in position of power in this deal and they can demand almost everything if they are funding project in 100% ?


I've been in a similar situation many times across multiple companies producing software for different industries and not once have I ever had a company micro-manage a project the way Sony would have to in order to prevent behaviour like this; in fact, as a general rule the larger the company (oil companies, telecommunications companies, etc.) the less they seem to care about these "small" amounts of money as long as the project is delivered as it was described in the contract.