Game Development

The case board, inspired by HBO show True Detective, originally featured free placement of clues and gated progress until players found a specific answer, but this led to high player frustration. Remedy shifted to a board that featured more questions with easier answers, leading to more dopamine hits with players, and finally scrapped free clue pla... See more

Sony earns a cut of the sales of third-party games on PlayStation, which of course it gets to keep with first-party games – meaning that its own games can justify very large budgets more easily, as they generate more revenue per unit sold. A further justification for taking this kind of risk on high development costs is that the games themselves se... See more

Horizon: Forbidden West has sold about 8.4 million copies, and The Last of Us Part 2 has shifted over 10 million. For Sony, both of these games are profitable – but “for Sony” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. For any other publisher, turning a profit from these games would have been a lot harder, because the economics of being a platform ho... See more

If there's a middle way, a way for premium games to somehow find a paying audience on devices such as phones and tablets, then the Game Pass style subscription to a game library is probably the best bet.

so long as Larian is generating enough revenue to make payroll, Vincke can operate the business in whatever fashion he chooses. The downside, of course, is that a single flop could completely tank Larian — hence the three years of early access.

if nothing else, video game development is a series of concessions and tough decisions. There's that perfect game you WANT to make... and then there's the game you CAN make. Sometimes, if the gods smile on you, those two are very close.

The economics of a platform holder building games for its own hardware are just different, and the end result is that Sony is one of a very small number of companies that can afford to spend these kinds of budgets on development while still sticking to a relatively old-fashioned pay-to-play business model. Neither game features any kind of battle p... See more