I think sony will play the right level of support for Bungie.

I also got a shot of what it looked like to develop a game. There are long windows where you have a lot of folks on staff with not much revenue. And developing a new IP means you have a lot more staff that has no revenue. This is hard for single IP studios, and thus the layoffs on a cycle. For 2 IP studios this can be harder as you want to go as big on the 2nd IP as you do the first, so you may have even more.

Being a part of a massive publisher helps out a ton. There are other games coming out and creating income, this levels out the 3-5 year development cycle between IP. It also takes the stress off of the founders a bit. You're not forcasting out runway for 4 years of minimal revenue and hoping you don't have to take on cash at the end and give up ownership.

My personal opinion: Sony wanted to acquire both the Destiny brand and the team that built that brand—especially the innovative networking engineers. I hope that Bungie gets another shot at a new brand, maybe something that isn't a shooter.

Sort of a "labor theory of value" for entertainment pricing, I guess.

This is simply wrong.

Marvel movies (and indeed, most studio releases) are generally produced and released within a year or two. Only the biggest blockbusters have crews in the hundreds, and it is rare for a movie to have a crew in the thousands. For example, Endgame is one of the most expensive movies ever made...and production and post-production (i.e., VFX) took less than 2 years. Dune (2021) was filmed and post-produced in under 2 years. Tenet, Nolan's most technically complex film, was actually filmed and post-produced in just over 1 year. (But contrast to Avatar 2 and 3, which have been in production for over 4 years and counting.)

On the other hand, almost every AAA game of the last decade has spent years in development with a crew of hundreds for almost the entire time. For example, Red Dead 2 was in development for 7 years. Starcraft 2 was in development for over 5 years. Destiny was in development for 4 years.

Note that the above timeline does not include pre-production work (like writing the screenplay, casting, hiring crew, raising funds) because in the movie industry pre-production work proceeds very slowly (for example: Avatar 2 was in pre-production for 7 years; Gemini Man for over 20 years), but the actual production and post-production (i.e., the actual making of the movie, editing, FX) happens at a lightning pace. In the game industry, the creative parts happen in tandem with the development of the game itself.

Also note that while movies can have large crews, the different teams aren't all working at the same time; for example, film crews and other production crews rarely interact with the VFX or other post-production crew.

But if you factor in audience size, things get more complicated. Red Dead 2 sold about 38M copies, a near record, but Avengers Endgame reached something like 250-300M people at the box office, even before streaming etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films

300M movie watchers is about half a billion hours. If those 38M games all had only one player (probably fairly close) they only have to play the game for 15 hours on average to get at half a billion player hours.

https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=27100 claims it takes at least 49 hours to beat it, so it’s likely that the game was played for more hours than the movie was watched.

There's a percentage of players of course that will play a game for many hundreds or thousands of hours but the calculation is shakier when you take the falloff of players into account/

https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/17/gdc-most-players-don...

Games take a lot longer to produce than films (in total, per hour of content that may not be true).

The largest expenses are related to FX costs and marketing. That's why the cost of low-effects movies falls very rapidly under 100m, you can film a run-of-the-mill romcom for less than 10m.

Also, how far down the stack do you go for each. Both rely on tools to make the production happen. Do you count hours to make the digital editing software and fx programs for films? Do you count the human hours to make Unreal4?

I doubt they count hours towards tools etc developed as they probably paid money for those. So, different bucket I guess, and still important for the overall cost.

For the more common endeavours, then no, of course - they just use what is there, or more likely outsource it to specialised providers in the same way as they would outsource e.g. building a website.

I'm not sure what you mean.

A big Marvel movie costs around $300m-$500m to produce, these days. AAA videogames can go over $300m-$400m I believe. It's basically the same ballpark, as far as input costs go. However, a film results in 2h of output enjoyment for a consumer, whereas games get several multiples of that.

It's a giant wall of text for 30 minutes.

Dollars per entertainment hour is just a way to try to convince gamers that it is reasonable to spend more on games, but perhaps the better argument to make is that we need to pay these companies more or they will go out of business or move to scummy pay to win business models.

It's apples to oranges anyway, even when comparing games to games.

And most importantly - isn't there the LEAST growth in the hardcore gaming segment?

https://gamerant.com/pokemon-legends-arceus-sales-records/

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_publisher#Major_pub...

I thought the budget for AAA games was higher, and I thought the budget for Pokemon (handheld games) would be lower.

But turns out Pokemon Sword and Shield cost >$20M to make, and AAA is low 10s of millions. Definitely AAA by every measure.

Pokémon does however have an AAA level marketing budget even if it doesn't have AAA level development budget.

Microsoft, Activision, Sony they were never truly independent no studio these days can afford too.

Game development is a mess and a very expensive mess at that, you need a sugar daddy if you would to survive.

Bungie didn't like how Microsoft managed them. Bungie wanted to do something other than Halo, but Microsoft wanted more Halo.

A Destiny reference can be seen in ODST: https://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2014/01/09/h...

With Halo, the single-player and lore began to tail off to focus on the multi-player market, and their other settings and styles of games were all discarded in favour of an FPS treadmill.

Maybe they should? The world would look quite different if companies were forced to innovate and compete rather than merge and acquire.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that some analysts estimate Microsoft paid between $20 million and $40 million for Bungie in total.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2000/06/20/microsoft-acquires-b...

I thought companies like Bungie, Bioware, etc. sold out.

i.e. it's easy to survive if you make blockbuster titles like Halo or Mass Effect, but then a big corp comes by and offers mega bucks to buy you and so you sell out. The solution if you don't want to be "under the thumb of [a] corporate overlord" is to not sell out in the first place.