Capcom? Konami? Sega? Nah, let's buy this 1 old ass game. Hope Bungie has something in the works that is 3.6B
Their next game is called 'Matter' and is purportedly more akin to Overwatch than Destiny. 2025ish is the current estimate.
Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal
191–200 of 263 posts
Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal
#192I still remember when Bungie was one of the only companies that made games for Macs. The Marathon trilogy was a memorable part of my childhood. Then Microsoft bought them for Halo, and spun them back out (sans Halo). Halo was first demoed by Steve Jobs - it was going to be a Mac game.
Marathon felt like such a huge deal at the time, with its funky triangular prism box, its hyperliterate storyline, and its novel network multiplayer modes. And yet it seems to get little to no airtime in video game nostalgia mythology.
Maybe it was just too niche as a Mac game.
Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you allocate all those hours to one gamer, there's no contest. Check out the dev costs of games here [1] to the "net negative" (no marketing) costs for movies here [2] -- 4 games break $100M while you need $200M as a movie to get on the list. So, twice as much for 2h of content! But if you factor in audience size, things get more complicated. Red Dead 2 sold about 38M copies, a near record, but Avengers Endgame re…
Isn't a huge part of that money going to the actors, not into more typical actual labor? Games take a lot longer to produce than films (in total, per hour of content that may not be true).
Not that huge, really. A-list actors will get 10-20m tops, add all the others and you're probably looking at around 30m-40m over a budget of 300m-500m.
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.
Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not looking like Destiny 3 is ever going to happen. There was even an interview from March of last year where a director said that they think Destiny 3 would be a mistake. And on top of that, they've laid out Destiny 2's roadmap until roughly 2024, and say that that's not the end then either. We'll see!
>There was even an interview from March of last year where a director said that they think Destiny 3 would be a mistake Destiny, especially Destiny 2 was really mismanaged by the directors though. They do have another IP, Matter in the works though.
I started playing in late 2019, but I'm up to almost 2500 hours. Can't speak to before that, but it's only been getting better and better as I've played, imho.
Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In comparison: Sony paid 20x less for Bungie. What they lack in variety of products, they make up for in, in my view, Potential. Destiny is a great franchise, with lots of fans. The team brings rock solid FPS dev & netcode experience (something Sony's first party studios are at a deficit for). I disagree. Destiny may have once had potential, but Bungie is a studio that continually shoots itself in the foot. Just li…
To actually finish all the content in each D2 expansion you have to invest full time job kind of time in it. Destiny doesn't just feel like a job, in some sense it IS a job. I thought they did a good job rehabilitating the first game from the sorry shape it shipped in (see: the economics of the loot cave). It is a mountain which can be climbed, and it is fun to do so. (There is also a literal mountain to climb)
I grabbed Destiny 2 and some expansions a while back on a humble bundle. I had a blast, it was fun and could play with friends. Then end game seemed to not have much going for it. And it was confusing on what you could and couldn’t access. Came back to it after a break and with more expansions out it just seemed even more confusing on what I could and couldn’t access. It’s sort of the WOW problem, the game is just overwhelming. There is so much content and no clear way on what you can or can’t access. The various currencies alone are confusing.
Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bungie hasn't owned Halo since they were spun off from Microsoft in 2007. Current Bungie is Destiny 2.
Yuck, zero interest in that :) I wish Sony could make a decent FPS with a great story. Something like Mass Effect or Halo. Killzone was okay I suppose, but the story was lackluster and the combat involved far too much hiding behind boxes.
Destiny is the spiritual successor to Halo. Maybe try giving it a shot!
Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would really like to see that comparison, i.e. the ‘human hours’ required, for a AAA game by a largish developer vs. the average Marvel film. I may try to do some rough numbers later because that just seems like an interesting thing to know. 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 f…
Do you count the hours to design and produce the computer hardware used to render the CGI for a film? Do you count the years and cost of raising a child from birth to being a member of the crew? 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.
It really depends on the production - some of them, particularly animated ones, had to develop their whole pipelines from scratch as part of their early productions. You can bet that time was accounted for as part of production costs. Same for pioneer productions like The Mandalorian (iirc costing $3m per episode, a large chunk of which went into developing experimental 3d soundstages).
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.
Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In comparison: Sony paid 20x less for Bungie. What they lack in variety of products, they make up for in, in my view, Potential. Destiny is a great franchise, with lots of fans. The team brings rock solid FPS dev & netcode experience (something Sony's first party studios are at a deficit for). I disagree. Destiny may have once had potential, but Bungie is a studio that continually shoots itself in the foot. Just li…
Generally agree, but on the other hand, the game feels a LOT better since since the Activision divestment. In the last 12 months narrative team of Destiny 2 have REALLY knocked it out of the park, with the seasonal plot actually making sense and having some interesting activities (like Battlegrounds). Some significant improvements in QoL too. While there definitely gaps as you say - the New Light experience in partic…
I agree that the seasonal storytelling is better but they have a very real problem with the game becoming Bounty Collector. They also have basically abandoned Crucible, which makes me think the new IP is where all their top PvP talent is currently.
Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal
#199I know Microsoft originally kept a minority stake in Bungie after letting it spin-off. I wonder if they kept the investment and how much.
Re: Sony to buy video game maker Bungie in $3.6B deal
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear that metric a lot - dollars per entertainment-hour. It's an interesting metric - but it's also important to remember the 1.5 hour Marvel film almost certainly took more human hours in the input side than virtually any video game. At least, my 10k hours in StarCraft took far far far fewer human hours to produce than my 1.5 hours watching the Avengers. Sort of a "labor theory of value" for entertainment pricing,…
If you allocate all those hours to one gamer, there's no contest. Check out the dev costs of games here [1] to the "net negative" (no marketing) costs for movies here [2] -- 4 games break $100M while you need $200M as a movie to get on the list. So, twice as much for 2h of content! But if you factor in audience size, things get more complicated. Red Dead 2 sold about 38M copies, a near record, but Avengers Endgame re…
I think the OP's argument is that you also have to factor in hours played, and that, per player-hour, respectively movie-watcher-hour, the game is a lot cheaper.
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.