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Jeff Ross - Days Gone has sold over 9 million units on PS4 and PC

bitbydeath

Member
I don’t think we’re getting the full story here.
Sony have been supportive of Days Gone.

A)
They call it a powerhouse IP.

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B)
They gave it new life on PC.

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C)
They labeled it as a game that defined last gen.
 

yurinka

Member
Gamestat also doesn't take into consideration every time someone borrowed Days Gone, secondary market or the number of different accounts per console that played it. There's way too many variables and Gamestat wasn't that reliable. He knows as much as we do with or without PSNow and plus numbers.
He mentioned it, Gamestat had a +/-10% error margin because of what you mention: secondary account, 2n market etc. Multiple devs verified that gamstat numbers were right within that error margin (often less) and that it was very accurate.

I don’t think we’re getting the full story here.
Sony have been supportive of Days Gone.
With this and the previous interviews we know the full story:

Sony also gave them budget to fix stuff after launch, add some extra post launch content and to port it to PC as one of their first games. Included it as PS Collection of 'games that defined the generation'. If Sony wasn't ok with the project wouldn't have supported it after launch as they did. And probably wouldn't have greenlighted their pitch.

Both Jeff and John said Sony always were supportive with them (I think in the John or Jeff interview they mentioned that this also happened with the DG1 reviews), gave them full creative freedom and allow them to do 'whatever I fucking wanted' and had good words for the Sony guys who worked with them during that DG/DG2 process and before (and mentioned some of them Scott Rohde, Shawn Layden, Shuhei Yoshida...) or with Naughty Dog or Guerrilla.

They said that the guy who gave them bad feedback about DG1 reviews and early sales and later blocked the DG2 pitch wasn't Sony: it was the boss of Bend Studio (studio manager / local Bend Studio studio management). Later they pitched the new IP, the Bend Studio boss allowed to send it to Sony and it got approved.
 
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It’s a solid game, but there
John Garvin was fired after it shipped.

Jeff Ross quit, most likely due to his obvious anger with Hermen Hulst and Sony producers.
It’s clear Sony wanted to cut ties for likely political reasons. I think there will be a sequel under different directors. Bend is still supporting the first game pretty well, so I think the ip has a future. These guys may have been led to believe differently, as things went sour. I don’t have anything negative to say about them or the game, but I wasn’t there and don’t know the inside story. Hopefully they weren’t screwed over by Sony or difficult to work with for that matter.
 

isoRhythm

Banned
It’s clear Sony wanted to cut ties for likely political reasons.
It's clear you didn't watch the Jaffe stream or read anything in this thread

"Bend is still supporting the first game pretty well"

Bend management are the ones who canceled DG2, Sony is the one bringing it to the PS+ collection & porting it to PC.
 
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ToTTenTranz

Banned
Jeff Ross basically said his sales figures come from gamstat. That's a website that uses data from trophies...meaning the 8M counts psnow and PSPlus users that played the game and had nothing to do with sales. PC numbers are from steamspy. He had no access to insider data on this :messenger_tears_of_joy:
8 million by the time he left. Jeff left early December 2020. At that time, Days Gone had been in Plus Collection for two weeks only for PS5 owners, together with 19 other heavy hitters like God of War, Uncharted 4 and Resident Evil 7. The PC version wasn't out yet either.

I doubt most release-week PS5 owners went on to play only Days Gone considering they only had 2 weeks, were probably playing PS5 games like Mile Morales and Demon's Souls and had more popular games to try on the Plus Collection.


The whole thing with local managment just sounds so messy. The cynical me thinks managment wanted to kill Days Gone because it's cemented them as a bottom tier dev in WWS, and used the sales number as an excuse to Jeff and John

Local management just thought the setting was too close to TLoU, and they were chickened out by the early reviews.
 

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
Don't hold your breath

Well obviously not, you need a lot of staff and resources to make a big game like any sequel to Days Gone would be expected to be.

This all feeds into the point about if you want to see a sequel, waiting on it to hit the sales isn't helpful.

The basic economics are that if you have a studio full of salaried employees and contractors, then you payroll spend is going to be consistent irrespective of whether they are working on a project or not. If half the staff have nothing to do, then you need to find them something productive to work towards as soon as possible.

This isn't a simple thing because what you're dealing with is not a homogenous group of people with generalized skillsets. Most of the staff are going to specialise in a single discipline with their value being dependent on their position within the organizational hierarchy. You can have the best creatives in the world but unless they know what they are doing they can't contribute meaningfully.

Losing talent is never a good thing, but that's what happens when big teams are stuck with nothing to do. Its not just the big-bad suits letting people go to save money, its individuals realizing that career damaging gaps are forming on their resumes, or worrying about their job security and deciding to jump to greener pastures.

Either way, the end result is when the next real project comes around the studio isn't ready. Too many gaps in important positions0, too much retraining/reorientation/team-building left to do... And if the studio isn't ready why would you greenlight them on a major deal?

Long story short, if a project is seen in the short term as a failure, regardless of its performance in the long-run the damage has already been done. The train has become derailed and its hard to pull it back on its original tracks.
 

Lunarorbit

Member
Days gone came out April 26th 2019. I remember the reviews coming out and reviewers were super unimpressed with the glitches and other technical hic ups that were present and warned the public.

I started playing on a base PS4 may 10 2019 and got the plat 13 days later. I never had game breaking bugs or problems with the horde loading on the screen. In the 2 weeks since it came out and I played it first a bunch of patches must have come out. Its like I was playing another game than the ones reviewers had.

This wasn't a no mans sky or cyberpunk type of situation. People just didn't try this game out when it first released cause it was broken before it got patched pre release. Glad I got to play it when it was fully updated.

PS Colin is having Ross and Gavin on sacred symbols maybe next week? He teases it in Friday's episode
 

assurdum

Banned
A lot has changed in the corporate culture of the entertainment industry since this game was originally green-lit. We all know why a sequel isn’t happening and it certainly isn’t because of a metacritic score.
I downloaded it heavily discounted (or free I don't even remind)not so much time ago, if I'm not wrong in 2021; it was plagued of many bugs and glitches, loading times were incredibly long and gameplay was absolutely the mediocrity personificate. Not to saying I haven't fun with it, but it's not a problem of a corporate culture, game is neither even good enough to deserve a sequel and this Jeff Ross seems have drunk or something like that every time try to to talk about it.
 
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Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
I downloaded it heavily discounted (or free I don't even remind)not so much time ago, if I'm not wrong in 2021; it was plagued of many bugs and glitches, loading times were incredibly long and gameplay was absolutely the mediocrity personificate. Not to saying I haven't fun with it, but it's not a problem of a corporate culture, game is neither even good enough to deserve a sequel and this Jeff Ross seems have drunk or something like that every time try to to talk about it.

That you personally didn't like the game is less important than the undisputable fact that many of us did, and would be very happy to hear a sequel announced.

I really do not get why people who didn't like the game feel compelled to chime in. If there wasn't a demand for a sequel then this conversation wouldn't be happening.
 

rofif

Banned
Days gone came out April 26th 2019. I remember the reviews coming out and reviewers were super unimpressed with the glitches and other technical hic ups that were present and warned the public.

I started playing on a base PS4 may 10 2019 and got the plat 13 days later. I never had game breaking bugs or problems with the horde loading on the screen. In the 2 weeks since it came out and I played it first a bunch of patches must have come out. Its like I was playing another game than the ones reviewers had.

This wasn't a no mans sky or cyberpunk type of situation. People just didn't try this game out when it first released cause it was broken before it got patched pre release. Glad I got to play it when it was fully updated.

PS Colin is having Ross and Gavin on sacred symbols maybe next week? He teases it in Friday's episode
I had a lot of bugs and slowdowns year after release.
I try listen to sacred symbols and I can’t. I kinda hate the super long ads which take half of my bike commute and they just feel smug af
 
That you personally didn't like the game is less important than the undisputable fact that many of us did, and would be very happy to hear a sequel announced.

I really do not get why people who didn't like the game feel compelled to chime in. If there wasn't a demand for a sequel then this conversation wouldn't be happening.

Yes it would. People start online petitions over anything. There’s an online petition to bring back spicy nuggets.

The overall point is that everyone at Sony Bend has moved on and you should too majority of the gaming population are jut tired of hearing about this shitty game
 
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