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[Eddie-Griffin]

Saints Row and Forspoken may have overspend just a little.

 

[El Pistolero]

 

[StereoVsn]

Add at least another $50mil if not $100mil for marketing. Yeah....not a good investment.

 

[MOTM]

Who was the target audience for this game?

This is the golden question.

 

[Aaron Olive]

For those that keep defending this garbage, little do they know that the game insults the player with absurdity in the opening 20 minutes.

Making you save her cat first instead of grabbing a duffle bag of money at your feet then taking the cat.



Only to then later give her cat away because the writers thought it was brilliant to not grab the money in the first place, WHAT?!


Now hypothetically if the same scenario happened to you in the real world what happens next?

 

[Mr Reasonable]

Not sure how that thing cost $100 million to make. Over bloated and bad financial management is my guess.

How much do you think it should have cost?

 

[blastprocessor]

Maybe they blew $90m advertising it.

 

[SteelCurtain 59]

Thankful they sold off all their good IP and studios. If this is the type of game they want to put all their money in I'd rather not have to care about Square Enix at all

 

[TheThreadsThatBindUs]

I call BS on this. No way the game cost $100m to make.

 

[Heimdall_Xtreme]

 

[Gamerguy84]

They need to break down the cost more. Does this include marketing? Some games get up to 100 million for marketing. Fordpoken was marketed pretty.heavy so I could see them spending 50 mil..

 

[DaGwaphics]

For those that keep defending this garbage, little do they know that the game insults the player with absurdity at the very beginning.

Making you save a cat instead of grabbing a duffle bag of money at your feet



Only to then later give the cat away because you didn't save your money in the first place.

Well, at least I give the character props for saving the life of her cat.

May all the neighborhood strays hunt you down for that insinuation about taking the money.

 

[abacab driver]

Saints Row and Forspoken may have overspend just a little.

I'm still wondering how Callisto Protocol was 160 mil.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Looks like Square is richer than we all think.

Forspoken, Balan, Babylons Fall, all these small budget card and strategy games. Likely all money losers. But they are still trucking along. lol

 

[ShadowLag]

In a world where indie devs can make comparable vertical slices almost for free at home, it continues to baffle me why companies endlessly inflate their development budgets. It doesn't buy them quality.

 

[D23]

I haven't played it and I have almost zero desire to do so. Even if it was on gamepass I'd think twice about compromising disk space for it.

They messed up and I'm sorry they wasted so much money in such a thing. I have 0 problem with the character being a woman or the dialogs she seems to have. It's just not an enticing game from any perspective. Every time I have seen a video or gif of the game instead of wanting to play it I just get an Infamous itch. That's it.

This is coming from a huge of single player story oriented games. This should be my jam. For some reason it is not.

Idk man. If u love single player story i think ull like this. Get it when its on deep sale or something but theres really good game in it

 

[StreetsofBeige]

In a world where indie devs can make comparable vertical slices almost for free at home, it continues to baffle me why companies endlessly inflate their development budgets. It doesn't buy them quality.

Agreed.

On a similar note, It's amazing when basement programmers can do good mods in games better than the studio itself. Most of them probably do it after dinner or on weekends after their day job with zero budget but their own time, yet can churn out quality content studios with highly paid people and tools cant

 

[Trogdor1123]

So they need to sell like 2 million copies to break even?

I feel like my math is off..,

 

[In Cold Blood]

Square are their own worst enemy.
Whoever is running that company should be sacked.
First they sell off Edios and CD for peanuts, they then sign exclusive contracts with Sony and can't seem to understand why their games arnt getting the exposure they want them to have.
It's no wonder Sony haven't bought them out yet. They would be stuck with the pipeline of poor decisions for the next 5 years.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

So they need to sell like 2 million copies to break even?

I feel like my math is off..,

2M copies at $70 = $140M. But after a store takes their cut, that leaves about $50 for Square. 2M x $50 = $100M.

 

[Aaron Olive]

Well, at least I give the character props for saving the life of her cat.

May all the neighborhood strays hunt you down for that insinuation about taking the money.

This is insanely insulting, both could’ve been accomplished. The writing is so fucking stupid it’s comical.

 

[Rival]

They were so caught up in the fact that they could make this shit game that they didn’t stop to think if they should make this shit game.

 

[A.Romero]

Idk man. If u love single player story i think ull like this. Get it when its on deep sale or something but theres really good game in it

Dammit. Now I'm curious.

Thanks for the recommendation.

 

[lyan]

While I wouldn't be surprised if the actual figure is close, the article just cites the writer's LinkedIn account who I highly doubt would have access to such data.

 

[Dr. Suchong]

Shame that nobody thought of 100 million reasons not to waste valuable time and resources on this middling pile of pish.

 

[nbkicker]

Hmmm i wonder how much rocksteady will have spent by time suicide squad game comes out

 

[Bitmap Frogs]

25 minutes a negative Forspoken article has been on the front page and rofif hasn't yet come galloping in to tell us how the game is the greatest thing since sliced bread and totally worth the 100M budget? I'm shocked!

Come on, we all have liked games that the mainstream hated at some point.

 

[Bitmap Frogs]

In a vacuum the release games areas look fine, but compared to that clearly bullshot trailer, yeah ....

Proving once again that the more you bullshot, the bigger the fall. I don’t understand why the industry keeps using these vertical slices that are just cgi movies, not actual gameplay.

Remember Anthem?

 

[Esppiral]

100 million, 90 of which being wasted in marketing like almost every single "major" release, and 0 to dub the game to the second most spoken language in the world.....

 

[Von Hugh]

Would of thought it costed more then that

 

[b0uncyfr0]

Go woke, go broke. Seems appropriate.

Forwoken... has that already been done..?

 

[mxbison]

All the hate for character, story, dialogue etc. aside, how does that game cost 100 million? Looks like an utter management/producer/director fail.

 

[mxbison]

Go woke, go broke. Seems appropriate.

Forwoken... has that already been done..?

What exactly is woke about it?

It's simply bad.

 

[Ozriel]

Where did all the money go? GOW, HFW, or Callisto Protocol have very high production values and that shows. Forspoken looks like a turd.

a huge chunk of the budget for game development goes into developer salaries. This tied down an entire AAA studio for 4+ years.

They’d also pay the actress for her likeness and voice acting.

Probably similar budget to Callisto that was made in around 3 years, since salaries are higher in the US.

 

[Ozriel]

Both teams are not the same size. And they did a ton of patches to FFXV, so it did not start immediately in 2016

Only a fraction of the dev team would work on post launch patch support for a non GAAS game.

Agreed, entire team doesn’t

But unlike GoW2018, a much larger portion of the team was

Iirc, ffxv had new cutscenes and stuff added in these patches

I doubt forespoen really started dev until 2018 in earnest

Yes, initial draft of the story was done in 2018 and full development started then.

I will say, though, that salaries would still be paid and charged against that game even in the pre-planning and early development stages.

 

[pepodmc_]

they sold tomb raider & hitman to fund this garbage.

Square Enix is quite possibly the most retarded company in gaming right now

square soft had to fuse with enix because of a failed ff movie NOBODY WANTED so, square being retarded is nothing new XD

 

[GymWolf]

Of all the people on here calling Forspoken a dumpster fire, what percentage of those players actually played it?

I remember only one dude actually playing the game that bailed out after 20-30 hours.

The others enjoyed the game to various degree.

 

[sleipnir]

I love open world games and am often happy to buy just to explore and muck about in them, even if the game doesn't grab me that much, but half an hour with the demo was more than enough. It certainly didn't feel like a $100 mill AAA game to me... now, if it had looked like the bull shots

I feel a bit sorry for the actress, as she seems like a really nice person. It must be disappointing for her seeing all the negativity, so I hope they paid her well.

 

[NiiloPielinen]

We’ve been conditoned to expect that very few, if any games will look as good as they look in trailers and presentations. Lying and downgrades are just apart of this industry

I mean, it is easy to make something look good when you don't have rest of the gameplay implemented, just an engine running and showing the world.

 

[Madserb2023]

That is insane. Why would you spend so much on a new project, not knowing whether people would even like it or not. Normally you would ramp up for the sequel. They look to have gone from 0 to 100mph.

 

[Green_Eyes]

If there's anything I've learnt...it's that they won't learn their lesson; because for some reason, they are so hellbent on this new age, diverse, self-infatuated, empowered young people bullshit...that they're totally okay losing money.

 

[Shubh_C63]

Its nice to know when everyone thought this things will be bad before the talky trailers, and the thing was just as bad. What Zen.

 

[Tomi]

That is insane. Why would you spend so much on a new project, not knowing whether people would even like it or not. Normally you would ramp up for the sequel. They look to have gone from 0 to 100mph.

We talk about square enix here
Do you remember babylons fail?

 

[Kvally]

I remember only one dude actually playing the game that bailed out after 20-30 hours.

The others enjoyed the game to various degree.

I am playing it now. So far I am liking it.

 

[Amish Prince]

Is not that "so much" at least... maybe a bit too much for Square but...yeah.... i'm excpected a bit more. Pretty sure FFXV costing more than this.

FFXV also sold more than 10m copies. Forespoken sold absolute dookie. No offense to those that enjoyed the game.

 

[Zuzu]

I wish they had have taken the money and used it on the ‘Valkyrie Elysium’ and ‘Star Ocean: The Divine Force’ projects instead

 

[begotten]

I call BS on this. No way the game cost $100m to make.

With the delays and staff turnover over the 7 years or so of development they could have easily gotten there.

 

[AtomicStarving]

They sold Tomb Raider for this.

 

[Pelao]

I'd believe you even if you told me it cost $200 million, because if there's one thing these big game companies are experts at, it's mismanaging resources on stupid projects.

 

[AmuroChan]

They need to break down the cost more. Does this include marketing? Some games get up to 100 million for marketing. Fordpoken was marketed pretty.heavy so I could see them spending 50 mil..

Typically, when talking game budget, it does not include the marketing cost unless specifically noted. The marketing cost is not determined until much later in the dev cycle. The game budget is what is signed off on when the project is greenlit.