He said the exact opposite. It's less of a priority, but they will keep doing so.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Jason Schreier joins MinnMaxx podcast to talk about Sony, Bend, and Naughty Dog
- Thread starter Biosnake
- Start date
Sometimes I feel that people have completely forgotten that ND launched TLoU2, an extremely demanding game from a production standpoint, less than a year ago...
He said he doesn't know if they'll distribute Factions as DLC not that they're making dlc.
tlou has 2 games in 8 years, remastered was not a remake.
They finished TLOU2 less than year ago and idk if you're aware but like.... a pandemic is happening
These two are mutually exclusive. Actually the 'high profit' part is kind of its own question mark - but just the idea that this is simultaneously low-cost and high-production values doesn't make any sense.
If the aim was time&cost-efficiency - something like 'TLOU2 Left Behind' or 'TLOU2 Lost Legacy' might work better. But the remake is going to be more expensive than either if it's on the scale of Demon's Souls (+ more, because people here demand complete retooling of gameplay systems). And if this is indeed picking up someone elses work as per Schreier's story - the cost could go up even more (because of human developer tendency to strictly adhere to NDH syndrome).
While everyone absolutely overreacted, the details of the article and the headline really drove the narrative that lead to the overreaction. Based on what he said in the podcast, he left out a shitload of details to accommodate the wider audience of Bloomberg but the article missed the mark and really ignited the easily angered console fanbases.
I think saying "people misunderstood what I was saying and took the wrong meaning from it" implies that maybe the article was not nearly as clear as it should have been.
I think saying "people misunderstood what I was saying and took the wrong meaning from it" implies that maybe the article was not nearly as clear as it should have been.
We also heard that a lot of people were forced out of Japan Studio and Bend was not allowed to make a sequel to days gone.
Again, last of us remake is an example that was brought up in the article. to show the direction sony is heading with priotrizing big studios much more than they before. I don't know which strategy is financially better but am not really fan of Sony's big budget game and mostly like their smaller stuff (besides GOW).
There's no "but still". The editor isn't the one getting lambasted. Jason is.
Thanks for the summary and that makes total sense.
I'm just wondering if this could have been prevented if their next project could have entered pre-production earlier so that by the time TLoU2 and / or factions was finished the bulk of the team could have started going all in on the new project instead of having to work on a remake just to have something to do for a few months.
Last of us 2 being delayed internally( from 2019 to 2020) and publicly(from Feb to May to June) + covid stoped that from being a possibility
Just finished listening. My stance remains the same; the Last of Us remake does not need to exist. If you have a bunch of developers not working on anything, why not have them make their own cool, little game before the next major project? It doesn't have to set the world on fire & it doesn't need to sell at full price. Make it $20 - $40, make it whatever you want, no pressure. It's as if the Naughty Dog isn't allowed to be attached to small projects.
Also, if VASG wanted to make a name for itself, why not make something original? Your first two thoughts are to remake two different games? And two games that are already available to play right now on modern hardware at that?
And finally, with Days Gone 2... like Jason said, capitalism sucks. Days Gone sold well, but internal projections says it'll just always sell like that & not grow, no matter how much better the sequel is. Again, I don't agree, but I'm not a business with investors.
Also, if VASG wanted to make a name for itself, why not make something original? Your first two thoughts are to remake two different games? And two games that are already available to play right now on modern hardware at that?
And finally, with Days Gone 2... like Jason said, capitalism sucks. Days Gone sold well, but internal projections says it'll just always sell like that & not grow, no matter how much better the sequel is. Again, I don't agree, but I'm not a business with investors.
Makes sense. It's been so long that I sometimes actually forget that we're in a pandemic...
It also means they started pre-production/production on their next big project in the middle of COVD.
I don't disagree with there being loads of people who would buy this again. Which is why it makes business sense. I'm not arguing why Sony is doing it, but man it is boring af compared to some of their usual announcements.
Splitting hairs here. I've played through this game 2-3 times and purchased two different versions of it and the sequel in less than a 5 year span. A complete remake of this type of modern game seems like the suits at Sony are becoming a little over reliant on this one franchise
The directors, writers, leads and lots of artists are usually the ones doing pre-production, can't really pull a team together without that, also having your studio basically in a race to beat pre-production is probably a bad idea, as is making games without any pre-production (even if smaller scale). It's better to just use those people as a support role for the studios own games or someone else, it's a relatively low investment and you can quickly move them off that, so they aren't tied up.
Now my question is....why couldn't Jason mention some of this in his article? This is what I mean...the way some stuff was framed in it was odd.
Bend is getting to make a new IP. That in itself is both riskier and its own investment than a sequel would be lol. VASG were the ones who pitched TLOU1 Remake to Sony.
On top of this, it's one thing to buy an established studio in an expensive city like they did with Insomniac, it's another to build one from the ground up like the former VASG head wanted to. If the studio hadn't worked out it would've been a very costly mistake.
Sony seems far more interested in Kojima/Jade Raymond style deals where they give a creative funding to build a studio and develop their first game and then if it works out, they'll continue working with them or potentially even buy them out. And if it doesn't then they can each go their separate ways and Sony doesn't have 100+ employees they have to figure out what to do with or layoff.
This was their MO for the pretty much the entirety of PS4 as well, regardless of what PR says. So far it seems that PS5 is going to be the exact same strategy as last gen. Which is good or bad depending on if you liked PS4.
It doesn't sound like we're missing out on anything in place of them working on the remake though.
It's a smaller / easier project that they can shift developers to while the creative team comes up with the next big project. It's part of why we got TLOU Remastered as well on PS4.
At the end of the day just don't play it. I loved TLOU on PS3 but never played Remastered until recently before Part 2 came out. The same way that game was for people who didn't have a PS3 this one is for those who didn't have a PS4 or got into the game through the HBO show.
I'm admittedly out of my depth here but how long does pre-production typically take for games these days? Not to mention a next gen, AAAA one. Probably not something we can quantify without inner knowledge of ND's tools, processes, and general production pipelines. It very well could take quite awhile, but I also can't help but think it would be completed prior to TLOU remake being finished, but for all I know they have a streamlined process for using the TLOU2 engine for the remake. Then again those animations aren't going to make themselves, and the old environments need to be remade, it's obviously a not insignificant amount of work compared to what went into the remaster on PS4.
My main concern is this could potentially reduce the amount of new games we get out of ND this gen. Two a gen already feels like it takes forever to get to experience them. Not trying to concern troll, I just want to see new stories from what's undoubtedly my favorite AAA/AAAA studio.
Basically, due to the audience the bloomberg article is for, that kind of nitty gritty details wouldn't really make sense.
I think the dividing line is PS4 was definitely about a transition to big, big games, but it wasn't really conservative or risk averse. Everything they greenlit was huge in scope, but they were willing to unshackle Guerilla from Killzone to take a stab at Horizon, Sucker Punch from Infamous to get Tsushima. God of War obviously had a big name attached to it, but they really went back to the drawing board on what it was.
Focusing on big games makes sense for them — I don't think the stuff around phasing out Japan Studio is really that worrisome — but the amount of effort going into keeping constant releases of Last of Us and Uncharted going instead of trying to find the next new thing is at least a bad signal to be sending.
I don't care about not making a Days Gone 2, but Bend is sort of next in line to crank out new IP to find the next Horizon or Tsushima, and that the first impulse was to put them on Uncharted instead of that isn't great, even if it's good they're back on that now. I hope Naughty Dog is doing preproduction on a new IP, and I get they needed a smaller project to fill the gap until that's ready, but I wish it were something more interesting than remaking such a recent game.
A new Uncharted (or a small sized project like Lost legacy) was a better option that the LOU remake.
Can depend massively really, lots of factors that I just don't know either, a completely new I.P could have years of pre-production, depending on lots of stuff. We don't even know when pre-production even started for whatever they have in pre-production either, so could be well along or just at the start. I believe ND always have games in some form of pre-production though, even if they aren't even planned to be going into full development for years, pre-production will just ramp up when they can.
Evan Wells did say ND are close to being a 2 team studio again, so with lessons learned from their last attempt at that it could really increase output, but also games are only getting longer to make
These are relative terms.
It's low cost because the game is newer compared to the Uncharted games for example.
Low cost and high production values aren't necessarily at odds if the production is largely done, ie the systems are already made.
Creating something like Left Behind/TLL would require more resources because you'd also have to bring in a creative team on top of having to make new assets.
...and there's only so much context / additional detail he could provided anyway given Bloomberg's word count constraints. Jason tweeted this about his Cyberpunk article, but I'm sure it applies here as well:
I totally get this, but given that neil is busy with a lot of last of us projects, it would be insane not to get inspiration for part 3 and that being his next move.
They only started working on it few weeks ago and before that they were supporting ND after Days Gone 2 was cancelled. There were real fear among developers that they would absorbed into ND and become support studio, which is what the article was referring to.
I'm shocked at the number of pages this thread has.
Some of these drama could have been avoided with some additional details from different perspectives which would have given us a less dramatized yet equally informative article. Even if there were word limits etc. there were also a lot of nonsensical portions like that dreams comparison to roblox for example. Everyone can and should do better.
Some of these drama could have been avoided with some additional details from different perspectives which would have given us a less dramatized yet equally informative article. Even if there were word limits etc. there were also a lot of nonsensical portions like that dreams comparison to roblox for example. Everyone can and should do better.
From what Jason said it sounded like its going to be even worse than PS4 era, where we don't even get games like Bloodborne, Gravity Rush or Days Gone. I guess we will see in few years.
You're saying canceled, but that's not the case. The pitch never was accepted. The project never got off the ground. Instead of having Bend do nothing, they were put on to support ND until they got a pitch off the ground. Not nearly as nefarious as people were making it sound when the article was originally posted. Saying they "weren't allowed" is funny because we don't know what the pitch was like. Maybe it just sucked ass. Days Gone was profitable, no reason to not give them another shot assuming the pitch was quality.
He literally said the opposite in the podcast lol. They're beefing up Media Molecule and Pixelopolus to continue making the type of games you're describing. We're literally getting a game like you're describing NEXT WEEK. Bend is making a new IP which will likely fall into that same column.
Because the article wasn't about TLOU Remaster. It was about people at smaller studios who talked to the press because they felt like they were getting sidelined and having projects taken off of them or whatever. It was about the staff who left Bend. About the people who were worried they were being absorbed into Naughty Dog as a support studio instead of making games they wanted to. It was an article about Sony studios and their people, not about specific games.
The bit about Days Gone 2 and TLOU2 Remaster got massively amplified here, because we're gamers first and that was fun video game news. That was the interesting bit for PlayStation fans. But it wasn't the crux of the feature and Jason probably didn't need to write an extra two paragraphs justifying why ND making TLOU Remaster made sense in an article about something completely different. It'd be the first thing anyone would edit out because it is irrelevant.
Like, I get it. That's the meat for a lot of ND/Days Gone fans here. But that's just a misunderstanding about what Jason was writing about.
The argument is exactly the same as the DG2 situation(except reverse). If TLOU:R exists - someone ran the numbers and projected it's worth north of 100M in revenue.
Anything less wouldn't warrant utilizing a sizeable portion of NDD studio, especially since it's 99% likely they'll just scrap most of what has been done by the predecessor studio on it anyway (see my previous post).
Would have been a strategic play (attach a known property that's 'safe') that backfired in this case. This isn't anything special or unique to this situation (or Sony) growing business units do these types of things all the time, across all kinds of industries as well (and many of them end up failing the same way too).
User banned (3 days): Antagonizing and discrediting fellow members with conspiracy theories. Prior ban for similar behavior
I love how this and the Jeff Grub article are playing off of each other and exposing that the press is pretty much wholesale creating a "Sony negative narrative" for themselves to run with, with the tone and factual and contextual exclusions being made in these articles, and then claiming it's Sony's problem to fix. By what? Giving them more insider knowedge and exclusives?
Pretty embarrassing for the gaming press.
Pretty embarrassing for the gaming press.
Well I do appreciate some of these articles this era is reminding me a lot of peak console wars where people are attacking Sony from angles for reasons that I would call not as serious as them not producing consistent hits and quality innovative titles.
The main issues is the behavior of the people here. People look for any reason to throw their jobs and everything instead of just living in their happy corner enjoying what they enjoy the most. Everybody should want every company to succeed enough so the industry continues to thrive.
If people are so invested that they got to look through post histories or find a moment of weakness or a joke or something because it doesn't agree with their perspective of the world then they need to invest that energy into bettering how they can present their argument while not being a completely biased cheerleader for their favorite brand.
For me to tell you that I prefer the way Sony makes their games and they're consistency in track record is a statement of fact but somebody else could see that the other way and not like that flavor of ice cream. That person could counterpoint in a constructive way without saying that company sucks because they offer a flavor of something that just doesn't taste good to me and not be constantly on the warpath to diminish the success and obvious Mass market appeal of a company like Sony who's doing very well with their gaming sector.
It's literally a playground in here and the mods already have their hands full but it's a little disappointing to not be able to comment on certain things or if you say things a certain way people get offended enough and then start reporting and it diminishes constructive conversation because as patient as I am with trying to keep this mature perspective that I am outlining, it's very difficult to see slanderous consistent immaturity be tolerated while constructive and non-incendiary or harsh language arguments be chastised.
Sometimes I think people need to get out and breathe a little bit and not be so invested but just let yourselves be reminded of that time when the console wars between PS3 and 360 were really hot during the neogaf days and this is the kind of stupidity that's happening now except that company that is now the leader still in sony, it's like everybody's looking for every angle at every corner to diminish a really solid foundation and track record that can they continue to hold.
This is easy for me to type with the voice recognition but I will make one last point. It doesn't help when you have articles that feast on this forum and on the internet's pallet for this type of TMZ like coverage. While I appreciate Jason's ability to go on this podcast to clarify things I think that it's great that we have the opinion pieces and stuff like that but so many people take it as gospel and then the misinformation and slander and false narrative starts. Sony shouldn't have to address a lot of this stuff when they are actively investing in services to a better experience for their users just like the competition is.
If there's something wrong with that then there needs to be no more discussion because people can't come to some kind of rational understanding and respect for companies that are leaders in the industry such as Sony with their stupid PlayStation box.
The main issues is the behavior of the people here. People look for any reason to throw their jobs and everything instead of just living in their happy corner enjoying what they enjoy the most. Everybody should want every company to succeed enough so the industry continues to thrive.
If people are so invested that they got to look through post histories or find a moment of weakness or a joke or something because it doesn't agree with their perspective of the world then they need to invest that energy into bettering how they can present their argument while not being a completely biased cheerleader for their favorite brand.
For me to tell you that I prefer the way Sony makes their games and they're consistency in track record is a statement of fact but somebody else could see that the other way and not like that flavor of ice cream. That person could counterpoint in a constructive way without saying that company sucks because they offer a flavor of something that just doesn't taste good to me and not be constantly on the warpath to diminish the success and obvious Mass market appeal of a company like Sony who's doing very well with their gaming sector.
It's literally a playground in here and the mods already have their hands full but it's a little disappointing to not be able to comment on certain things or if you say things a certain way people get offended enough and then start reporting and it diminishes constructive conversation because as patient as I am with trying to keep this mature perspective that I am outlining, it's very difficult to see slanderous consistent immaturity be tolerated while constructive and non-incendiary or harsh language arguments be chastised.
Sometimes I think people need to get out and breathe a little bit and not be so invested but just let yourselves be reminded of that time when the console wars between PS3 and 360 were really hot during the neogaf days and this is the kind of stupidity that's happening now except that company that is now the leader still in sony, it's like everybody's looking for every angle at every corner to diminish a really solid foundation and track record that can they continue to hold.
This is easy for me to type with the voice recognition but I will make one last point. It doesn't help when you have articles that feast on this forum and on the internet's pallet for this type of TMZ like coverage. While I appreciate Jason's ability to go on this podcast to clarify things I think that it's great that we have the opinion pieces and stuff like that but so many people take it as gospel and then the misinformation and slander and false narrative starts. Sony shouldn't have to address a lot of this stuff when they are actively investing in services to a better experience for their users just like the competition is.
If there's something wrong with that then there needs to be no more discussion because people can't come to some kind of rational understanding and respect for companies that are leaders in the industry such as Sony with their stupid PlayStation box.
According to the video it was nothing but pen to paper ideas in the first place and never really got off the ground. With Bend back to working on their own game it might be in limbo at the moment
Doesn't sound like it. It's probably all hands on the remake and MP game while creatives are cooking up whatever's next. Which could be a new Uncharted tbf but I doubt it.
Unknown, but it doesn't sound like it was ever at ND, was going to be Bend's game with ND oversight, I doubt ND are interest if Sony are looking for a studio though. Bend's Uncharted is super dead and never really got started.
This is why i always question media, journalist, "insiders"...Because this article reads 100% different after watching the video with more context and because of this article not providing the context originally it spurred so many think pieces like Grubbs going off bad faith arguments. It created an entire narrative based on false information.
After watching the video i 100% agree with everything Jason has said and i really wish it had been part of the original discussion
Yeah its possible that the pitch sucked but I think the point was that there was real fear that they might be absorbed into naughty dog. People inside were jokingly calling them ND North.
The Last Of Us Remake, Days Gone 2, Nintendo Reveals - The MinnMax Show
Welcome back to The MinnMax Show! On this week's episode, we're joined by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier to talk about his recent story revealing that Naughty Do...
youtu.be
He definitely said the smaller games were prioritized more before than they are being right now. I know we are getting Returnal next week but you don't see the imapact of this decisions few years after.