Earlier this week, the ongoing FTC trial between Sony and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Microsoft resulted in the budgets for two of PlayStation's biggest games being revealed. Thanks to a redaction-related snafu, we now know that Horizon Forbidden West cost $212 million to develop and The Last of Us Part 2 cost $200 million. The piece of evidence was quickly removed and replaced with more thorough redacting, but not quickly enough. ಌOops.
As TheGamer’s editor-in-chief Stacey Henley wrote in her piece about the gaff (linked below), it was an embarrassing moment for both the courts and for Sony. ꦗBut why should it be?
As a cinephile with a masochistic fixation on box office returns, I spend a lot of time thinking about whether would-be blockbusters, like The Flash and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, will recoup their budgets and whether mid-budget movies, like No Hard Feelings and Asteroid City, will be able to find success among the gigantic action spectacles. I can speculate on these things at all because this information is generally easily accessible for members of the public. If you go check the Dial of Destiny Wikipedia page, you'll find the budget right there in the breakout box near the top of the page, alongside the information about who directed it, who produced it, and who distributed it. Once returns start rolling in this weekend, a box office figure will be added, too.
This is just how movies work, as that industry is significantly less secretive in general. Actors and directors are frequently announced as being attached to projects years before they come out. If you read a trade publication like Deadline or Variety on any given day, you'll find articles on casting announcements for projects that are still a long way off. We got a high profile example this week as , but it happens all the time.
To take another example from nerd culture, we know the titles and release dates for the next eight movies in the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Marvel Cinematic Universe. We know a little about Xbox, Sony, and Nintendo's big releases for the next year or two, but a higher premium is placed on that information in games. We look forward to flashy presentations about the future of our favorite studios, while the next Superman is casually announced via press release on a Tuesday. Box office information is similarly public as studios take internal projections of how well they expect movies to perform, rival studios similarly keep track of their competition's products, and theater box offices report earnings to the studios. All of this is recorded by Rentrak and published by industry trades. Corporations have gotten away from reporting numbers in the streaming era, and it's been a net negative for everyone involved… except the corporations.
Netflix doesn't share its internal data on how many views a movie or TV show gets (unless they want to brag about it), which puts the creators of media hosted on Netflix at a disadvantage. This has been a key point for the striking Writer's Guild of America: if only one side has information about how well a series did, that party holds greater leverage in negotiations about the project's future. If you don't know for sure that you made a massive hit, you aren't armed with the information you need to bargain for a better deal going forward and you have no idea how much money you would, in a just world, be compensated.
This represents a shift for Hollywood, and it's one that the striking union is hoping to reverse. But in games, that secrecy is the rule, not the exception. NDAs are common and strict, and developers often can't discuss canceled projects that they spent years of their lives working on. Publishers aren't required to release sales information unless they're publicly traded and, if they aren’t, typically only do so if they feel like they have a hit on their hands. Still, finding out how many copies a game has sold (at least, in estimate) is significantly easier than getting any information on its budget. You can do some math, based on rough estimates of how many employees the studio has, what the average salary for the odd job posting at the studio is, and how long the game was in development, but those are just estimates and are frequently wrong. We have no consistent, reliable source of information about game budgets, and that's in keeping with the industry's extreme secrecy.
It may be embarrassing for Sony to have the budgets of two of its big games leaked, but it's a boon for the rest of us. For indie developers considering how they should budget their games, it's helpful to know they'll never have remotely near the funds to compete with triple-A and budget accordingly. For game developers interested in working in triple-A, especially in leadership, it's helpful to know the kind of pressure they'll be under given the amounts of money in play. For the press, it's helpful to know how much a hit triple-A game needs to make to recoup its budget, and additionally, how well that means companies are doing as a result. And, for players, hopefully, it will help drive home why games cost so damn much.
