Sony hate thread

[moocow]

*Was* TLOU2 actually a major success? I can only find Ubisoft-esque ramblings where they go on about engagement and players tracked, rather than commercial and critical results.

They've never published plain-language sales figures or anything a respectable accountant would even pretend is "accurate and reliable" information that a reasonable person could use to determine whether it was a "success" by commonly-accepted variants of the word's meaning.

They've never even simply stated "X copies of the game have been sold." They did do that for the Horizon shovelware, and applied every shady trick they could to inflate those numbers (e.g. by including pack-in copies, promotional copies, bundles, pre-order bonuses, etc.). But they've been impressively stubborn about not saying how many copies of the fucking thing they've sold. Similarly they've steadfastly refused to admit what the game's total revenue was.

Neither of these figures are particularly hard to provide -- they know how many copies they printed, for example, and even a first-year accounting student can figure out how to compute total sold by comparing "how many they printed" to "how many they still have." They know how many times a person has paid them for a copy of it. They know how much was paid each time, too.

They just won't publicly state those numbers. It has been a consistent truth throughout modern business economics that a successful business, experiencing a successful turn of events, a successful product launch, or a windfall of any kind (expected or not), they are bragging openly about their numbers, because it's good business to say "look at us! We're winning! Our product is a success! You should buy it too!" The only time a business stubbornly refuses to provide concrete numbers is when they're fucking abysmal and would signal abject failure and kill the business if they were publicly known.

 

[Cuckoman]

Kojima Productions has fewer than a 100 people. Death Stranding was very likely cheaper than any of us expect, engine was already made and it heavily leveraged procedural level design tools made for Horizon.

I would be surprised if it even cost 50M$, thus making a pretty decent profit on the estimated 170M$ in sales.
His studio is pretty small and the game is basically DS1 with a new map. Almost all the assets and mechanics are just copied and reused from the first game.

I think he was a victim of timing rather than anything else. Had he and his new game asked for more time and more money a year ago he would have been fine but times are very different now. There has been a lot of very expensive failures lately, including Bungie, who was a very expensive aquisition and has nothing at all to show for it. Last game is turned down, current game is 3 digit concurrent players and nothing in the pipeline. These are things that are literally keeping the CFO awake at night at this point.

Time is very different now compared to a year or two ago. There are billions and billions of losses that will never be recouped and there is very little to zero tolerance now for slipping budgets or commercial failures.

 

[moocow]

These are things that are literally keeping the CFO awake at night at this point.

I'm still not convinced anyone even remotely close to this minimal level of intelligence is still employed at the C-suite level at Sony Computer Entertainment of America (or whatever the Playstation division is formally called these days).

 

[StacticShock]

You know Wolverine is a turd when even the mainstream gaming subreddits are shitting on it. They couldn't even mobilize the reddit mods to shill the game after the game journos panned it.

saints row 2022 all over again

 

[ShitLurker]

They fired the entire studio that made Concord. Sucker Punch, Insomniac, and Naughty Dog have so far made commercially successful games. That's why they haven't been fired. Haven Studios is on thin ice, wouldn't be surprised to see it shut down after Fairgame$ fails. If Wolverine did badly, given how well Spider-Man 2 did, Insomniac will probably get another chance.

It's really simple with Kojima. He was way over budget and way behind schedule, and his last game sold poorly. Everyone who's been kissing his ass for 30 years because of MGS can be mad, but he's not entitled to money. He's obligated to deliver. Death Stranding 2 did poorly, Physint was his chance to make it good, and he failed.

Pretty much this. I'm just amazed there are still such adamant Kojima dickriders around. Kojima hasn't actually been relevant since mgs5 more than 10 years ago outside of people that activelly follow him. I assure you a good chunk fell off with the Death Stranding games, you cannot imagine how much I hated DS (the core delivery gameplay had potential, the story was so retatded it took it all down and combat felt like ass) and I doubt I'm the only one, we are in the fool me twice part with not metal gear, so it's far from a garuanteed success and younger players that didn't grow with the metal gears just give 0 fucks about Kojima, only know him as the weird westaboo from the game awards that everyone seems to dickride but only delivered amazon simulator

I doubt Sony really gave a shit about any of that stuff so much as Kojima wouldn't commit to making the game fully Playstation exclusive, and Kojima's allies at Sony had left the company.

I honestly think this is a much bigger factor in the fallout. We know that Sony said fuck you, but was it only budget or did Kojima have a series of red lines he wouldn't relent on and the higher ups just said "not worth dealing with this shit". Also, when a company starts cutting corners you have to start somewhere, and also, in the panic part of cost reduction you destroy a lot of things purely thinking short term. I still think that getting rid of Kojima is a win, it's just a very hollow one because you still have fuck all, at this rate Sony should just kill all it's studios and gift a pair of sneakers with each ps5/ps6 and hope the dlc sales from third parties keep the whole operation going.

View attachment 9563887

Is this low-key admitting he's bad with money to the detriment of the game? I'm sure they could have saved some production budget if they didn't hire hollywood actors, right?

Should we get mad at Sony now? It sounds like Death Stranding wasn't able to be made properly because they wouldn't give him enough money...

Bad Budgetman says he's not bad with budgetting. Sure buddy. Didn't he blow stupid amounts of money on music as well as his retarded celebrities that add nothing?

 

[Xenomorphs Are Cute]

If I remember the leaked docs correctly, it's until like 2035. If any of the big releases (including wolverine) sell less than 6 million however, disney can cancel the contract at no liability to themselves, and sony has to pay them back certain amounts I think.

If Wolverine can somehow sell 6 million, the video game industry is truly dead. The Goyim will have fully accepted slop as the norm.

We shall once again question the big 6 million number.

i hope this nigga gets mocked, i hope he knows he gets mocked.
i'm not talking about DSP, i mean the faggot presenting DSP as a target audience because DSP can still mess up no matter how hard you retard proof stuff, DSP is the incarnation of anti-retard proofing.

For future reference, his name is Gary Butler, aka GaryBKK.

View attachment 9561242

He looks like Gordon Freeman kek.

But yeah, this a general mainstream problem The most recent example being Lanterns' Sinestro.

MCU is a good example of that when talking about Marvel.

Marvel Rivals also does this, but their designs are still good as a whole. Even other Marvel games (the Avengers one, & even the GOTG one had this problem). But, due to how sonyggers & capeshitters are, they just eat this slop even more when it comes to Insomniac games. Seriously, the original post has leftist discourse levels of cope going on.

>Insomniac makes humans look basic as fuck in their capeshit games.

>Buh, buh *smacks lips* look ayt Venom (literal alien goo), Reptile (a scalie), Black Cat (literally Sam Maggs self-insert, with the worst Black Cat outfit to date), Kraven (an actual good exception, who still goes through the problem (Smallville jacket, tech goons) etc. of being an Insomniac human), Mr. Negative (literally inverted color chink), Tombstone (literally looked better in MCU through Brand New Day), etc.

Some people are legitimately using the best examples to the problem (Doc Ock, Rhino, Shocker, Yuri Watanabe in ISM2).

Insomniggers are unironically goycattle.

View attachment 9563293
There is no way this is real, if it is... My god will this game flop, this is almost worse then the spider-man 2 homo zones. lmfao
Doesn´t help that wolverine looks like the literal definition of a soy suckling manlet who wears a "A black woman is speaking listen and learn" T-shirt.

I know this might sound as overdoing it, but I think we sincerely should have either a Insomniac Grieving Thread or just a thread for Insomniac Wolverine itself. Hell, the Insomniac Spider-Man games had it's own (which I can't find anymore, but I found an article thread) & even Miles' game had it's own thread. Even their leaks had not one, but two threads (even an article thread).

Also, here's a guy getting called faggot a lot for being a redditor (instead of leftist discourse problem, we have the lefist fear projection problem) about the flag.

The game has so much bad coming out that it can't be contained in just this thread.

 

[regalterry]

I think he was a victim of timing rather than anything else. Had he and his new game asked for more time and more money a year ago he would have been fine but times are very different now. There has been a lot of very expensive failures lately, including Bungie, who was a very expensive aquisition and has nothing at all to show for it. Last game is turned down, current game is 3 digit concurrent players and nothing in the pipeline. These are things that are literally keeping the CFO awake at night at this point.

Thing is, you don't keep someone like Kojima around to make you money.

Not to say he can't make a profitable game, but Kojima is there to be the auteur, to deliver the les beaux-arts of gaming, the kind of quirky, unique experiences you can't get anywhere else. You keep Kojima on your payroll for the prestige of doing so.

He's one of the last vestiges of the old Playstation, where you could get the kind of experiences you couldn't anywhere else, he's there to make you the Tokyo Jungles or the Shadow of the Colossuses, not deliver the next billion-dollar franchise.

It's telling they're divesting themselves of Kojima, under the pretense of going over budget and missing deadlines, when every single one of their first party developers is guilty of worse crimes.

I'm just amazed there are still such adamant Kojima dickriders around.

I don't particularly like Kojima, but like I mentioned in the paragraphs above, his role is to be the auteur mascot. Normie niggercattle still respond positively to his antics, and he can deliver a good product if you can find a competent tard wrangler to curb his worst impulses.

We shall once again question the big 6 million number.

I haven't seen an AAA game get this kind of negative reception from all sides, even game journo dickriders, in a long time.

Everyone is shitting on the game. You have even the most milquetoast normies criticizing the obscene levels of handholding the game engages in.

And then there's Insomniac so high on the Kool-Aid making things worse with every public release they're doing, from alleging that Sabertooth and Wolverine are gay for each other, the language dripping with the most vile yaoi fanfic vernacular (and you know the writers slicked themselves raw at all the gay stories of Sabertooth raping Logan), to them dragging the Jean Grey actress out of the retirement home to pose around in a video for social media, despite the fact Sadie Sink is still in the public conscious and people will be comparing the hot young redhead to wine grandma over there.

Supposedly, the game is the second most expensive Insomniac title of all time, with a budget in the ballpark of $300,000,000 (excluding marketing).

To note, the second Spider-Man game sold 18 million copies allegedly, and we know from the Sony leaks that even with those sale figures, it barely broke even.

Wolverine is not going to be selling Spider-Man numbers, not even close.

 

[Oliver Onions]

I think it’ll sell. There’s plenty of normies who see a Wolverine game and it’s an instant buy.

I predict strong initial sales, but it's gonna end up with more shelf real estate in used game stores than FIFA or Madden.

I know this might sound as overdoing it, but I think we sincerely should have either a Insomniac Grieving Thread or just a thread for Insomniac Wolverine itself.

I propose a Kojima kontainment thread instead. I want to discuss the games Sony is actually putting out, not read 40 pages arguing back and forth over whether the Jap starfucker is a genius or a retard.

 

[Dr J]

It's telling they're divesting themselves of Kojima, under the pretense of going over budget and missing deadlines, when every single one of their first party developers is guilty of worse crimes.

Yes but see, those first party developers who are guilty of worse crimes, they have allies in the company. Kojima doesn't any more.

I propose a Kojima kontainment thread instead.

We already have the Metal Gear thread

I want to discuss the games Sony is actually putting out

What games? So you don't want to discuss anything?

 

[moocow]

he's there to make you the Tokyo Jungles or the Shadow of the Colossuses, not deliver the next billion-dollar franchise.

The trouble is he's not really doing either of those things these days. Seems like he spends more money being a starfucker than actual "video game production" nowadays.

 

[Dr J]

I still think that getting rid of Kojima is a win

I don't think so. Kojima is a name, Kojima was planning to make Not! Metal Gear when all Konami at this point can really do is remake Kojima's games with uglier, more expensive graphics, and now there's a chance that Not! Metal Gear will be even better on Xbox than it would have been on PS5 because a lot of the project hinged on using Sony Pictures' resources and their soundstages. Now that he's partnered up with Microsoft instead, he might not be able to do that any more, meaning there's a chance he has to tone down the starfucking and focus on what's actually important.

 

[moocow]

there's a chance he has to tone down the starfucking and focus on what's actually important.

Do you have any idea how rare that kind of thing happening actually is?

If auteurs had "come to their senses" moments with any amount of reliability, we'd have far more genuine works with artistic merit on our hands these days than we currently do. Once they get a "taste" for rubbing elbows with their "betters" (in their estimation, not ours), they will devote their whole fucking lives to being able to continue doing it.

 

[Dr J]

The trouble is he's not really doing either of those things these days. Seems like he spends more money being a starfucker than actual "video game production" nowadays.

Yes, but consider that Sony have a film arm, whose only success really is the first Men in Black and Spider-Man (both the Raimi movies and the Marvel-made Tom Holland movies). That's how pitiful their success rate is. Kojima wants to use all those resources and create a kind of cross-brand synergy between them which, if successful, would have the benefit not only of selling games but potentially getting people interested in their films. And Sony, in their infinite wisdom, decided to cut him loose.

If auteurs had "come to their senses" moments with any amount of reliability

But they do, usually. Usually they blow a ton of money on a project that bombs, the studios wash their hands of them and they go back to doing smaller, more humble, independent work. See: Orson Welles, David Lynch, Michael Cimino, the list goes on

 

[Jaimas]

*Was* TLOU2 actually a major success? I can only find Ubisoft-esque ramblings where they go on about engagement and players tracked, rather than commercial and critical results.

Sony's never posted actual sales numbers for it, which is usually code for it doing poorly as @moocow explained.
Other sales figures were a little more optimistic, but if there was one metric that was absolutely vicious, it was how poorly the game was selling via retailers.

You had the game being bundled with consoles to promote it, and just shelves full of it going unsold. This is another reason Sony wants to exit physical media: It makes fuck-ups like this harder to fudge.



By my estimates, at best, TLOU2 did okay, and okay is not a win for Sony considering how much money went into it. They needed a smash hit. The fact that Neil Druckmann hasn't worked on a goddamn thing since says a lot.

 

[Questions are a Burden]

Sony's never posted actual sales numbers for it, which is usually code for it doing poorly as @moocow explained.
Other sales figures were a little more optimistic, but if there was one metric that was absolutely vicious, it was how poorly the game was selling via retailers.

You had the game being bundled with consoles to promote it, and just shelves full of it going unsold. This is another reason Sony wants to exit physical media: It makes fuck-ups like this harder to fudge.

View attachment 9564602

By my estimates, at best, TLOU2 did okay, and okay is not a win for Sony considering how much money went into it. They needed a smash hit. The fact that Neil Druckmann hasn't worked on a goddamn thing since says a lot.

Huh? He's been "working" on that Intergalactic garbage.

 

[regalterry]

The trouble is he's not really doing either of those things these days. Seems like he spends more money being a starfucker than actual "video game production" nowadays.

To be fair, his track record is still better than many of the other has-beens.

Roberts is busy killing the space sim genre for the next 50 years, Levine is making another Jewish grievance simulator, Cuckmann is doing the same, Warren Spector fucked off into the sunset when he realized nobody was buying what he was peddling anymore, I am not even sure what Molyneux is up to - probably figuring out a new way to scam people.

At least Kojima can deliver a finished game of middling quality.

Pretty much everyone else has retired, and gaming now lacks these "bigger than life" characters/clowns.

Sony's never posted actual sales numbers for it, which is usually code for it doing poorly as @moocow explained.
Other sales figures were a little more optimistic, but if there was one metric that was absolutely vicious, it was how poorly the game was selling via retailers.

Considering how the TV show the moment they killed Joel, I can't imagine the game did any better, especially once word-of-mouth started spreading.

Plus, you had all those instances of Cuckmann coping extra hard by saying he deliberately made a game people wouldn't like just so the failure wouldn't shatter his narcissistic ego.

Even if the game turned a profit (doubtful), it killed the TLOU franchise for good.

 

[ShitLurker]

I don't think so. Kojima is a name, Kojima was planning to make Not! Metal Gear when all Konami at this point can really do is remake Kojima's games with uglier, more expensive graphics, and now there's a chance that Not! Metal Gear will be even better on Xbox than it would have been on PS5 because a lot of the project hinged on using Sony Pictures' resources and their soundstages. Now that he's partnered up with Microsoft instead, he might not be able to do that any more, meaning there's a chance he has to tone down the starfucking and focus on what's actually important.

We'll know in a few years when it either comes out or gets cancelled. At the very least it will be more successful under microsoft purely on also likely releasing on pc as well day 1.

I don't particularly like Kojima, but like I mentioned in the paragraphs above, his role is to be the auteur mascot. Normie niggercattle still respond positively to his antics, and he can deliver a good product if you can find a competent tard wrangler to curb his worst impulses.

Do normies even care about Kojima? Only ps1 to ps3 gamers acrually care about him. Everything else is obscure wanking about Snatcher and Policenauts. I would be surprised most normies were really that aware of Kojima if not already historically sony fanboys. That dorito pope puts him front and center whenever he can doesn't mean that he's a crowd pleaser, it just means Geoff is from that time were Kojima mas an institution.

 

[Oliver Onions]

What games? So you don't want to discuss anything?

I want to discuss what Sony's long-term plan could possibly be when they allow 6 year dev cycles and $200-400-million budgets for games that instantly flop on release (if they release at all).

Everyone already knows how they feel about Hideo Kojima, and no one is going to be swayed by an essaypost about why he's good or bad.

 

[Dr J]

I would be surprised most normies were really that aware of Kojima

I imagine they're as aware of Kojima as anyone is of who actually directs the game. Probably a bit moreso for Kojima

I want to discuss what Sony's long-term plan could possibly be when they allow 6 year dev cycles and $200-400-million budgets for games that instantly flop on release (if they release at all).

They don't have a long-term plan. Their long-term plan is to go out of business. There, /discussion

 

[The Pulverizer]

No, I couldn't imagine a film director ever saying something like that, no
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dg-qaeIcuyI

https://archive.ph/5m1aU#selection-3323.0-3325.171

Or indeed a novelist. I couldn't imagine a novelist saying something like that, either

https://archive.ph/76EDn#selection-1315.0-1321.1

I couldn't imagine a film director ever saying something like that, either
https://youtube.com/watch?v=mNMHtDYKmzQ:353

Comparing Kojima to Orson Welles or David Lynch is some next level bootlicking. Even so, he doesn't follow anything these people have said because he brags about the A24 films he's seen on Xitter all the time. If anything, Kojima is doing the exact thing Orson Welles warned us about in your first video. Take a look at this list that details all the media that's influenced Metal Gear.

Directors like Mamoru Oshii (Ghost In The Shell) or Katsushiro Otomo (Akira), the reason why they create their masterpieces is because they haven’t just watched anime. They have seen European films and wanted to put that in anime.

By the way, Kojima used an example to justify his disinterest in video games like you did. Except he chose to name two massive Otaku that love the medium they work on. These directors don't think anime is inferior to films, so when they take influences from certain films, they're not doing it in an attempt to "transform" the medium. Kojima is nothing like them.

Cutting Kojima off is one of the best decisions Sony has made in recent years. Kojima puts himself in the position of creating games that are supposed to have gameplay and some cutscenes, and yet, the only part he's interested in is is making cutscenes. Half the budget is used to make the game look like a movie, and the rest is split between hiring celebrities that will pretend to be Kojima's friends and designing the game. Personally, I'd be worried about PS if they actually financed another project of his.

Sony didn't get cucked. They dumped a crazy bitch and then Captain Save A Hoe, AKA Xbox, came in to grab their sloppy seconds. Physint? More like Pissant.

Spoiler: More reasons for Sony to drop Kojima

After making this post I came across this article from Forbes and a few bullet points caught my eye.

• Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2 did not meet Sony’s expectations. The two games are estimated to have sold 5 million and 2.5 million copies, respectively, by last count.
• Physint missed multiple deadlines and was already well over budget, despite remaining years away.
• Physint was not going to be a permanent exclusive to PlayStation hardware, similar to Death Stranding being a timed exclusive that eventually went elsewhere. Kojima Productions owns the franchise itself.

Also, when development on Physint began, PlayStation had two CEO's that filled in for Jim Ryan after his departure, Hermen Hulst and Hideaki Nishino. Hermen Hulst, the co-founder of Guerilla, who previously served as the Head of Playstation Studios and oversaw the development of classic titles such as Spider-Man 2 and Horizon Forbidden West, is the man who wanted PlayStation to publish Physint. He even announced the game alongside Kojima in January of 2024.

So one of the people responsible for killing PlayStation played a part in PlayStation's partnership with Kojima.