It is an open secret that all companies with a gaming division – Microsoft’s Xbox, Sony and PlayStation, and Nintendo’s Switch division – spend big when it comes to game development, but how big exactly, that has been the question. In the case of Sony, that magic number is in excess of US$200 million(~RM934 million), and that is per title.
Sony’s development budget for its PlayStation titles was unceremoniously revealed through highly confidential and heavily “redacted” documents that were shared to the US District Court, as part of the ongoing hearing between the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Microsoft. And by “redacted”, we mean that someone in the company blacked out critical details with a Black Sharpie. As in, the ones with the ink that you can see through if you were to scan the documents or shine a flashlight through the back of the page.
The court desperately tried to remove documents detailing Sony’s snafu, but it was too late: the embarrassing PlayStation documents had already been downloaded by both reporters and Microsoft. To pour salt into the wound, the documents were put in the public domain.
All in all, the deciphered details indicate that Sony PlayStation spent US$212 million (~RM990 million) onthe development of Horizon Forbidden West, over a period of five years with 300 employees. For the Last of Us Part II, it spent US$220 million (~RM1.03 billion). As PCGamer puts, these numbers aren’t a reflection of Sony suddenly entering a new age of transparency, although the topic of transparency is what appears to have gotten the company into this bog hole in the first place.
That wasn’t the only detail the redacted documents revealed either. According to Sony, one million PlayStation owners actually bought its console, all so that they could play one game, Call of Duty. Makes a fair bit of sense, then, why Sony is vehemently against Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
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