The game is so bad it killed the Studio

[Rumi]

Square Enix has announced that Luminous Productions - the development studio behind Forspoken - will be merged into Square Enix effective May 1, 2023.

[germality]

Most studios are shut down or let go after a game is completed. They aren't working on it anymore because it's not a "live service." Sheep on.

[Elveone]

Originally posted by Littlepi:

Square Enix has announced that Luminous Productions - the development studio behind Forspoken - will be merged into Square Enix effective May 1, 2023.

Just like Diablo 2 Resurrected was so bad that Vicarious Visions got merged into Blizzard.

[Swamp Fox]

Originally posted by corrupted-file:

Most studios are shut down or let go after a game is completed.

This is completely false.

[kiteless 凧無し]

Originally posted by corrupted-file:

Most studios are shut down or let go after a game is completed. They aren't working on it anymore because it's not a "live service." Sheep on.

What is it about people who bought this game being in denial about how big a flop it turned out to be

Is this some coping mechanism?

[germality]

Originally posted by kiteless 凧無し:

Originally posted by corrupted-file:

Most studios are shut down or let go after a game is completed. They aren't working on it anymore because it's not a "live service." Sheep on.

What is it about people who bought this game being in denial about how big a flop it turned out to be

Is this some coping mechanism?

The game is awesome. And mindless sheep pull everything out of their butt to try to justify their conformity to garbage.

[Rumi]

Originally posted by corrupted-file:

Originally posted by kiteless 凧無し:

What is it about people who bought this game being in denial about how big a flop it turned out to be

Is this some coping mechanism?

The game is awesome. And mindless sheep pull everything out of their butt to try to justify their conformity to garbage.

I'm pretty sure all 243 players right now agree with you.
https://steamdb.info/app/1680880/charts/

[kiteless 凧無し]

Originally posted by corrupted-file:

Originally posted by kiteless 凧無し:

What is it about people who bought this game being in denial about how big a flop it turned out to be

Is this some coping mechanism?

The game is awesome. And mindless sheep pull everything out of their butt to try to justify their conformity to garbage.

I am not talking about whether the game is good or not, i am talking about sales, the game flopped and that’s something you can’t dispute

[Elveone]

Originally posted by kiteless 凧無し:

Originally posted by corrupted-file:

The game is awesome. And mindless sheep pull everything out of their butt to try to justify their conformity to garbage.

I am not talking about whether the game is good or not, i am talking about sales, the game flopped and that’s something you can’t dispute

Technically we have neither the budget nor the sales data for the game so whether the game made profit or not is pure speculation at the moment.

[kiteless 凧無し]

Originally posted by Elveone:

Originally posted by kiteless 凧無し:

I am not talking about whether the game is good or not, i am talking about sales, the game flopped and that’s something you can’t dispute

Technically we have neither the budget nor the sales data for the game so whether the game made profit or not is pure speculation at the moment.

Come on, enough with this nonsense

The game had a 12k concurrent peak and a month later it doesn’t even have 300 concurrent players, you don’t need to see actual sales data to know that’s a massive flop

Stop the denial, there is no shame in admitting you paid full price for a flop, everyone’s done it at some point

As for the budget, It’s an AAA game, none of them are cheap to make

[Syad]

i'm shocked! Who could see it coming.

[germality]

Originally posted by kiteless 凧無し:

Originally posted by Elveone:

Technically we have neither the budget nor the sales data for the game so whether the game made profit or not is pure speculation at the moment.

Come on, enough with this nonsense

The game had a 12k concurrent peak and a month later it doesn’t even have 300 concurrent players, you don’t need to see actual sales data to know that’s a massive flop

Stop the denial, there is no shame in admitting you paid full price for a flop, everyone’s done it at some point

As for the budget, It’s an AAA game, none of them are cheap to make

I paid full price for a game I enjoyed very much. Sheep on.

[kiteless 凧無し]

Originally posted by corrupted-file:

Originally posted by kiteless 凧無し:

Come on, enough with this nonsense

The game had a 12k concurrent peak and a month later it doesn’t even have 300 concurrent players, you don’t need to see actual sales data to know that’s a massive flop

Stop the denial, there is no shame in admitting you paid full price for a flop, everyone’s done it at some point

As for the budget, It’s an AAA game, none of them are cheap to make

I paid full price for a game I enjoyed very much. Sheep on.

Once again I’m taking about the game being a commercial flop resulting in the developer merging. Nothing to do with whether you like it or not

[Eye of Newt]

Originally posted by corrupted-file:

Most studios are shut down or let go after a game is completed. They aren't working on it anymore because it's not a "live service." Sheep on.

That doesn't explain why Deck Nine continues independently after making Life is Strange: Before the Storm.

[Elveone]

Originally posted by BlackSunEmpire:

Originally posted by Elveone:

Technically we have neither the budget nor the sales data for the game so whether the game made profit or not is pure speculation at the moment.

We certainly have the sales data for pc, estimated by steam db, playertracker and steamspy:

https://steamdb.info/app/1680880/charts/

All three sources fluctuate between:

100.000 - 301.100 sold units.

Those are estimations, not sales data. Even if they are correct we still don't have sales on PS5, how much money Sony paid for exclusivity and what the budget of the game is. While I agree that the game is most likely a financial loss we cannot really be sure about that.

Here is some math though.

Luminous productions said they had 130 employees in 2018, their linkedin stats say they have about 60 and the number hasn't changed since then so let's assume they've been 130 through all of it. Some of this staff is not developers but for the same of estimation let's say that they all are and half of them are more junior and half of them are more senior. According to google the average yearly salary of a more junior developer is about $61000 and for a more senior it is about $106000 so on average it will be about $83500. Let's assume that everyone in the studio worked on that game exclusively for the 4 years it was in production. This would end up at $43420000 in salaries. And although this is somewhat generous because of assuming everyone is a dev, you know, let's round it out to $50 million because of taxes, office expenses, etc.

Now 100k to 300k sales is also kind of weird, only one source estimates it that high and there is one that estimates at sub 100k so let's say about 150k sales is okay. There haven't been that many discounts on PC so let's say that the game sold for let's say about $60 on average because of slightly inflated base price and regional pricing, discounts on third party sites and more expensive editions. That would be about 9 million in sales on steam alone. But then Steam and other resellers would take about 30% of that so is 6.3 million from steam alone. The game is also on EGS so let's be generous and give that storefront an additional 10% of revenue in addition to steam and round it up to $7 million from sales on PC in total. Now let's be even more generous and say that the game sold twice as well on PS5 than on PC so that would be an additional $14 million profits from sales there.

Okay, so where do these assumptions leave us? Well, with Square Enix being $29 million in the red for starters. Then with Forspoken being one of the more expensive games to develop. And honestly - it doesn't really seem like it is so if it really is then the studio wasted a bunch of money. Also if that budget is correct the game will have to sell about 1.2 million copies to recoup its cost at full price and currently it is most likely about a third there and in the long run it might actually be able to do it in a couple of years if they fix the performance issues and have several good sales in a row. And lastly - it is quite obvious now that I love making stupid speculative calculations.

[Rumi]

Originally posted by Elveone:

Originally posted by BlackSunEmpire:

We certainly have the sales data for pc, estimated by steam db, playertracker and steamspy:

https://steamdb.info/app/1680880/charts/

All three sources fluctuate between:

100.000 - 301.100 sold units.

Those are estimations, not sales data. Even if they are correct we still don't have sales on PS5, how much money Sony paid for exclusivity and what the budget of the game is. While I agree that the game is most likely a financial loss we cannot really be sure about that.

Here is some math though.

Luminous productions said they had 130 employees in 2018, their linkedin stats say they have about 60 and the number hasn't changed since then so let's assume they've been 130 through all of it. Some of this staff is not developers but for the same of estimation let's say that they all are and half of them are more junior and half of them are more senior. According to google the average yearly salary of a more junior developer is about $61000 and for a more senior it is about $106000 so on average it will be about $83500. Let's assume that everyone in the studio worked on that game exclusively for the 4 years it was in production. This would end up at $43420000 in salaries. And although this is somewhat generous because of assuming everyone is a dev, you know, let's round it out to $50 million because of taxes, office expenses, etc.

Now 100k to 300k sales is also kind of weird, only one source estimates it that high and there is one that estimates at sub 100k so let's say about 150k sales is okay. There haven't been that many discounts on PC so let's say that the game sold for let's say about $60 on average because of slightly inflated base price and regional pricing, discounts on third party sites and more expensive editions. That would be about 9 million in sales on steam alone. But then Steam and other resellers would take about 30% of that so is 6.3 million from steam alone. The game is also on EGS so let's be generous and give that storefront an additional 10% of revenue in addition to steam and round it up to $7 million from sales on PC in total. Now let's be even more generous and say that the game sold twice as well on PS5 than on PC so that would be an additional $14 million profits from sales there.

Okay, so where do these assumptions leave us? Well, with Square Enix being $29 million in the red for starters. Then with Forspoken being one of the more expensive games to develop. And honestly - it doesn't really seem like it is so if it really is then the studio wasted a bunch of money. Also if that budget is correct the game will have to sell about 1.2 million copies to recoup its cost at full price and currently it is most likely about a third there and in the long run it might actually be able to do it in a couple of years if they fix the performance issues and have several good sales in a row. And lastly - it is quite obvious now that I love making stupid speculative calculations.

Bla bla bla nobody cares didn't read