Stray pulled off AAA quality on a tiny budget using something loved by a lot of people (cat protagonist) but it had a number of advantages, primarily you don’t need licensing fees for cats, the dev time was deep into “purely a labor of love” length, and I don’t think it came out near any releases of a superior direct competitor. Any adventure epic right now had to contend with FF16 and people still messing around with Tears of the Kingdom.
I think licencing agreements are the death of many games. I maintain that the failure of Cyberpunk 2077 was primarily due to their involvement with Keanu Reeves and I need to bring in revenue to satisfy his Hollywood contract.
They were thinking they’ll get their golden parachute regardless of their effort, and the workers will take the fall, just like they did here, so fuck project quality!
Rather unsurprising but of course sucks for the developers. What were the execs thinking?
They were probably thinking they could get AAA game quality and indie game budgets, just by injecting a well known license.
I kinda hate that about companies. The ones who make hairbrained decisions are never the ones who pay the consequences.
Stray pulled off AAA quality on a tiny budget using something loved by a lot of people (cat protagonist) but it had a number of advantages, primarily you don’t need licensing fees for cats, the dev time was deep into “purely a labor of love” length, and I don’t think it came out near any releases of a superior direct competitor. Any adventure epic right now had to contend with FF16 and people still messing around with Tears of the Kingdom.
I think licencing agreements are the death of many games. I maintain that the failure of Cyberpunk 2077 was primarily due to their involvement with Keanu Reeves and I need to bring in revenue to satisfy his Hollywood contract.
Make money and cut costs. Always the case.
They were thinking they’ll get their golden parachute regardless of their effort, and the workers will take the fall, just like they did here, so fuck project quality!