most of those updates are barebones. If that's like they handle all their gaas games than they should 100% stop trying
Destiny is the only real gaas out of that list and that shit talked hard since Sony took over.
Arrowhead released a lot of new content and features in less than a year. Specially considering they are a way smaller team.
There aren't 'real' or 'fake' GaaS. Games are GaaS or not, independently of if you like them or not.
Yea they could be happy with staying afloat. I doubt they are making alot of money.
And yes let's not pretent that Sony need a fortnite level of hit to even offset all their looses and I highly doubt current Sony will manage to archive that.
Facts say they are making a lot of money and that they aren't losing money at all:
Sony first party games FY23
- PS: $905.89M
- Outside PS (also including addons revenue): $667.35M
Sony first party games H1 FY24
- PS: $248,38M
- Outside PS (also including addons revenue): $330.12M
Other than this, both Destiny 2 and Helldivers 2 are among the
top 10 top grossing games of 2024 in Steam, and Helldivers 2 has been their most successful launch ever.
We don't know the Fortnite numbers so we can't compare. But 4 of the first 6 GaaS of the '12 IPs with GaaS' initiative are very successful. And as we can see above, in FY23 their first party games made over $1.5B (+addons in PS), enough to fund half a dozen AAA games with the revenue made in that single fiscal year. Or also made $578.5M in H2 FY24, enough to fund a couple AAA games more with the revenue made that half a year.
It's always a team effort (from video games to CPUs/GPUs), but leadership quality/direction is paramount.
You think nVidia would be the same without Jensen Huang?
I think everything is important, from top executives to the testers and everything in the middle: if somebody fucks it up can ruin the project.
Management can ruin a project setting the wrong company strategy, the editorial/catalog team choosing the type of games they have to make and that they greenlight, producers making super wrong or unrealistic resources/time/budget estimations, directors choosing a direction that doesn't work or isn't clear enough, designers setting the wrong features, balancing, difficulting or progression, the coders making shitty broken code, the artists making awful art, the QA team not detecting enough bugs (or what really happens, devs ignoring tons of detected bugs or not having time to fix them), marketing making a wrong decision when choosing their target demographics or marketing strategy, HR hiring or promoting the wrong candidates...
And people in each role does a lot of things and there are people in charge of many things. In big companies, top executives are busy with other things they have to do, and don't waste time working on making the 'low-level' things of the projects themselves, mainly because they normally they have more important things to do and already have people in charge of each 'low-level' thing that are better at this than them or at least can spend on it the time it requires. Specially because like in case of a game publisher they work in lots of games at the same time and a person can't handle alone a whole project, even less will be able to handle all of them.
I worked on a tp AAA publisher, and previously on that studio before it was bought, where I worked directly with like a dozen people who before or later has been top staff at other top AAA publishers. Plus also have friends who run indie, top mobile or top AAA (including GOTY winner) dev studios plus random devs anywhere.
From my experience, some top executives -often not known publicly, aren't PR stars- make a difference in thier companies, while other executives don't do anything or do a shitty job and are there jsut basically collecting money in that top position because they were a big investor or were in the past very successful somewhere. In a couple cases I know it happened to be PR star of the company or the team, the public face. For some reason publicly people assume these public faces are the creators or who do a lot of the work of their products just because they happen to be the PR face.
Regarding Jensen Huang, I have no idea. As I remember I don't personally know anyone who works at Nvidia, so even less in top positions. The company is performing super well and I assume that a part of it was thanks to him getting the best GPUs for mining crypto recently and for AI more recently. But I'm sure he doesn't personally designs the each new GPU or manufactures the cards: he has other people to do so.