Back to talk more about my brain. I was going to expand on my premise, but after rereading my last post about Kojima, I decided to elaorate a bit more on the last bit. I read that he’s desputing that he was missing deadlines and going over budget, but I take what he says with a grain of salt. Other people are saying that all big budget games go over budget and miss deadlines. I would not be surprised if this was true, but how does that excuse him from doing it? “Everyone else is doing it, Mom!” has not ever been and still is not an acceptable excuse.
And, call it a hunch, but I bet Kojima misses deadlines by more and goes over budget by more as well. In addition, he’s the one in charge so the buck stops with him. If you’re going to get the accolades for being the auteur who is also a visionary, then you have to deal with the blowback of missing deadlines and going over budget.
Look. I am not one to take the side of a corpo over–well, just about anyone. However, in this case, there’s enough blame to go around. I don’t doubt that Sonyy is looking to cut their losses after hemorrhaging money over their ill-conceived idea of being ALL LIVE SERVICE GAMES ALL THE TIME. In addition, they’ve decided, weirdly, not to port their games to the PC. I know they did not make a ton of money on their ports, but it brought their best games to a whole different crowd. And, I think if they did it steadily and consistently, they would have seen a significant increase in their sales.
For whatever reason*, they have chosen live service games over everything else. Even though their last big live service game (Concord (Firewalk Studios, who got shut down because of the fiasco)) was an utter disaster.
So, yeah. Sony’s panic is of their own making, completely. Let’s add to that the fact that they shot themselves squarely in the foot with their stance on physical copies of their games, including the fact that they chided their customervs fdor being naive/not smart enough to realize that, duh, of course they don’t really own anything digitally. This as they’ve taken away movies from their shelves long after customers have bought digital copies of said movies and are SOL.
In other words, they are owning their own goals so hard right about now. The last thing they need is (in their eyes) a high-strung, nervy auteur who is not meeting the demands goalposts they were setting.
I’m not saying Sony is blameless–far from it. I’m just saying that it’s not outrageous that they would cut the cord with
Well, my sleep has been aaaaalllll over the map, and I was struggling to stay awake for hours when I was writing this. I finally gave in and went to bed, so this is me writing the next day.