Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2024]

[Seanspeed]

I imagine they predicted growth in the console space once supply limits ended. I would guess they expected to basically take a large chunk of Xbox's market share. Their prediction was wrong, unfortunately. In hindsight it's obviously a bad decision, but I don't really remember anyone sounding huge alarm bells for Sony. It could be out there, but I don't remember seeing it. Mostly there was just a lot of talk about how they were "winning" and how hot the PS5 was as a sales product. I'm not sure anyone expected the home console market to contract, which seems to be what's happening if I'm understanding correctly. Sony's raw unit sales will actually be lower than PS4 and Xbox's raw unit sales will be much lower than Xbox One.

I think Sony was basically trying to deliver exactly what their customers were asking for, but couldn't do it fast enough. Making these big games has become too difficult and too costly. I'd never claim they didn't make any mistakes, but I also don't have access to the information they do. The handling of things like the closing of that studio in the UK with Jim Ryan having his photo taken days before it was closed is absolutely atrocious and unkind, but looking at the business decisions in isolation is really hard to judge from the outside. Really can't say if they had better information to know they were heading down the wrong path, but I don't remember seeing concern from gamers or the gaming press.

Well no one at the time knew they were spending $300m on Spiderman 2. I still cant in any reason or shape understand how that happened. That should not happen. It shouldn't be allowed to happen, whether it ultimately ends up making money or not.

But plenty of us were absolutely raising alarm bells on Sony reporting on how they were going to start spending big on live service titles. They literally said they plan on spending more on live service games by 2025 than they were spending on single player games, without reducing spending on single player games. Meaning they were making plans to start spending a LOT more money, which is required for live service titles, all while failures of those(like TLOU) can be disastrous. They seem to have gotten a bit lucky with Helldivers 2, but that's the payoff and why they're doing this, hoping that they'll hit on at least a couple titles that make all the spending worth it.

But personally, I still think this is irresponsible levels of spending. If they dont hit on the live service stuff, then yes, they are in trouble and it's their own strategic choices that caused it, they aren't just having this situation forced on them.

I also think it's terrible how much they spend on stuff like timed exclusivity. That's not investing in games, that's just spending mountains of money to keep Xbox players from being able to play these games. Sony obviously feels it's worth doing, but again, they dont have to spend that money that way. It's their own choices causing this. And now studios and developers are paying the price for those choices.

 

[Seanspeed]

And they in fact, did get it shut down.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1764704580724576465

https://twitter.com/x/status/1764715696250843321

Devastating, and it seems like Yuzu devs are largely to blame for giving Nintendo such a good case for this. This happened so quickly too, so it seems like Nintendo's lawyers made it quite loud and clear how much they messed up and had no room for rebuttal.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Devastating, and it seems like Yuzu devs are largely to blame for giving Nintendo such a good case for this. This happened so quickly too, so it seems like Nintendo's lawyers made it quite loud and clear how much they messed up and had no room for rebuttal.

Yeah, they were really dumb. I mean a lot of Nintendo's complaints were nonsense as well, but from the perspective of 'covering your ass from a highly litigious corporation', one way you do that is to not distribute links to a google drive with dumped rom images for your contributors to work on in a discord, or actually give out links on your main page to show how to break your Switch's DRM. The Yuzu devs in general don't have the best reputation in the emulator dev community as well, for reasons outside of this (allegations of stealing code). Doesn't mean Nintendo was in the right to target Yuzu's codebase by any means, but you gotta know how close you were flying to the sun.

On one hand, it's def not the worst outcome, as no further legal precedent has been set. Otoh though, the quick fold may serve enough to spook other devs. Their main argument seems to be that having an emulator rely on decrypted keys to work is in effect, making its existence predicated on violating the DCMA. I think most other emulators - especially those without a Patreon - are safe, but it's not like the technical/legal argument needs to be sound when the thread of financial destruction can be levied so easily.

 

[Lurkmass]

I mean If they detest the reverse engineering community so heavily then they should just emulate (pun intended ?) Sony's old strategy of adopting "exotic architectures" or require constant online DRM authentication like Microsoft originally once intended to spite them ...

Don't use any mainstream CPU ISAs (x86, ARM, maybe RISC-V too) for their host architectures, contract Imagination Technologies to design their graphics accelerator, write libraries that rely on sensitive cache timings to have games statically link against them and run games in ring 0 ...

The other option is to just release their games on more open platforms like Windows or Android so that there wouldn't be any demand in the reverse engineering community to create an alternative in the first place ...

 

[Remij]

Devastating, and it seems like Yuzu devs are largely to blame for giving Nintendo such a good case for this. This happened so quickly too, so it seems like Nintendo's lawyers made it quite loud and clear how much they messed up and had no room for rebuttal.

Yea. Releasing updates and fixes for unreleased games behind a patreon paywall.. shows that they clearly had access to those unreleased games.. and the only way that could happen is by piracy. It shows direct intent for them to enable people to play the game more optimally before it (Tears of the Kingdom) had even released.

That was a big stupid mistake on their part... Instead of just being happy with a smaller amount of people supporting a genuine emulation effort... they got greedy and incentivized people to pay for it by advertising fixes in the emulator for games that weren't even out yet lmao... really dumb of them.

They got off lucky really.

 

[see colon]

Well no one at the time knew they were spending $300m on Spiderman 2. I still cant in any reason or shape understand how that happened. That should not happen. It shouldn't be allowed to happen, whether it ultimately ends up making money or not.

I suspect it was payroll or other asset generation costs linked to the pace that Insomniac titles have been released in the last few years. There's a reason why Activision has multiple teams to keep the COD pipeline populated. Insomniac has shipped 6 titles since 2020, if you count the Spider-Man Remastered, it's later PC release and Rift Apart's PC release. Even if you don't count the PC releases, which they've made public statements about being involved with the ports, it's still 4 titles in 2 years. I can't think of another dev with that kind of AAA output in this modern era of historically long development times. And that pace costs money.

 

[techuse]

That 300 million must include a substantial licensing fee to Disney. It was a less than three year development and they aren't a massive studio. They also had more than half the map and a ton of animations and other systems already designed.

 

[Scott_Arm]

That 300 million must include a substantial licensing fee to Disney. It was a less than three year development and they aren't a massive studio. They also had more than half the map and a ton of animations and other systems already designed.

From the Kotaku article about the insomniac leak:
"Pre-production began in 2018, and at peak earlier this year there were 264 developers working directly on the project, with an additional 116 contributing in the form of managers, IT staff, and other support roles. 314 minutes of cinematics alone cost over $40 million. The final cost was roughly $30 million over the original $270 million budget, according to the presentation, requiring the game to sell 7.2 million copies at full price to break even."

2018-2023 costs are probably much higher than 2013-2018 costs. I'd guess there were far more people working on the game as well. I can't really explain why it would cost reportedly three times as much as the original, but I would guess labour costs with inflation is a very big part of it (obviously labour costs per developer did not triple, but some inflation of wages with an expansion of the team size).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

As I linked to in the other thread and to finish off here as it's non-technical, the inflation of 3x over 5 years is not atypical for all of video game cost increases. We just weren't watching prices increase from $100,000 one game to $300,000 for its sequel.

(Perhaps we need a DF Non-technical discussion thread! )

 

[DavidGraham]

And they in fact, did get it shut down.

Take one down, two more shall take it's place.

Two new emulators have popped up since then – Nuzu and Suyu. They’re built on the latest Yuzu version.

New Nintendo Switch emulators Nuzu and Suyu rise from the ashes of Yuzu

Guess what? Two new Nintendo Switch emulators have popped up – Nuzu and Suyu. Both of them are built on the latest Yuzu version.

www.dsogaming.com

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Hail Hydra??

 

[Seanspeed]

Take one down, two more shall take it's place.

Two new emulators have popped up since then – Nuzu and Suyu. They’re built on the latest Yuzu version.

New Nintendo Switch emulators Nuzu and Suyu rise from the ashes of Yuzu

Guess what? Two new Nintendo Switch emulators have popped up – Nuzu and Suyu. Both of them are built on the latest Yuzu version.

www.dsogaming.com

These aren't 'new' emulators, though. They are Yuzu. Certainly not gonna pass any legal scrutiny when Nintendo essentially got a complete win to destroy Yuzu. Simply changing the name isn't gonna cut it....

 

[Nesh]

As I linked to in the other thread and to finish off here as it's non-technical, the inflation of 3x over 5 years is not atypical for all of video game cost increases. We just weren't watching prices increase from $100,000 one game to $300,000 for its sequel.

(Perhaps we need a DF Non-technical discussion thread! )

What baffles me is that it cost triple when they already had an engine in place, the foundations of the gameplay and animation as well as a complete city from the previous game.

If the game was created from scratch, how much would it cost?

 

[Scott_Arm]

What baffles me is that it cost triple when they already had an engine in place, the foundations of the gameplay and animation as well as a complete city from the previous game.

If the game was created from scratch, how much would it cost?

I'd be really interested in seeing a breakdown of a "typical" studio and where the money goes. I would guess it's mostly artists, animators and level designers. I would guess the engine teams are a small part, unless the tooling part is significant. My assumptions may be totally wrong though.

The Spider-Man 2 map seems to be roughly the double the size of the original game. I would guess pretty much nothing was ported over straight from the fist game? Probably everything at least got a face lift? You need to bring the quality of the old assets up to the quality of the new ones. That goes for animation, npcs as well.

 

[cheapchips]

I'd be really interested in seeing a breakdown of a "typical" studio and where the money goes. I would guess it's mostly artists, animators and level designers. I would guess the engine teams are a small part, unless the tooling part is significant. My assumptions may be totally wrong though.

111 people in the audio department according to imdb, which is an eye brow raising amount. 34 doing stunts.

 

[Scott_Arm]

@cheapchips 111 in audio is very surprising! I always thought the audio departments were relatively small.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

These aren't 'new' emulators, though. They are Yuzu. Certainly not gonna pass any legal scrutiny when Nintendo essentially got a complete win to destroy Yuzu. Simply changing the name isn't gonna cut it....

Can they, though? What does a 'complete win to destroy Yuzu' mean, exactly? Nintendo has made hosting Yuzu source code illegal?

Someone correct me I'm wrong, but as far as I understand it, it was an injunction against the Yuzu creators - Tropic Haze. From the terms of the settlement, they can't host it, they can no longer work on it or promote it, but the code is open source - Nintendo's argument was that Yuzu 'facilitated' DCMA violations by it's instruction on how to use prod keys, but there is no copyrighted material in the Yuzu code itself. I don't know what legal recourse Nintendo would have to prevent forks of open source software that doesn't contain any proprietary code. Perhaps they can make the same shaky argument that its 'main purpose' is to violate DRM and go after each, but that's dubious both in legality and effort necessary - especially if there is no evidence of a profit motive behind a particular fork, and if any developers working on these forks are outside of the US, which are usually less receptive to DCMA complaints as a whole. Ryujinx devs being based in Brazil is a decent safeguard for example.

As for these forks meaning much in the grand scheme of things, not really. Emulation is like, really hard. The expertise loss from the Yuzu developers is a big blow. However, at the very least I don't foresee anyone having trouble nabbing a copy on popular distribution sites, I don't think you'll have to resort to torrents of dubious origin anytime soon.

I'm under no illusion that Nintendo wouldn't like to see all emulators excised from the planet (that they don't develop themselves, often badly), but they did go after Yuzu in particular for some very specific reasons (alongside a host of bullshit ones too).

 

[Jupiter]

I can't understand the USD 300 million für the latest Spiderman either.

What is the current average cost per employee in the video games industry? $120,000 per person a year?

 

[Flappy Pannus]

I can't understand the USD 300 million für the latest Spiderman either.

What is the current average cost per employee in the video games industry? $120,000 per person a year?

There was likely some irresponsible head count ballooning during the pandemic, but the core of the issue is not really individual salaries.

 

[Jupiter]

If you extrapolate the 120,000 USD to all employees then you need 500 employees working for 5 years on that game to get to 300 million USD. Was the work on Spiderman that extensive?