Phil Harrison's GDC keynote - Home, LittleBigPlanet & more

So what do you have to say about Resistence being at over 700,000 units sold without Europe in 3 months?

Is that still bad to you?

 

I'd like to see some proof for that data first. This guy seems to disagree with that 700K and I happen to trust him a bit more.

Then again, if Resistance has sold 700K then they should break even soon and that's cool.
But it does not change the fact that had Sony managed to sell the 5-6 million PS3s that they were bragging about, then Insomniac would have a big fat royalty check in their hands now, instead of worrying about their financial results.

 

It sold 70,000 in Feb so that puts its LTD at 500K. It's also still selling at an attach ratio of over 50% per month, so if there is this proclaimed growing disinterest from consumers, it's not showing yet.

 

Apologies if the following questions are stupid, but ...

What is the break even point for Resistance ?

Are those LTD numbers for US or Worldwide ?

 

I haven't really done any calculations yet, as it's kinda complicated to break down the revenue for this game, as it's been published by Sony itself. Hard facts about the budget are rare too, so it's mostly educated guesses from me.

We know that Call of Duty 2 had a budget of $14.5 million, so let's assume that Resistance had ~$15 million. After all they're both first next-gen person shooters, with a 2 year production schedule; and even though COD2 is a multiplatform title which should result in additional costs, the higher production values of Resistance should more then compensate for this. Marketing should be $5 to 10 million on top of this, so about $20-25 million is the break even point.

Total revenue from 500K at $55-60 is ~ $30 million, but it also has to cover costs for manufacturing, shipping, and we also have to account for the retail profit margin.
It's also completely unknown how Insomniac's contract with Sony works, they may have a very good deal that gives them royalty right after the game breaks even, or they may have to wait until Sony makes some profit on its investment before getting their share.

So, with conservative estimations for the production and marketing budget, it seems that ~500K units are the break even point for a 1st/2nd party AA title (if you're 3rd party, it gets a bit worse because $5-10 goes back to Sony/MS/Nintendo as a per-unit licence fee).
Now I've obviously been quite loose with my guesses, so IMHO it's safer to say that Resistance starts to make money beyond 700K units sold. It seems they'll make it, but it won't invalidate my point: selling to such a limited market will seriously reduce their profits.

 

I have to say, looking around here it seems that each shop has at least 20 units available at launch, which is pretty incredible. They also guarantee delivery, which is understandable because probably a lot of these shops have their deliveries already. For the first time I saw a real PS3 in a shop (Media Markt, like some other Dutch posters here) and it was running a Ridge Racer 7 demo in 1080p on a nice Sony TV, and it drew a lot of attenion. Everyone seemed to know what it was and about half of the people stopped and looked, and there were a fair number of comments like 'much better than xbox'. I even tested the 'yeah but the 360 is cheaper' comment on one of them, and I got the correct answer.

Having said that, at 599 only a small portion of those people will buy one on day one. BluRay also isn't well known yet.

So in the end, I think that sure, Europe will make a difference, but it won't necessarily be on day one. But we'll found out soon! I do think that the PS3 will sell a lot through word of mouth. The thing makes a big impression in real-life and it is getting good press in the magazines.

 

Europe will sell a lot on the first few days, just as it happened in the US and Japan. It will go on the news and Sony will publish shiny press releases on the event. All this is fairly obvious.

The real question is, how the PS3 will fare after the initial demand. We have seen how quickly its sales dropped in the other two regions, but the problem is that there aren't any global statistics for the EU - so we may never know.

 

The 'correct' answer is simply what you get for your money. I put 'correct' between quotes now, because I know it is controversial (though not to me, or else I'd be picking up a 360 come Friday).

1080p/60fps is still twice as many pixels per second. You may need that expensive 1080p to see the difference, but you do see it when you get that screen and you are standing in front of it at less than 2m distance.

I expect Resistance to keep selling for a while yet.

 

Twice?

 

1920x1080 = 2 073 600
1366x768 = 1 049 088

Both versions do 60fps, so that doesn't factor in. Same amount of colors too, I'm sure.

Am I missing something?

(I did notice a tad bit of slowdown in the replays in RR7 though when there were many cars together in a corner camera sweep.)

 

And some people also say, at half the detail... Higher resolutions don't come for free, evident by looking at the actual support for 1920*1080p - but this has been beaten to death as well.

 

only that RR6 (720p) came out a year before the other and before 360 had implemented 1080p in their machine.

 

Did you forget japanese sales? And NPD doesn't have the sales numbers of important retailers like: Amazon, Wal-Mart etc.

 

Anything to back that up?
I definately cannot see "half the detail"... there were loads of comparison screenshots and except minor differences (it's not the same game btw.) there were no real changes in detail looks more like a redesign of some track elements.

 

I thought 720p was 1280x720...so it would be 2.25 times. Not sure if Xbox360 has a retail game at 1080p 60fps yet.

 

Besides the obvious math that 1080p has 2x the pixels as 720p? Don't take the saying so literally. The point is that 1080p requires a significant amount more pixel shader work than 720p and with next gen games' bottleneck resting at the pixel shader level fairly often, the increase in pixel count is non-negligible with respect to performance.

 

In a title such as RR6/7 the level of actual shader work are probably relatively minimal - its not exactly a graphically taxing game. You can probably point to titles that are leaning far heavier on the shader engine at lower resolutions than RR is at the higher.

 

Would that not be a testament to the RSX's theoretical pixelshading advantage over Xenos?

 

Sure, but I wasn't talking about the mediocre of the launch titles. Maybe they were and I missed it (oops), but I'm talking about the more average use case. Doubling res is a sizable performance hit in most next-gen games, I would guess. Any sample of size one may not reflect that, of course.

I don't see where I said anything specific to any platform. So no, that would not be a testament to anything.

 

Nevermind then, I thought we were still discussing RR7 on PS3 at 1080p.