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Bloodborne sold through more than 1 million units worldwide as of April 5

Rhaknar

The Steam equivalent of the drunk friend who keeps offering to pay your tab all night.
What is the ballpark for BB's development cost anyways?

Or for Souls games in general really. Would love to know myself. There's a lot of stuff going on in these worlds and they are not short games with a handful of zones.
 

Rhaknar

The Steam equivalent of the drunk friend who keeps offering to pay your tab all night.
I would assume around $20-30 mil.

I think so too but a lot of people keep assuming they cost fuck all to make for some reason.

Well to be far 20 mill isn't that much these days anyway, but ever since I heard the insane costs of small double fine games I never know what games cost these days
 

Rektash

Member
I think so too but a lot of people keep assuming they cost fuck all to make for some reason.

Well to be far 20 mill isn't that much these days anyway, but ever since I heard the insane costs of small double fine games I never know what games cost these days

It is assumed they are comparatively cheap to make because they lack FMV and ingame cutscenes. There isn't a lot of voice acting going on either. Heck, dialog isn't even lip synced in FROM games.
 
In terms of raw assets BB would have more than the previous games combined. I imagien it would have had a wayyy higher budget than DeS/DS/DS2
 

GorillaJu

Member
I think you can judge a game's budget on the size of its team, and From are a relatively small studio comparatively speaking. The fact that the president and director are one and the same is a pretty telling sign right off the bat. As for Sony's side, they use their business nous and production capabilities with external developers and thus don't commit many (if any at all) of their own programmers and designers.
 
I think so too but a lot of people keep assuming they cost fuck all to make for some reason.

Well to be far 20 mill isn't that much these days anyway, but ever since I heard the insane costs of small double fine games I never know what games cost these days

A lot of that is Schafer's mismanagement and things that they don't really need (I like Elijah wood but don't need a celebrity VA, especially not for a ks game.....)

I think they might be cheap compared to others which shows how well they work considering the cost of Japanese development and the breadth of the "Souls" games themselves.
 
I think so too but a lot of people keep assuming they cost fuck all to make for some reason.

Well to be far 20 mill isn't that much these days anyway, but ever since I heard the insane costs of small double fine games I never know what games cost these days

Probably because demons souls was known to be extremely cheap to develop. That game was targeted to be "profitable" with 175k sales in the US. (that number is from memory so not exact, don't sue me) a million WW was far beyond anyone's expectations.

BB is obviously a more expensive game, but there's no way it's anywhere close to 20M. That would put it up there with the Uncharted games, as someone else said.
 

Melchiah

Member
Good to see a game like this getting a similar amount of sales as Infamous did a year ago. Anecdotally speaking, only Destiny beats Bloodborne when it comes to how many of my PSN friends are playing the same game. That's about a fourth of the PSN friends I have.

Hrdbvbxl.jpg
 

Kill3r7

Member

Steel

Banned
I think you can judge a game's budget on the size of its team, and From are a relatively small studio comparatively speaking. The fact that the president and director are one and the same is a pretty telling sign right off the bat. As for Sony's side, they use their business nous and production capabilities with external developers and thus don't commit many (if any at all) of their own programmers and designers.

Well according to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Software they have 230 employees(the source for this information is cited), and have at least 2 teams at any given time. So about 100 people per team(maybe less depending on how many of their employees have nothing to do with game dev), which isn't exactly tiny(not huge either, but still).
 
Darksiders 2 was 80 million USD.

Development budgets for Japanese games tend to be much smaller than their US counterparts on games in similar genres.

I imagine this is due to a lot of reasons, primarily due to smaller development teams that focus more on gameplay mechanics and tools, rather than the use of expensive marketing, hiring celebrity voice actors, inclusion of CG and FMV sequences, an increased focus on tech and visuals.

Bloodborne is a game where all of it's development budget went into game design and the creation of the game's many environments. Other than that intro CG, was also doubled up as a primary marketing tool, there was nothing in the game that had any superfluous costs that was outside actual game design.

The graphics engine also seemed heavily re-used. Not to mention many animations as well.

Also, games that aren't planned properly can see their development costs drastically increase. To be perfectly honest, there was nothing about Darksiders 2, as for as the game was concerned (not too sure if it includes marketing costs) that made me think this was an 80 million dollar game.
 
Good to see a game like this getting a similar amount of sales as Infamous did a year ago. Anecdotally speaking, only Destiny beats Bloodborne when it comes to how many of my PSN friends are playing the same game. That's about a fourth of the PSN friends I have.

Hrdbvbxl.jpg

You must only add real friends. I have around 220 and so far about 68 have played Bloodborne. Pretty amazing.
 
Good to see a game like this getting a similar amount of sales as Infamous did a year ago. Anecdotally speaking, only Destiny beats Bloodborne when it comes to how many of my PSN friends are playing the same game. That's about a fourth of the PSN friends I have.

Hrdbvbxl.jpg
That counter is broke a lot of the time.
 

rhandino

Banned
Still finding it hard to see those numbers.
Why? Darksiders 2 was very bloated because they tried to make it massive in all aspects (locations, weapons, armors, enemies, etc.) compared to the original and also launched on 4 different plataforms. They also pushed the game hard.

The fact that the last 2 worlds of the game are shorter and shallower than the previous areas, meaning that even with that budget they STILL needed more time and money, is the mind blowing thing.

Also the budget for Darksiders 2 was 50 Million, not 80 =P
 

Adachi

Banned
So assuming that that Superdata number is true, we can then estimate how much money Bloodborne has made Sony, using this:

6a00d8341c630a53ef0120a8b7438c970b-600wi


For the sake of not overcomplicating things, I'm going to exclude collectors editions and am also going to use the US dollar as the only currency.

Using this we get about $38.03 million in money for Sony from these 1 million units sold. Counting collectors editions and accounting for the different currencies would probably make the number even larger.

Bloodborne may very well already be profitable.
 

Steel

Banned
So assuming that that Superdata number is true, we can then estimate how much money Bloodborne has made Sony, using this:

6a00d8341c630a53ef0120a8b7438c970b-600wi


For the sake of not overcomplicating things, I'm going to exclude collectors editions and am also going to use the US dollar as the only currency.

Using this we get about $38.03 million in money for Sony from these 1 million units sold. Counting collectors editions and accounting for the different currencies would probably make the number even larger.

Bloodborne may very well already be profitable.

You're also ignoring the digital side of things where the retailer is sony, there's neglible distribution cost, and there are no returns. If superdata is to be believed that's a little less than 20% of sales.
 

Adachi

Banned
You're also ignoring the digital side of things where the retailer is sony, there's neglible distribution cost, and there are no returns. If superdata is to be believed that's a little less than 20% of sales.

I didn't ignore that. I calculated 155k at $60 and 845k at $34.
 

Alo0oy

Banned
So assuming that that Superdata number is true, we can then estimate how much money Bloodborne has made Sony, using this:

6a00d8341c630a53ef0120a8b7438c970b-600wi


For the sake of not overcomplicating things, I'm going to exclude collectors editions and am also going to use the US dollar as the only currency.

Using this we get about $38.03 million in money for Sony from these 1 million units sold. Counting collectors editions and accounting for the different currencies would probably make the number even larger.

Bloodborne may very well already be profitable.

That graph is completely inaccurate, retailer margins are too high, platform royalty is too low (it should be about twice the number in that graph).
 
So we're assuming 20% of a game's physical sales is digital?

And that's for standard affairs right? I assume things would be skewed on the digital side if there was a price benefit.
 
That's way too high, UC3's budget was 20m, & that game's production value dwarves Bloodborne.

I don't think the game's budget is higher than 10m, 15m tops.

Uncharted 2's budget being so low compared to how lavish and how much content the game has is absolutely an anomaly, not the standard.

Darksiders 2 was 80 million USD.

Really?! Holy shit, that's crazy. Do you have a link?


Okay, $50 million makes more sense, with another $30 million in marketing. Still kind of crazy considering the first wasn't a particularly notable success, and with these kind of figures THQ would have to sell about 3 million copies in order to make a profit.
 
So, according to our NPD thread:
BLOODBORNE sold through ~390K copies in North-America as of April 5th.
(retail only / no digital sales)

So for 13 days (if you count the two sundays, too): ~390K

HELL YES!

X2VPwjn.gif
 

Reallink

Member
Why? Darksiders 2 was very bloated because they tried to make it massive in all aspects (locations, weapons, armors, enemies, etc.) compared to the original and also launched on 4 different plataforms. They also pushed the game hard.

The fact that the last 2 worlds of the game are shorter and shallower than the previous areas, meaning that even with that budget they STILL needed more time and money, is the mind blowing thing.

Also the budget for Darksiders 2 was 50 Million, not 80 =P


Uncharted 2's budget being so low compared to how lavish and how much content the game has is absolutely an anomaly, not the standard.



Really?! Holy shit, that's crazy. Do you have a link?



Okay, $50 million makes more sense, with another $30 million in marketing. Still kind of crazy considering the first wasn't a particularly notable success, and with these kind of figures THQ would have to sell about 3 million copies in order to make a profit.

The total cost of Darksiders 2 was pegged at 78.7 million dollars according to THQ's bankruptcy filings. The (0.5) denotes a half million dollar loss on earnings of 78.2 million for the game. Either Nordic was not aware of or privy to the actual budgeting, or 50 Million was strictly the development budget with an additional ~30 million being marketing. Either scenario is completely bonkers.
 
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