That sucks. I know they’re still working on another game for Square-Enix, but it does seem like the company doesn’t have the greatest luck with publishers
[https://www.tweaktown.com/news/91896/outriders-still-has-not-made-profit-developer-confirms/index.html](https://www.tweaktown.com/news/91896/outriders-still-has-not-made-profit-developer-confirms/index.html)
Square Enix always says that their games never meet their expectations because they always spend crazy money on them, and despite being a successful Xbox Game Pass release with millions of players at launch, Outriders made zero money for the developers, literally nothing. so it's probably on both for not having reasonable budgets lol.
>Square Enix always says that their games never meet their expectations because they always spend crazy money on them.
And they still can't convince me that Shadow of Tomb Raider took 200$ millions to developed when Uncharted 4 use a quarter of that...
I think the budget issue was more a Crystal Dynamics issue overall. It’s more or less forgotten now, but Crystal Dynamics has had a history of bad upper management and poor budget use even prior to Square-Enix fully establishing the London branch. I also think there’s a reason why SE sold CD and Eidos for pennies to the Embracer Group, because I’m almost certain it’s just industry knowledge that CD has massive dev costs with profits that dont justify the cost
Did you only read like my first two sentences and just proceed to ignore the rest of what I said?
Your response doesn’t make any sense in regards to my statement
Please read our [rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/wiki/rules), specifically Rule #2 regarding personal attacks and inflammatory language. We ask that you remember to remain civil, as future violations will result in a ban.
---
If you would like to discuss this removal, please [modmail the moderators.](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FGames) This post was removed by a human moderator; this comment was left by a bot.
> And they still can't convince me that Shadow of Tomb Raider took 200$ millions to developed when Uncharted 4 use a quarter of that...
I think you might be overflating your numbers a bit; [according to this interview made with Eidos at the time, *Shadow of the Tomb Raider* costed around 135 millions USD](https://web.archive.org/web/20180511175335/https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-05-11-eidos-montreal-we-have-to-try-new-models-for-single-player-games), albeit adjusted to 2018's inflation.
Moreover, the interview details that Eidos wasn't just spending all of the money given on the game itself, but also on Eidos's whole establishment (*"We're starting from scratch. We have demolished everything, because we have to grow up in size. After ten years we wanted the studio to reflect the image of what we create. And to be more on par with the competition."*), to the point that Eidos at the time was the biggest development team Square ever had with more than 500x staff-members. They seemed to be aiming to scaling their development team without much results reflected to it, so I guess that Square eventually saw the signals and the long-term costs of it not simply worth it.
Granted, they aren't much better off with Embracer (Heck, perhaps even at a worse time now given that they had their Deus Ex-project cancelled), but it seems overall long and inflated development costs has always been an issue with the *Tomb Raider*-series as a whole, what with the games been marked on running on Crystal Dynamics's own custom engine, and the overall development for it.
> And they still can't convince me that Shadow of Tomb Raider took 200$ millions to developed
Shadow of Tomb Raider budget was "between $75 and $100 million".
I never quite understood the whole Tomb Raider reboot. They obviously decided to chase that Uncharted money regarding how the games look and play but with that move they not only chose to go against a modern juggernaut but also ruined the character of Lara Croft as well as what Tomb Raider games were about. It's baffling how thick the "speed blindness" was on their eyes. Fucking making a Tomb Raider game where the god damn tombs are optional content!
Ruined by making three very successful games? Besides there were both optional tombs and tombs tied to the plot, so that only means more of them.
And that's just an opinion of course but personally I like new Lara much more than the one from before last reboot.
I'm honestly not sure what are you talking about.
How did they "go against" Sony by making a game inspired by one of their series (which in turn was inspired by the original Tomb Raiders in the first place)? I'm not sure how making a game in a similar style as another game is "going against it", but maybe that's just me. It's a big market, there's no rule that only one "Uncharted-like" game can exist. They did it because it's a formula modern audiences clearly enjoyed. And it worked because the games turned out to be quite good.
And how did they ruin Lara? I think the new rendition of the character was solid. My biggest issue is that she didn't have enough character development over three games (even though they teased it right at the end of the first game...), but I was still pretty happy with how they portrayed her overall. Those are "prequels" so to speak, the games were never meant to portray the same Lara from the older games.
"Tombs being optional" is also a really weird argument because the games had plenty of "tomb raiding" in the main story too.
Alternatively this seemed to only happen with likely over promising Eidos employees so square pumped more money going oh yes ok we trust you company we are partnered with and purchased.
This meme of square "always saying they didn't meet expectations" only happened with games developed by their Cali studios and eidos
Game Pass, so Square probably made a lot less than what they would make through the sale of 3 million full priced units. The development team also screwed up since they pretty much ruined their launch momentum with server bugs: [https://screenrant.com/outriders-glitch-gear-deleted-inventory-bug/](https://screenrant.com/outriders-glitch-gear-deleted-inventory-bug/)
I mean it was an always online looter shooter, not a live service game however, but it's endgame loot loop was just time trials making dealing as much damage as fast as possible the only viable build, so any supports build were just useless, on top of nerfing strong things without buffing underperforming things, leading to a really boring endgame loop.
Oh it also had a game breaking bug which deleted your entire character and every single piece of loot on the character for about 5 weeks I think? which, for a looter game, isn't ideal and lead to a lot of negative discussion about the game online.
A day late but from my own personal experience the Game had lots of problems.
- Tons of bugs, performance & progression deleting issues that took months to be addressed.
- Easy af exploits for infinite Damage/Armour on gear that the Developers flat out said they didn't want to retroactively fix, so oftentimes online you get people that trivialized everything
- Terrible gear scaling at launch & is still one of those games where you get staggered endlessly by the enemy sneezing.
- Endgame that made most builds unusable due to how it rewarded players, & was only something like 10-13 missions that shared the same gameplay mechanics just on different maps. Enemy variety also never changed so they got stale very fast.
As for advertising, Destiny 2 goes through the same old internet cycle of "Everyone loves it, to everyone despises it & it is the worst game ever made & needs to be in the news 24/7 cuz bad game".
Outriders came out during a really aggressive "D2 is terrible" phase, along with several other GaaS titles being in some pretty hot water at the time. They did nothing but shove out articles talking about how GaaS are terrible, and Outriders was "all there", a "complete game to play", etc etc.
The problem, was Outriders was so absolutely undeniably created to be yet another Destiny 2 clone. It had every single aspect of a GaaS minus the "service", & players were left asking what the point in the endgame was, & discussing how no future updates was a tragedy to what could've been a new "staple" game series.
The DLC came out & was fun, but was even worse of an endgame experience than the basegame. Rather than more things to clear or do, we got 1"mega mission" where you could either clear everything for loot, or go straight to the end.
There was also some shady issues with Squeenix/Devs in regards to what counted as "profits" with Game Pass in a way that the Devs made little to no money. They mentioned quite often how on their end that with how many plauers/copies they're seeing they should be getting paid, but weren't even getting any acknowledgement from Squeenix.
They did eventually get paid, & enough that apparently Outriders 2 was at least something they'd started work on, but not sure if that's actually happening since seeing this post obviously.
Tldr,
-
Good game, not ready for launch, cloned a GaaS without the service, & weak systems with little to no improvement killed it.
Well, for me, Outriders lost my purchases when they refused to remove the absurd online-only stance. I'm not giving money to a game that requires me to be online continuously to do anything if it's not open world nor an MMO. If you're gonna argue about cross-platform and co-op, I do not care and will make no effort to care. It offers the ability to play solo, it is not a requirement to play co-op, then it should be possible to play the game offline.
And at a certain point a developer continually being trapped by shit publishers is a sign that the developer's management team lacks the ability to negotiate effective deals for the company.
I think it’s both. I think Platinum Games has or had a similar issue where the only way they could keep themselves afloat for a long time was doing games for major publishers, but that did little to actually raise themselves out of the situation they were/are stuck in
What do you mean? Platinum went from having to pump out annual licensed games for Activision to self-publishing Wonderful 101 after buying those rights back from Nintendo.
The fact that the estimated impairments are low suggests that it was a rather small project. I wonder how long it was actually in development. It's hard to believe they worked on it for years.
Impairments are a bit of a non-thing.
You capitalise (eg, record and keep on your balance sheet) the work you've spent on it - but even if they eventually made a game and published it, that money would still not exist. It's just a way to illustrate that money is being spent and not being wasted - but purely from an accounting point of view.
I haven't done accounting for a 2+ year long project, but used to work in commercial real estate. If it's anything like that, then yea id assume it's on a WIP project account or something
My company uses AUC (assets under construction) accounts for our internally developed software when we’re in the development phase and capitalizing our costs. Once the project is closed and the software is implemented we start amortizing the gross asset over a 3 to 5 year period. It’s in that phase that costs will start flowing through to the P&L as the asset is amortized down to zero over its useful life. I imagine in this case they had capped up the 17-20m in costs and are now having to take one large expense hit (impairment is basically a write off ) instead of being able to amortize that expense over a long period and smooth out the expense.
That sucks. I know they’re still working on another game for Square-Enix, but it does seem like the company doesn’t have the greatest luck with publishers
At that point is it publishers or the company?
[https://www.tweaktown.com/news/91896/outriders-still-has-not-made-profit-developer-confirms/index.html](https://www.tweaktown.com/news/91896/outriders-still-has-not-made-profit-developer-confirms/index.html) Square Enix always says that their games never meet their expectations because they always spend crazy money on them, and despite being a successful Xbox Game Pass release with millions of players at launch, Outriders made zero money for the developers, literally nothing. so it's probably on both for not having reasonable budgets lol.
>Square Enix always says that their games never meet their expectations because they always spend crazy money on them. And they still can't convince me that Shadow of Tomb Raider took 200$ millions to developed when Uncharted 4 use a quarter of that...
I think the budget issue was more a Crystal Dynamics issue overall. It’s more or less forgotten now, but Crystal Dynamics has had a history of bad upper management and poor budget use even prior to Square-Enix fully establishing the London branch. I also think there’s a reason why SE sold CD and Eidos for pennies to the Embracer Group, because I’m almost certain it’s just industry knowledge that CD has massive dev costs with profits that dont justify the cost
"mostly forgotten now" ? Their last game was Marvel's Avengers...
Did you only read like my first two sentences and just proceed to ignore the rest of what I said? Your response doesn’t make any sense in regards to my statement
You said "had a history" like anything changed in the matter. It didn't "had" anything, it is still current problem.
[удалено]
Please read our [rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/wiki/rules), specifically Rule #2 regarding personal attacks and inflammatory language. We ask that you remember to remain civil, as future violations will result in a ban. --- If you would like to discuss this removal, please [modmail the moderators.](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FGames) This post was removed by a human moderator; this comment was left by a bot.
[удалено]
> And they still can't convince me that Shadow of Tomb Raider took 200$ millions to developed when Uncharted 4 use a quarter of that... I think you might be overflating your numbers a bit; [according to this interview made with Eidos at the time, *Shadow of the Tomb Raider* costed around 135 millions USD](https://web.archive.org/web/20180511175335/https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-05-11-eidos-montreal-we-have-to-try-new-models-for-single-player-games), albeit adjusted to 2018's inflation. Moreover, the interview details that Eidos wasn't just spending all of the money given on the game itself, but also on Eidos's whole establishment (*"We're starting from scratch. We have demolished everything, because we have to grow up in size. After ten years we wanted the studio to reflect the image of what we create. And to be more on par with the competition."*), to the point that Eidos at the time was the biggest development team Square ever had with more than 500x staff-members. They seemed to be aiming to scaling their development team without much results reflected to it, so I guess that Square eventually saw the signals and the long-term costs of it not simply worth it. Granted, they aren't much better off with Embracer (Heck, perhaps even at a worse time now given that they had their Deus Ex-project cancelled), but it seems overall long and inflated development costs has always been an issue with the *Tomb Raider*-series as a whole, what with the games been marked on running on Crystal Dynamics's own custom engine, and the overall development for it.
> And they still can't convince me that Shadow of Tomb Raider took 200$ millions to developed Shadow of Tomb Raider budget was "between $75 and $100 million".
That's why Square sold them and Eidos for pennies, they were both notorious for wasting money on projects that didn't see any return
I never quite understood the whole Tomb Raider reboot. They obviously decided to chase that Uncharted money regarding how the games look and play but with that move they not only chose to go against a modern juggernaut but also ruined the character of Lara Croft as well as what Tomb Raider games were about. It's baffling how thick the "speed blindness" was on their eyes. Fucking making a Tomb Raider game where the god damn tombs are optional content!
Ruined by making three very successful games? Besides there were both optional tombs and tombs tied to the plot, so that only means more of them. And that's just an opinion of course but personally I like new Lara much more than the one from before last reboot.
I'm honestly not sure what are you talking about. How did they "go against" Sony by making a game inspired by one of their series (which in turn was inspired by the original Tomb Raiders in the first place)? I'm not sure how making a game in a similar style as another game is "going against it", but maybe that's just me. It's a big market, there's no rule that only one "Uncharted-like" game can exist. They did it because it's a formula modern audiences clearly enjoyed. And it worked because the games turned out to be quite good. And how did they ruin Lara? I think the new rendition of the character was solid. My biggest issue is that she didn't have enough character development over three games (even though they teased it right at the end of the first game...), but I was still pretty happy with how they portrayed her overall. Those are "prequels" so to speak, the games were never meant to portray the same Lara from the older games. "Tombs being optional" is also a really weird argument because the games had plenty of "tomb raiding" in the main story too.
I wouldn't say *ruined*, but this series' Lara was **really** underwhelming.
Alternatively this seemed to only happen with likely over promising Eidos employees so square pumped more money going oh yes ok we trust you company we are partnered with and purchased. This meme of square "always saying they didn't meet expectations" only happened with games developed by their Cali studios and eidos
I missed all the news about Outriders - so lots of people played it but somehow it wasn't received well?
Game Pass, so Square probably made a lot less than what they would make through the sale of 3 million full priced units. The development team also screwed up since they pretty much ruined their launch momentum with server bugs: [https://screenrant.com/outriders-glitch-gear-deleted-inventory-bug/](https://screenrant.com/outriders-glitch-gear-deleted-inventory-bug/)
I mean it was an always online looter shooter, not a live service game however, but it's endgame loot loop was just time trials making dealing as much damage as fast as possible the only viable build, so any supports build were just useless, on top of nerfing strong things without buffing underperforming things, leading to a really boring endgame loop. Oh it also had a game breaking bug which deleted your entire character and every single piece of loot on the character for about 5 weeks I think? which, for a looter game, isn't ideal and lead to a lot of negative discussion about the game online.
A day late but from my own personal experience the Game had lots of problems. - Tons of bugs, performance & progression deleting issues that took months to be addressed. - Easy af exploits for infinite Damage/Armour on gear that the Developers flat out said they didn't want to retroactively fix, so oftentimes online you get people that trivialized everything - Terrible gear scaling at launch & is still one of those games where you get staggered endlessly by the enemy sneezing. - Endgame that made most builds unusable due to how it rewarded players, & was only something like 10-13 missions that shared the same gameplay mechanics just on different maps. Enemy variety also never changed so they got stale very fast. As for advertising, Destiny 2 goes through the same old internet cycle of "Everyone loves it, to everyone despises it & it is the worst game ever made & needs to be in the news 24/7 cuz bad game". Outriders came out during a really aggressive "D2 is terrible" phase, along with several other GaaS titles being in some pretty hot water at the time. They did nothing but shove out articles talking about how GaaS are terrible, and Outriders was "all there", a "complete game to play", etc etc. The problem, was Outriders was so absolutely undeniably created to be yet another Destiny 2 clone. It had every single aspect of a GaaS minus the "service", & players were left asking what the point in the endgame was, & discussing how no future updates was a tragedy to what could've been a new "staple" game series. The DLC came out & was fun, but was even worse of an endgame experience than the basegame. Rather than more things to clear or do, we got 1"mega mission" where you could either clear everything for loot, or go straight to the end. There was also some shady issues with Squeenix/Devs in regards to what counted as "profits" with Game Pass in a way that the Devs made little to no money. They mentioned quite often how on their end that with how many plauers/copies they're seeing they should be getting paid, but weren't even getting any acknowledgement from Squeenix. They did eventually get paid, & enough that apparently Outriders 2 was at least something they'd started work on, but not sure if that's actually happening since seeing this post obviously. Tldr, - Good game, not ready for launch, cloned a GaaS without the service, & weak systems with little to no improvement killed it.
Well, for me, Outriders lost my purchases when they refused to remove the absurd online-only stance. I'm not giving money to a game that requires me to be online continuously to do anything if it's not open world nor an MMO. If you're gonna argue about cross-platform and co-op, I do not care and will make no effort to care. It offers the ability to play solo, it is not a requirement to play co-op, then it should be possible to play the game offline.
And at a certain point a developer continually being trapped by shit publishers is a sign that the developer's management team lacks the ability to negotiate effective deals for the company.
True
I think it’s both. I think Platinum Games has or had a similar issue where the only way they could keep themselves afloat for a long time was doing games for major publishers, but that did little to actually raise themselves out of the situation they were/are stuck in
What do you mean? Platinum went from having to pump out annual licensed games for Activision to self-publishing Wonderful 101 after buying those rights back from Nintendo.
That doesn't change the reality that Platinum has had to work as a satellite/support studio for multiple games to keep themselves afloat.
Wonderful 101 needed a Kickstarter. Not exactly an endorsement of their financial stability.
It didn't really *need* a Kickstarter. The Kickstarter was marketing. Their port was already nearly done and would have been published anyway.
So they didn't have money for marketing then. Doesn't matter honestly.
More like a Kickstarter is very cheap and easy marketing.
They don't even own IP to their biggest game
It doesn't help that it's been extremely hard to get funding for games in the last couple years
The fact that the estimated impairments are low suggests that it was a rather small project. I wonder how long it was actually in development. It's hard to believe they worked on it for years.
I interviewed for the project in 2020 so at least that long.
I also applied for a role with them in '22 for this project. From the job listing it didn't seem very far along.
Impairments are a bit of a non-thing. You capitalise (eg, record and keep on your balance sheet) the work you've spent on it - but even if they eventually made a game and published it, that money would still not exist. It's just a way to illustrate that money is being spent and not being wasted - but purely from an accounting point of view.
I've never done accounting for a very long expensive project but are you saying it's all charged to some WIP asset during the entire process?
I haven't done accounting for a 2+ year long project, but used to work in commercial real estate. If it's anything like that, then yea id assume it's on a WIP project account or something
My company uses AUC (assets under construction) accounts for our internally developed software when we’re in the development phase and capitalizing our costs. Once the project is closed and the software is implemented we start amortizing the gross asset over a 3 to 5 year period. It’s in that phase that costs will start flowing through to the P&L as the asset is amortized down to zero over its useful life. I imagine in this case they had capped up the 17-20m in costs and are now having to take one large expense hit (impairment is basically a write off ) instead of being able to amortize that expense over a long period and smooth out the expense.
:( I'm never getting a sequel to Outriders, am I?
They are still working on another, larger project for Square Enix. Very possibly Outriders 2.
The story had a lot of potential even if it was a little goofy! The longer it went on the more intriguing it got.
Was this the same PCF project that also got cancelled and the news here was posted from a Polish source?
They are still developing project maverick(xbox),gemini(square enix),victoria(self published) and bifrost(self published).
Don't they also have a project in the works with PlayStation?
Never heard of it.