Game Development

King Kong director Peter Jackson famously produced a series of over 50 video diaries while filming the 2005 remake, the first of which was published well over a year before the movie hit theaters. Almost a decade later, he would do the same thing for The Hobbit , uploading behind-the-scenes highlights from the set directly to YouTube. The only comp... See more

The case board, inspired by HBO show True Detective, originally featured free placement of clues and gated progress until players found a specific answer, but this led to high player frustration. Remedy shifted to a board that featured more questions with easier answers, leading to more dopamine hits with players, and finally scrapped free clue pla... See more

The economics of a platform holder building games for its own hardware are just different, and the end result is that Sony is one of a very small number of companies that can afford to spend these kinds of budgets on development while still sticking to a relatively old-fashioned pay-to-play business model. Neither game features any kind of battle p... See more

"Why make the player watch something when they can do it? If possible, we shouldn't rely on narrative bookending to tell the bulk of the narrative," Wasselin said. "Avoid exposition cutscenes, and tie narrative to interaction whenever possible. Even a small interaction is better than none, and when that isn't possible find tricks to make the player... See more

Sony earns a cut of the sales of third-party games on PlayStation, which of course it gets to keep with first-party games – meaning that its own games can justify very large budgets more easily, as they generate more revenue per unit sold. A further justification for taking this kind of risk on high development costs is that the games themselves se... See more

Horizon: Forbidden West has sold about 8.4 million copies, and The Last of Us Part 2 has shifted over 10 million. For Sony, both of these games are profitable – but “for Sony” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. For any other publisher, turning a profit from these games would have been a lot harder, because the economics of being a platform ho... See more

“[Y]ou can dislike parts of a game. You can hate on a game entirely,” Pagliarulo wrote several messages later. “But don’t fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is (unless it’s somehow documented and verified), or how it got to be that way (good or bad). Chances are, unless you’ve made a game yourself, you don’t know who made cer... See more