Spiderman 2: Budget, revenue and sustainability

So we’ve just finished up playing through Spiderman 2 on PS5. We liked it, for what it was. We got the 100% platinum trophy. It was lavish, gorgeous looking. No expense spared. We had heard that it was a pricey game to make so we looked it up and- HOLY-MOLY IT COST $300 MILLION TO MAKE.

Now that we’ve calmed down, let’s talk this through. First we have to acknowledge how we know this. We know this number and believe it to be true because it came from a wide scale hack of Insomniac Games. A serious criminal incident that has had major ramifications across the board. So when writing this, we had to think about sharing the figure. However, it is out there and has been for months from many major news outlets. So, reader beware and understand we don’t condone this.

The only reason that we even looked was because, at the time of writing, we considered it one of the most AAA games that we had ever played. It looked incredible on PS5. Everything was lavish. Huge and epic cut scenes, massive amounts of dialogue and quality voice acting. Dozens of customizable suits and gadgets and other features. It ran flawlessly regardless of how much was going on screen. It felt expensive because.. it was?

Quality versus Quantity?

To be clear, we aren’t conflating lavish with quality. Expense doesn’t equate to greatness. It’s just the sheen on Spiderman 2 hit us hard. It got us thinking about one of the current hot topics in gaming – sustainability and expense. It also got us thinking about something else. Do players want this?

At $300 million, this is a flagship title for Sony. Spiderman on the PS4 was that generations biggest exclusive hit. Sequels shoot for bigger and better. There are also a lot of additional costs that may or may not be in the $300 million. Firstly, those Marvel rights. Sony may own the rights to the the webhead’s cinematic universe but it still needs to license him for the game. Plus marketing etc. and other elements. It had a five year dev cycle.

Still let’s talk sustainability and why this kind of budgeted game is a problem for the industry.

An arms race?

So for a start, this is an escalation. The original PS4 Spiderman cost $100 million. Ouch, that’s expensive. Still, it went on to sell more than 22 million copies and made $827million in revenue. Not bad right? Not a bad return on investment.

For that cost, I’d argue sure, that’s right. A big licensed game, well received with a well known and established IP. To be simplistic, for a $100 million dev cost, you are looking at post development ‘profit’ of $727 million right? Plus the prestige of associated sales. I mean this isn’t going to be accurate. There will be distributution, marketing, fixed costs etc. not reported in that. Plus inflation right? Still we can be sure that it made at least a relatively healthy profit. Not to mention a good seller for the brand.

Now let’s compare with Spiderman 2 on PS5. So far its lifetime sales are an estimated 10 million copies. It’s early days for the title and we know that 10 million copies in only a few months is pretty amazing for a launch. It is likely that it will turn a pretty good profit like its predecessor.

The thing is, it is unlikely to be as GOOD a profit as its predecessor made and the risk is so much higher. With an additional budget of over $200 million it either has to sell drastically more copies to eclipse the revenue of the first (unlikely with a smaller install base with the current PS5 gen) or accept a loss of profitability. If it had failed, the loss would be that much harder to bear.

Risk and reward

For Sony this is probably low risk and an acceptable strategy. Make less profit but know that they have a talented and consistent developer, a popular franchise and a game that appeals to a lot of demographics. Plus its a prestige title, a AAA advert for PS5 right?

That’s Spiderman though. What about other major AAA titles across all platforms? What kind of risk can these companies take and get away with it?

Not all AAA titles are going to be that polished, that lavish or have that budget. They are still high though. Let’s compare cost with another PS4 and PS5 title, Final Fantasy VII Remake (on PS4, PS5 with their remaster and PC). This cost a rumoured cool $144 million to make for Square Enix. It launched on PS4 then released later on PC and PS5. It has sold over 7 million copies as of writing. We don’t know if that includes marketing etc.

That game is also lavish and on the same platforms. Still if we do the maths, we can see the games revenue compared to its budget is going to be a far tighter margin. The existence of a sequel would suggest that it made some profit and we are pretty sure Sony may have offset some risk with an exclusivity deal. At the same time, Square Enix has seen its stock drop a lot after posting underwhelming company reports in the last year.

All about the dollar bills

The point is that the cost versus risk margin is large and getting larger all the time on AAA games. Budgets creeping now on large AAA games of over $150 million, and probably north of $200 million means those games have to succeed which is never going to happen. Another big AAA comic book game, ‘Suicide Squad: Let’s Kill The Justice League’ won’t have been cheap. It’s reasonable to suggest a budget between $100-200 million given its long development time. It has got to sell well to make any profit yet it has had a lacklustre launch. If a publisher has several high profile duds of this size then there is a real risk of it going under.

This is resulting in two things amongst publishers. Firstly, less titles. A game like Spiderman 2 with that level of production polish took 5 years and 100’s of people to make. Most studios cannot handle more than one project like that at a time (yes, Insomiac is an exception). So if it now takes a studio 5 years per release and the average console generation lasts 7 years, well, we aren’t getting as many games. Compare that to the PS3/Xbox 360 gen when you got multiple titles from a studio in a similar time period.

Risk it for a biscuit?

Secondly it means less risks. Sony splurged that money because Spiderman 2 was a known commodity that took little creative risks. Major publishers are going to invest in what they think will return a guaranteed return. They are not blowing that cash on something experimental.

Which is a huge blow because gamers are losing out and we have to ask, do they care? What is causing that bloat? As suggested, inflation and a raise in costs for all things in society won’t be helping. That’s not the whole story though. Hardware producers in both the console and PC space generate attention and sales by releasing new hardware. The performance arms raise is increasing with every new GPU or console. These then necessitate games to take advantage of that tech.

Games are also getting larger. We have played both Spiderman 1 and Spiderman 2. In terms of hitting 100%, it took us close to the same time (approx 30-40 hours). We feel it was comparable in terms of story length and side questy stuff. Given that, Spiderman 2 was physically larger. It added almost 50% to the map. The game utilized none of that other than having more locations. It had two playable characters. It had more costumes and bits to go with it. The game was larger for.. reasons? We don’t know.

Does size matter?

Bigger and bigger maps, content, side quests, MP modes – it feels like they are getting larger with each subsequent title. We’re just not convinced that players are asking for that. Sure there are tech heads that want to see what their new piece of hardware can do when pushed. Yes, there are people that want bigger and bigger games. We’d argue they are in the minority though. If it brought the budget down and meant Sony could spend some of that cash on smaller niche titles, we’d have gone with the same map size as Spiderman 1. We could have done without 2 playable characters. We could live without the creepy attention to detail on Tifa in FFVII remake.

A recent game we’d point to was the DLC For Cyberpunk 2077. We lamented the huge but largely empty world of Cyberpunk when it released. When the expansion, Phantom Liberty launched, it came with a new smaller area that was far more dense with stuff to do. It was focused. It was… better?

Perhaps the industry needs to look at itself and wonder what really matters to gamers. A laser focused experience is far more pleasing to most than artificially padded empty worlds and maps. A drop in graphical fidelity can be acceptable if it is attached to a better game. Nintendo are the masters of that. When a AAA title costs as much as the GDP of some small countries, you have to question what the future is. Yes Spiderman 2 was lavish and spectacular but did we need that to enjoy the game? We’d argue not.

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