Once again, Arrowhead decided to go with Sony as publisher, they agreed with PSN account linking. No offense, they are are an independent studio, they did not need to do that. It is sad they lost money, but the developers already got paid. The worst thing that can happen is they have to switch jobs.

[–] Sanctus@lemmy.world 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Arrowhead did not have the infrastructure for this many people. Sony barely pulled it off at launch and cross play still sucks.

[–] derpgon@programming.dev 3 points 4 months ago

I mean, who would've pulled the sudden influx of players? The game being popular was expected, but not in such huge numbers.

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Developers generally have a choice between going to one of the massive publishers (which allows for better promotion and for expensive games to pay off, but comes at a cost of their will over devs), or to self-release, which means way less players will even know about the game, not to mention buy it.

Arrowhead realistically only had the first option.

That's not to say there's no fault of theirs in the situation, just that it's not a free choice and that Sony is still the main culprit

[–] BruceTwarzen@kbin.social 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If they truly go through that for the promotion, then they are idiots and deserve all the hate. Video games don't blow up because there is a commercial on time square that costs a million dollars, games blow up because they are good and people/youtubers and (yuck) influencers talk about it

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 1 points 4 months ago

If that would be true, all games would be indie titles.

Unfortunately, those promotions DO matter, and absolute majority of indie games never pull it off, because we never even get to hear about them.

Promotion makes a difference between a cool game no one knows about and a game everyone plays.

And when everyone is expected to buy your game, you have much bigger budgets to make the game not just conceptually good, but also greatly executed.