Frostpunk 2 Dev Recoups Entire Marketing, Production Budget in Three Days

Loved the first. Was terrible at it, but excited for round 2. Glad to see there are devs out there capable of making great games on a budget that is easy to recoup.

It's a little too miserable for me, and I can't stand snowy settings (I know, weird), but I'm happy for the devs.

Respect your fans + Know your market + Budget accordingly = Profit

Got this lined up thanks to Game Pass. I am hoping it’ll be a bit easier to survive for a bit longer than the first. Found the first enjoyable but could only play for about half an hour before losing.

Great message that the AA games market is not only alive but thriving. I hope that some companies will disarm and move from AAA to AA.

@Max_the_German It's weird the companies are pushing ever more expensive hardware. Consumers are trained to expect to need more hardware by poorly built games spending the tech budget in calculating water drops reflecting the light from Polaris, while AA is basically where all the profitability is.... We REALLY need to step hardware back 3 generations while making people feel like they're going forward. I think that's the point of the handheld revolution but Sony is busy thinking they're Nvidia.

@LuXifer what's that? I'm pretty sure I heard you say if you throw another 300m at it I triple my investment, right?

@LuXifer something for Sony to think about….

@Max_the_German At the same time Kunitsu Gami: Path of the Goddess sold under 20k copies on Steam.

Plenty of AA games come out and sell miserably but you generally never hear about their failings.

@LuXifer if only... Plenty of games with all those elements fail to sell well and make a profit.

Frostpunk is the sort of game you can play even if you don't like city builders. My problem with the genre is that there usually isn't an end goal besides "make big city" whereas Frostpunk has a loose narrative that keeps you going. Apart from that you simply want to see how long you can survive and how low you have to sink to get there. I have yet to play the sequel but I'm really hoping for more of the same...but better.

Well, what do you know - they released a beta test, got lots of feedback, delayed the game and apparently fixed most issues reported during the beta. Well done. And to add to what was said before - the strong, still-not-overused setting could be enough to get people interested in the game even if city builders aren't their cup of tea.

Very much enjoyed the first even though I was garbage at it, but had lots of fun trying and being in the world, so good to see its success!

I would love for Sony to look at producing 1st Party AA games for release on PS5/PC, honestly that's where the money can be found, all this hundreds of millions of dollars and 6-7 years for a single beige game is unsustainable.

Loved the first, bought the second on release but yet to fire it up, saving it for my weeks holiday at the start of October.

Glad it seems to be doing well though

@NEStalgia
We don’t need hardware to “go back three generations”, we need ai to speed up software development for AAA games.

@NEStalgia "We REALLY need to step hardware back 3 generations while making people feel like they're going forward."

If there's a heaven, I sincerely hope Satoru Iwata and Gunpei Yokoi are watching this all unfold and laughing hysterically.

@Max_the_German Sony's audience would revolt. They've been trained to expect and only want to play technically ambitious blockbusters, so Sony's trapped in this cycle where they need to create increasingly expensive AAA titles for their ecosystem. Apparently they have some games in the works that are even more expensive than Concord was.

@ChrisDeku Yeah that game was digital only it looked like Capcom themselves didn't believe in the game.

I came to the conclusion with the first game that it needed Keyboard and Mouse support in order to achieve success with the hard settings. Loved the game though

@thefourfoldroot1 Somewhat yes on both counts, but I'm not convinced AI is magically going to speed up game development. It means we'll either get more generic uninteresting games that make Concord look unique much faster, possibly even more broken games than the games we already get, or on the handful of good games that remain the stuff the AI is accelerating isn't what they were spending far too much time on anyway. The problem is scope including the technical scope for gfx. They're putting far too much work in general into a game that doesn't have a potential real market to justify all that effort because the market is never going to bay exotic pricing for a piece of entertainment. I don't think AI magically fixes those problems. It shrinks some departments, sure, but it doesn't really speed up the overall project that dramtically because the biggest consumer of time is really the human aspect, not the busy work. The busy work is farmed out for lowest cost anyway. It just makes it cheaper with less humans.

@Ralizah LOL especially Yokoi. Dude told the whole industry point blank in the mid 90's and nobody, even Nintendo at the time, listened.

@NEStalgia
Imagine if a dev could just speak their imagination and AI would create it. No need to actually code. Adaptations and alterations done on the fly, by voice, allowing many instances of a team’s imagination to be created and discarded or iterated upon.

The thing holding back more originality is the fact that there is a large time (and so financial) investment to creating and changing things, and that is a risk.

So, yeah, I don’t buy the whole “AI just re-uses what has been done before, output will be generic and boring” argument. AI is a tool, not a master.

Especially as this is what every human being does anyway, reinterpret and iterate from their experience.

Obviously there are lots of process things AI could take over too, but I’m concentrating on your originality concern, as I see it again and again.

I got it installed on Game Pass. Gonna get to it soon can't wait.

@thefourfoldroot1 Yep, imagine a gaming industry in which nobody is needed except Peter Molyneaux, who can actually ship a game that does what he says it does, and we can pay $200 each copy that's injected right into the hedge fund and megabank investors veins. Yep....good times ahead....

GAI currently by definition just re-uses what has been done before. It can give you what you want, kind of, almost, as long as it already has an example to copy or iterate on (kind of like the whole modern AAA industry, but so much cheaper for the bankers!)

AGI could be so much more powerful, could achieve sentience, all that jazz. But also if it can do all that, also can replace humans completely, for less. It won't exist for some time still, but that's the dreaded AI of sci-fi that's the pipe dream for corporate types who want all the reward and none of the cost.

The current AI, generative AI quite literally can only use what it already sees, whether created by humans or created by other AI or itself. It's not really "intelligent", it simply renders all human effort on the internet public domain and glues it together in usually awkward ways.

What you're talking about is Artificial General Intelligence. It doesn't exist yet. They're working on it. That's what would be your dream of reducing game dev to only Molyneaux That's what would also create giant land squid to consume the earth.

Physical release on consoles, please!

@thefourfoldroot1 Generative AI does not comes up with output out of thin air. It uses a data set to develop an answer - already existing material

@UntilRespawn
We are talking about two different things it seems. Never mind.

@NEStalgia
Yes, that’s why I used the words “imagine” and “could”. We are talking about the future. Which is why I said “we need” in my first comment. Just like we are talking about the future when people talk about job loses en masse.

To repeat my first post to you:

“ We don’t need hardware to “go back three generations”, we need ai to speed up software development for AAA games.”