Polish developer One More Level has disclosed the first figures for Ghostrunner 2, a sequel to its commercially successful cyberpunk action game. Let’s take a closer look at the data.
Dead Island 2 is under Deep Silver, which belongs to Embracer. Dambuster Studios used to be Crytek UK, and Homefront The Revolution was absolutely a AAA game. A massively expensive AAA game that almost got the studio shut down.
Homefront The Revolution was absolutely a AAA game. A massively expensive AAA game that almost got the studio shut down.
They were an AAA studio then not now. I’m sure they shed/lost a ton of talent after. According to Wikipedia, the Deep Silver moved most of its staff to Damnbuster after Crytek UK was shut down. Embracer likely beefed up to make Dead Island 2.
Crytek UK was shut down in 2014. The team was scooped up by Deep Silver, and they spent another two years working on the game under Deep Silver (who also purchased the IP rights). It was a tortured project and it shipped in a poor state. They then put a lot of work into patching it. They had departures and structure changes and stuff, but they remained a large studio.
According to Embracer, in 2021 the studio had 172 employees, which is a bit on the smaller side for a AAA studio which can easily exceed 400 but they also had other DS studios doing QA and stuff.
172 employees plus all the outsourcing to people like Virtuos is pretty comfortably AAA territory, IMO. Wheras a studio like Teyon making RoboCop: Rogue City with about 60 employees plus some outsourcing is AA-tier.
It’s really an issue of employee burn rate. If you’re paying UK wages to 172 people, an AA budget (which is usually under 10 million but even 15 million sits on the border between AA and AAA) disappears quickly.
You mention Hellblade. Well, Hellblade had core a team of 20 people. It’s funny seeing them say:
“We want to develop games in the space between AAA $60 games and indie games.”
It’s like, we have a term for that. It’s called AA.
Dead Island 2 is under Deep Silver, which belongs to Embracer. Dambuster Studios used to be Crytek UK, and Homefront The Revolution was absolutely a AAA game. A massively expensive AAA game that almost got the studio shut down.
They were an AAA studio then not now. I’m sure they shed/lost a ton of talent after. According to Wikipedia, the Deep Silver moved most of its staff to Damnbuster after Crytek UK was shut down. Embracer likely beefed up to make Dead Island 2.
Crytek UK was shut down in 2014. The team was scooped up by Deep Silver, and they spent another two years working on the game under Deep Silver (who also purchased the IP rights). It was a tortured project and it shipped in a poor state. They then put a lot of work into patching it. They had departures and structure changes and stuff, but they remained a large studio.
According to Embracer, in 2021 the studio had 172 employees, which is a bit on the smaller side for a AAA studio which can easily exceed 400 but they also had other DS studios doing QA and stuff.
172 employees plus all the outsourcing to people like Virtuos is pretty comfortably AAA territory, IMO. Wheras a studio like Teyon making RoboCop: Rogue City with about 60 employees plus some outsourcing is AA-tier.
It’s really an issue of employee burn rate. If you’re paying UK wages to 172 people, an AA budget (which is usually under 10 million but even 15 million sits on the border between AA and AAA) disappears quickly.
You mention Hellblade. Well, Hellblade had core a team of 20 people. It’s funny seeing them say:
“We want to develop games in the space between AAA $60 games and indie games.”
It’s like, we have a term for that. It’s called AA.