Grand Theft Auto V Earns $800 Million in a Day
variety.com
variety.com
I played this yesterday (I don't own a console) at a friends house and what they've been able to achieve on these consoles is impressive considering these consoles aren't next gen and are resource limited.
It seems like that happens at every end of every console's life. Last of Us, BioShock Infinite, and GTA V are three fantastic games to close out the PS3.
eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_specificatio...
A whopping 512mb of RAM to run GTA 5
I picked up my 360 in the launch month, and it's still running eight years later. Have to give them credit for that as I've put a lot of miles on the system.
Wow, I have had like 4 consoles, 2 original, elite and finally the slim. All but the slim RROD, to still have your launch edition is mighty impressive!
My experience was that the RROD issues were sorted out well before the elite and slim 360s (worked in GameStop), so it's surprising you had problems with those versions.
> While both games were developed for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, the team were able to render the world of Grand Theft Auto V with greater detail than in Grand Theft Auto IV because they had become familiar with the hardware over time. Art director Aaron Garbut opined that while the aging hardware of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were tiring to work with, "I think one of the most amazing features is the way we handle lighting in the game to maintain a consistent look despite the constraints on realistic lighting and shadows on current hardware", he explained.[28] Vice president Dan Houser agreed with this sentiment, explaining that working on Grand Theft Auto IV with relatively new hardware was difficult, but "now we know what the hardware's capable of, so it's become a lot easier to move things along and a lot more fun, too".
So it's too early to "close out the PS3" IMHO.
It could be that there is so much PS3 specific tricks in there it just wouldn't work.
The idea that the PS3 has some sort of huge advantage is mostly Sony propaganda, and people who don't get that "Cell" doesn't mean something magic that makes everything faster, it means something more like "overoptimized for a particular use case" that only makes certain very narrow tasks faster.
Now I can finally justify this point I've made before with this: There is a reason the PS4 is fleeing the Cell architecture just as fast as its metaphorical feet can take it. If companies, like politicians, weren't obligated to put on a public facade that says they never make mistakes, they would admit that it was an error and never really panned out the way they hoped (to say nothing of what they claimed!). As it is, if you read in between the lines a bit in this presentation, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHXrBnipHyA , the PS4 lead came about as close as he politically could to admitting it. (Props to him. The PS4 is looking really solid to me, and I think that is essentially 100% because of this guy.)
It will however eventually release on PC and generate a nice chunk of change over a few years at various price points.
No game in the history of ever has sold as many copies on Xbox 360 or PS3 as GTA V just has either, no? ;-)
That said, I think I agree with the inferred point that simultaneous PC release wouldn't have had a huge impact on revenue.
Several blockbusters, such as Call of Duty, have sold more on consoles than GTA V currently has, just not on day 1.
It sucks that every major game lately is just made for the lowest common denominator and then if we are lucky, we get a half assed PC port. Dear god what a mess GTA IV was and how many patches it took to actually get it to a workable state.
I still wait on a studio that actually takes enough pride in their work to develop something that really pushes the envelope of PC gaming. You could take that then and show even the "Next Gen" consoles what actually is possible nowadays if you don't go for the bargain basement.
Could be the reason they don't, but I expect piracy is the main reason it's not on the PC yet.
You do often see tech demos of engines that show of what can be done, but you develop for the market, which is the same for most technology (cough Internet Explorer cough)
Which brings us back to: Piracy is a market failure, not a cultural failure.
'Piracy' was defined as copyright violation by the copyright holders, not by general usage.
Therefore, we should fight that usage, just to compensate the balance.
That's exactly how language is defined; by popular usage, not by design.
Of course, theft and copyright infringement are not directly comparable, being quite different concepts.
Look at Watch Dogs. Another open world hacker-esque game and it's coming out on consoles and PC on the same date. Rockstar are a much bigger company with more resources and bigger budgets to develop for multi-platforms. They are a console oriented company, but I remember when GTA was much bigger on PC than any console back in the 1,2 and 3 days especially.
Well, put it this way. If there are plans for next gen, we'll definitely get a PC person as they are effectively the same in many ways.
If I didn't know the game was released and well received, I'd say there's no way in hell it would be possible to put it all together on time, on budget, and without major flaws. Damn impressive.
It's easier to be on time and on budget if you break rules like 8 hour days and proper remuneration of the workforce.
I cannot comment on quality of work for Rockstar tho.
If you're offered a bottom-level job at a great studio, these are often presented as a stepping stone to said dream, so many people end up there and stay until they're drained.
Again, I can't testify that this is the case for Rockstar, but I know it's the case with some other major studio's.
You can easily find this story, like on Gamasutra: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RockstarSpouse/20100107/4032/...
So either it is 100% male OR the female staff are either unmarried or do not have the same complaints.
If I write a blog post about how I feel I'm being exploited by my employer, that doesn't necessarily mean my colleagues don't feel the same.
I can only speak to anecdotal evidence, but I've hired several engineers who previously worked at Rockstar in the UK and haven't heard anything outside of the ordinary.
EA's sports game studios, or Korean/Chinese outsourcing/free2play sweatshops are places where it really sucks.
Consider this situation: You've spent most of your life training yourself as a game developer, only to find out that every company you'd like to work for will drive you like a slave. 50+ hours per week is not merely an option, but a necessity if you want to remain competitive. And since everyone wants to be a game developer, that means your salary is less than in other types of compsci jobs.
So, that culture stuff you're speaking of? It's bullshit. Ultimately it's a method of getting you to do the bidding of others. It's not about you at all. No one is looking out for you, and while you may feel like you're part of a team, that team has no loyalty to you. If you stop performing at peak level for even a couple months then your prospects will be severely harmed.
Employees get to feel proud they've literally sacrificed part of their life to help someone else succeed. And you're supporting pervasive lawbreaking in the name of "that's just what it takes"!
If game companies are finding it hard to recruit talent, well, that's probably because people are finally wise to their ways. You won't find anyone who was more in love with the idea of being a game developer than I was, but the reality of the industry is abhorrent. The shared culture has utterly decimated any hope of work-life balance in the gamedev industry in the US. My options were to work elsewhere or to move overseas. And by working elsewhere I get more cash, get to work on problems that are more interesting, and I learn more.
European developers seem to have figured out how to develop next-gen games without any of the bullshit methods of control you've described. Maybe US companies should start caring how.
> Employees get to feel proud they've literally sacrificed part of their life to help someone else succeed.
Your tone suggests outrage but you're just describing the nature of competition. You are agreeing to trade your time and skills for money. "Getting you to do the bidding of others" is a cynical way to put it, but if a certain type of team building yields good results why would a company not go down that path? Of course you're going to be replaced if the you aren't producing the results you were hired for, this is the nature of competition. There is no fair or unfair. Employees are not sacrificing part of their life for someone else, they're trading their time to someone else. No one is forcing anyone to be a game developer.
That's a fine-sounding statement but in reality if you want to be a game developer in the US then you'd better be willing to live a life where you wake up, go to work, get home sometime later than 8pm, spend ~2 hours unwinding and maybe visiting with your SO, and then go to bed. Repeat forever. A lot of times even on weekends. The studios I worked for all made it regular habit to make pizza available in the evening and then refuse to allow devs to leave. Crunch time became a way of life. Anyone who dared not to like it risked ostracism. Those who were fired for it severely harmed their career prospects, precisely because every other employer has the exact same culture of insanity.
Put that way, it's more than a little bleak. If I sound outraged, it's because it's outrageous that it somehow became the norm in the US and that nobody bats an eye because "that's just the way it is."
It's not about fair or unfair. I'm not saying anyone should force the companies to change. I'm saying the companies had better change themselves before the nice little train of momentum they've built up from legions of starry-eyed young developers finally runs out when those developers realize they could be going off and starting their own companies rather than playing by your rules.
Why not?
What if game developers were to unionize? Or we were to strengthen the 8-hour work day laws? Or boycott the most egregious companies?
What's wrong with those or other ways of forcing the companies to change?
Unionizing is only effective in situations where employees can band together into a shared social framework. During the industrial revolution this was facilitated by the massive size of workplaces. But at each studio there are usually less than 30 devs.
I think ultimately the solution is to start our own companies imprinted with a culture of employee well-being and work-life balance. If it's a success, and it's located in a gamedev hotspot, then all of the top talent will want to work there. This synergizes well with free market aims, because competitors who don't get top talent soon go out of business.
The relevant California law is that computer professionals are exempt from overtime law if they "mainly perform intellectual or creative work that requires independent judgment in the design, development, documentation, analysis, creation, testing, or modification of systems, programs, software or hardware. In 2012, they were required to earn $38.89 or more an hour ($81,026.25 or more annually, or $6752.19 or more monthly)."
My modification to that law would be to raise that to $75 or more per hour. What might be reasonable "horrific unintended consequences" of reclassifying programmers thusly?
"But at each studio there are usually less than 30 devs"
You don't know much about the history of unionization, do you. That's okay, neither do I. But I do know a bit more than you do.
The early unionizations include unions that came out of the guild system, not the factory system. For example, Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842), which settled that unions were legal in the US, dealt with the journeyman shoeworker Jeremiah Horne, who charged less than what the Boston Journeymen Bootmaker’s Society required.
It was legal for him to charge less, but then the Society would have called for a walkout. The master of the shop "would not wish to lose five or six good workmen for the sake of one", so fired Horne instead.
So we have a union which is effective even against a shop of 10 "boot developers", as it were.
Why do you think that unions are only effective in large factories? Do you mean to disregard the history of craft unionism, or are you speaking mostly out of a lack of knowledge?
They have no real incentive to optimise their workflows to be more productive in less time because they could simply crunch their staff until they burned out and then bring in a fresh batch of recent graduates.
It is true that people work voluntarily but on the flipside it is still important to highlight these things so that potential game developers can make informed decisions before deciding to invest heavily in this career path.
Thankfully, there are still a handful of game developers in Dundee. One of the original designers on GTA now runs Tag Games in Dundee, which does some quality mobile games.
And I don't even live in a first-world country.
That's what we are interested in knowing. Everything else you are writing is speculation and propaganda.
[edit] I'm not talking specifically about Rockstar or games companies - this is standard practice in many sectors.
Suffice to say that after reading those stories I'm never touching a QA/tester game industry job with a 10-foot pole.
See also: silicon valley startup culture.
Anyone else notice the nod to Vangelis' Blade Runner theme in the first part?
On the other hand, I don't think a very large portion of game development teams are engineers anymore. Not only are the tools much better, there is much more focus on other things like art, sound, marketing, design, etc...
It's a good point that the proportion of employees who are engineers is probably lower than in the past. I wonder how engineering vs art/music salaries compare.
/go back to moving bits from one column to another.
[1]http://gamerant.com/activision-lawsuit-infinity-ward-salarie...
According to sources that come up in Google (bureau of labor, indeed, glassdoor, salary.com) the average nation wide software engineer salary is close to that plus or minus $5K.
On HN it feels like nation wide game industry numbers are being compared to the salaries of the best engineers at the most successful Silicon Valley\SF tech companies. When you compare against top tier companies we're looking at a $20K+ jump. But if you start comparing against top tier game developers like Valve, Riot or Naughty Dog you get comparable results.
I know that salary surveys are understandably taken with a grain of salt on HN, but I feel like it's a better yardstick than the "common wisdom" that gets thrown around.
(That is a massive painting on the side of a building, incase that isn't clear)
"Hype" definitely gets sales. It leads to people checking out the game/movie, paying attention when they otherwise might not have - it's a form of social proof.
$800m in sales, first day. How much of that was due to marketing? Who knows. But it looks pretty positive to me, and stunts like this are part of it. Almost certainly positive, IMO.
Sure, ROI is tough. But think about the wrong decision to not market and sales flops in the first 2-3 weeks. You can't make up that lost revenue from launch.
But to build awareness and convince more people to go out and buy it during the opening weeks, that's where a poster like this comes into play. Constant visible reminders of the release date turn a 500m release into an 800m release
Another big-ticket budget item is clearly music licensing and celebrity involvement for major-character voice acting (like GTA:SA had Samuel L. Jackson in a major role for example and some old-school rap celebs for "radio moderator" talking).
Kinda depressing, considering how game developers are typically underpaid and overworked... But as long as people are willing to put up with it, it's going to continue.
And marketing people aren't?
I'm a game developer, and it depresses me how much undeserved hatred and contempt "suits" get form us "technical" guys. We work hard to make something, and they work hard to get it to the people. If you don't like the idea that games like GTAV should be advertised in order to get the money they deserve (and I think no one here disagrees that GTAV deserves it), you should be disappointed with the audience who wouldn't notice it if not for a marketing budget.
Let's just look at it logically; the budget dedicated to development determines the quality and quantity of what can be created. If you have a finite pool and < 50% is going to development and > 50% is going to marketing then logically you're going to get a lesser product than if you put say, 75% in development and 25% in marketing.
So yeah, that's sad. You don't even need to get into who works harder, etc.
Then imagine marketing submitted their budget independently. Their proposal included some high cost, unique advertising campaigns and totaled $150m.
Both got approved.
In most circumstances, budget is a finite resource that people fight for, and one person getting more means someone else getting less. But for a very successful company releasing pretty much the world's most successful game, maybe they just gave everyone what they wanted/needed and marketing's costs somehow were legitimately higher.
I agree it seems weird to have the split like that, but not all development efforts are cash deprived, and if it isn't then more money won't help much.
I'm not singling out Rockstar here, ALL huge companies have this kind of ridiculous split between development and marketing in today's world. It's just the sad reality of how business is done.
Congratulations sir. You must not watch much TV. It's understandable if they have commercials on all the sports, but I don't even watch much sports and I feel like I've seen the GTA-V spot a hundred times.
Digital download is the future. They have chosen to ignore it at their own peril.
Non-yearly (or biyearly) release schedule for an extremely well-known franchise.
No outstanding publisher issues of note, especially gaffes related to gameplay "dumbing down"
A number of factors contributing to somewhat inflated review scores including normal reactions to AAA titles and the GTA series' tendency to hit the right buttons for reviews that doesn't necessarily reflect on gameplay
Or am I being prejudiced? Does it run OK on a PS3?
When the PC version comes I'll probably double dip.
I'm surprised the revenue surpassed Call Of Duty Black Ops 2 though that is one of the most popular games out now and sold out on just the pre-order.
Another thing of note about why GTA IV looks so much better than GTA 3 is that GTAIV uses what's now called Euphoria from Natural Motion: http://www.naturalmotion.com/middleware/euphoria/ Its synthesized animation looks way more natural than the stitching together of hand-made animation and I'm actually surprised that it didn't take the character animation world by storm by now.
Edit: I'm a dunce. See the comment by adventured.
I played GTA IV for about a week prior to getting this game on the same console/TV. I used to play it on a 12 inch SD screen so I thought it looked great but it's the first time I have played it on a 32" HD display and it looks pretty bad. The depth of field makes blurred regions look like a bad painting. It looks horrible. After playing GTA V for a few hours, the graphics are miles apart even if it's not entirely apparent at first :)
Your judgment of the value of a game is purely how it looks? That sounds very destructively reductionist.
GTA V shares literally nothing with GTA IV -- different character, location, dynamics, physics, storyline, music, voice actors, etc, but because it's people and cars that makes it an expansion pack?
So they threw GTA IV out and did everything from scratch? I very much doubt it.
That said, we're talking about GTA here, the game that outdid itself with every single iteration. Why should we expect any less this time? I want to see what they'll come up with now that they have the power of PS4 behind them.
Rockstar Games is famous for a reason.
FYI if any of you play it and like cheat codes, here they are http://www.gta5cheats.com/
There is only so much you can do on a small screen.
The form factor is well suited for a certain type of game.
It also limits the social aspect of gaming.
Expansive, visually stunning games built to be played on a large screen with other people in the room or playing multiplayer will be around for a very long time.
Mobile games have their place, but they are competing for an orthogonal piece of consumer time.
They lump the whole of 'gaming' as one thing, not realising that a new market segment emerging doesn't cannibalise the old one.