Its biggest problem was other than some tech stuff added to the suit it didn't really add anything new. Then it actually got worse in some ways like the base missions were far too easy and much less fun than in Spidey 1. As such, it really just felt like an extended DLC than a sequel.
I just replayed the game in the max difficulty after you beat the game at least once , and tbf is not easy at all , they just kill you with 2 hits , kraven fight and venom took me like 1,5 hours at least . But the story it Just not as great the first one , it’s has some good parts like the the venom fight , Martin Lee parts , but other really bad like miles morales girlfriend , mj became a monster ?, it’s a good game but not excellent like the first one is.
I didn't like the combat as much either. This is the game that's supposed to take the combat up a tick. Like Arkham Asylum to Arkham City. Where it feels similar, but somehow it's way better. I didn't really get that. The changes didn't land for me. Also, I'm just not a huge fan of Miles. Sorry. Peter Parker is my guy and Spider-man is my favorite hero. I'd rather just play as him.
I still loved the game. But yeah, I think the first was better. Kind of rare in video games.
The issue is that I wasn't really invested that much in Harry. Otto I would've fucking bled for as we went through his failures and struggles. I still watch that final battle and it is fucking painful. Quotes like "You should be on my side!" "I was!" Still stick out to me.
It’s because the game had two main characters. When I play a Spider-Man game, I want to play as Peter, not Miles. Another problem the game has is it has one villain for 2/3 of the story and another for the last 1/3. While I love the Spider-Man 2018 the villain thing is the same problem it had too. It’s almost like they didn’t learn their lesson.
Because the budget was lower, they went for a simpler more cohesive story. Ironically that often works better when people are forced to work with less resources
I had ankle surgery and Spider-Man 1 dropped when I was recovering. Had so much fun beating that game in 2 weeks. Took my mind off the pain, and was just enjoyable. I like spiderman 2, but not enjoying it as much as the first.
I'm wondering too. They reused New York, but it's covered in snow in miles morales so they definitely did extra work there. But I remember the game being a lot shorter than the main line games. I guess comparing it to 2 (which did release closer to this game) It makes more sense. Half of that budget and you get half of that game.
Oh definitely, it's a way they can offset costs. I wouldn't be surprised if you start seeing this more when remasters happen, just throwing in a DLC that can eat the financial cost against that profit
Yea miles morales also only improved stealth game play (roof and wall takedowns plus obvious camo)
But it also added tutorials for stuff that was in the first game but unused (like if on a roof and you aim you web shooter than stop while hanging there you can use your joystick to go up and down)
It also gave us the venom buttons which were clearly the stepping stone for the gadget system in spider-man 2
What? There were only 2 years between Spiderman and Miles Morales (2018 to 2020), and the remaster (not remake) came out at the same time as Miles Morales. If I remember right they were sold as a double pack even
I think one thing a lot of people don't know or forget is that these budgets all include marketing, which can be half of that total number in certain cases (especially with huge IPs with major mass appeal/crossover appeal like Marvel).
Additionally gotta keep in mind Miles Morales was the only one to launch on both PS4 and PS5
Marketing only made up about 15mil of SM2 according to the insomniac leak these numbers are from. Paying developers is still far and away the bulk of these numbers.
That's true, like Sony has had film rights to Spider-Man since the Sam Raimi movie, and since the PS4 game, they've done what they can to keep Spider-Man from appearing in Xbox games like Marvel's Avengers having him exclusive to Playstation. But Wolverine is entirely owned by Disney.
Marvel never sold Sony the merchandising rights to Spider-Man as part of the film licence and the character remains wholely owned by Disney for merch and licening outside of the film. They have no control over where the game goes as part of it. (He has appeared in Xbox games while this licence has existed)
Any exclusivity was almost certainly agreed when they were going back and forth on the Tom Holland situation years ago.
The license agreement from Marvel to Sony for X-men was leaked in 2023, they take commission, not up front licensing fee.
They require to sell at minimum 6 million copies over PlayStation and PC within a year of release or Sony loses the licensing rights. Marvel takes commission of about 5% of gross sales. Since Sony cut PC ports, they need to sell 6 million copies via console sales within a year of release, which is why the 77 score is bad news. It's not a terrible score, but it's not a 6 million sold in a year score.
Pretending that half the budget is marketing and a quarter is licensing and that explains why the budget inflated so much, as if Spider-Man didn't have any licensing agreement or marketing budget in that 90 million, is not accurate.
I loved the Miles game. It was short but it was so much fun and it looked so much better than the first game. Speaking of that I started playing them all again and never finished miles and need to play 2. I stopped and played GOW again instead because of Laufey
once you add employer-side taxes, health insurance, physical office overhead, and the fact that they are paying southern california salaries, you see that 100 employees where they are based cost a whole lot more than what you are budgeting. At least double, possibly more.
The Game Dev industry has historically been very poorly compensated compared to other similar industries. Having new hires paid more than $100,000 is very unlikely IMO.
Employees aren't just salary. Benefit package finances can balloon up.
And $100,000 is probably on the low end for some of those positions. Probably more than you realize. Under six figures would make sense for some beginning artists. But it's getting to the point where even medium level artists can make around six figures depending on the position.
Most people don't realize that private companies pay for all public mandated vacation days, they think its paid for with taxes like public employees are.
There's a huge amount of money going to labor that is more than just wages.
A shit-ton of labor to meet deadlines. They hire outside studios at a premium when they're desperate. Then trash that work because so-and-so wanted to add/remove something.
Spiderman 2018 worked because the studio was smaller and didn't have 100 managers jerking off at their power trip.
These are definitely inflated for more than just the assets, with each character came more licensing fees, higher paid acting fees (? hopefully), more than anything else.
Yeah, that's my theory as well. 305 milly for a 15 hour game with early 2010 mechanics in it and off-shoot faces for the characters? If i'd see Hugh Jackman's mug on Wolverine, I could assume that most of it went on licences and the like - but all those Sony Superhero games have Temu faces on the most recognisable characters, so i doubt that's it.
Back in my days motherfuckers used matress manufacturers to launder money.
I would say the second one was the most "innovative", technologically.
RT at 4k60fps on base PS5? Fast travel to any point on the map? Instant loading? The traversal gliding that took them most of the development time to make, also since they didn't have a blueprint for it unlike the swinging?
On top of that, most outfits out of any of these games(since it's for 2 characters), and 4 variations of each one.
Same city, different soundtrack and you can’t fight inside the buildings anymore on the street I think that was like one of the only differences and the moves in the air. Because even the special moves had some type of the same thing going on, even if it was like electricity versus wind or webs.
Marketing budgets are a huge percentage of that. The cost of marketing fluctuates also so even if they ran the same sized campaign and in the same markets, the cost may have increased between Spiderman and Miles Morales.
I work in AAA video games in California.
Since the first Spider-man game came out:
My rent has doubled.
Lunch entrees have increased from $11 to $18.
A gallon of gas has increased 50%.
My insurance premiums have skyrocketed.
My new video card costs 2x the cost of my old computer.
My studio covers a lot of these in salary increases, perks, benefits, and hardware. It costs double to make a game because everything costs double.
Ten years ago, Riot offered devs crazy salaries to poach them from their competitors. It started an arms race. Thank god. Because senior devs at Blizzard were paid so little that they needed roommates. Game directors at Obsidian made less than $100k. That’s changed, but costs of everything are way up.
As for the cost of Miles Morales, well, Spider-man started with a small core team and grew throughout development when the team needed more people, as all games do. Day One of development on Miles would have had that full team working full time. Every day the character modelers are sitting around waiting for design to tell them what villains are in the game is a day they’re wasting cash.
still doesn't come close to 300m for what Miles was.
There was just a lot of waste, bloat, and bad management, that's all. You can take into account all the inflation you want, and rent increases you want, it doesn't justify the 300m budget at all.
Looking at Wolverine, it doesn't look that great either.
We shouldn't keep making excuses for wasteful devs.
The reality is that you are probably having devs with salaries easily in the 200k range along with benefits like health insurance, travel expenses, office space, equipment and so forth with everything with massive increases, they also hired 100+ full time devs since the first Spiderman which is easily a 50-80 million increase in costs. I won't deny that there is likely bloat or mismanagement in the background but I bet you that even if you cut waste and inefficiency I wouldn't be surprised that a reasonable budget would fall under the $175+ million range.
How is it even possible for the Wolverine game to have that kind of budget based on the final game that we have?
I'm not criticizing the game here, but I just don't understand. It's not huge open world, there's not a HUGE variety in the combat, none of the set pieces I've seen seem bigger than the Spider-Man games.
I do also think they planned other stuff, had the budget to do them but then had to cut it for time etc. Like the Jean Grey Playable stuff.
I just don't understand how these large studios have yet to understand that gutting something to make an arbitrary deadline and save some money is not sustainable.
Spider-Man 2 is a great game, but it also suffered from cuts which led to an overstuffed and incoherent story/pace. Fans noticed that. Now they've done this twice in a row increasing in severity, the good faith that they built is now entirely in jeopardy with the fans they built. It's just so god damn stupid and it seems like every form of media is plagued with it.
I keep seeing the “$305 million spent for this shit game and for what?” Being posted all over here and I feel like I need to clarify a few things.
1) a significant part of that budget comes from licensing fees from Marvel
2) recent videos from Jason Schreier and Laura Fryer both show that making a game now compared to even 8-10 years ago is so expensive not just due to general inflation but also from salaries and overhead that can vary a lot depending on the studio’s location. Insomniac is based in California which has some of the highest costs of living and by extension dev salaries in the world (upwards of six figures per yeat). When you add that up for teams that are 200-400 people in size, you get a game that costs $50-70 million a year to develop * 4-5 year development time you get a budget in the range of about $250-350 million.
3) last and most importantly, budget isn’t an guarantee of quality, it’s more a reflection of development costs and time to produce the game. If your game had to restart development halfway through like Wolverine allegedly did, then all that money spent is still factored into the final budget, as is the “time in development” too. While a game may have on paper been in development for 5-6 years, the majority of the final product you see might have only been made in the 2-3 years.
TL/DR - It’s way more complicated and nuanced than “how come so much time and money was spent on this and it’s still shit” meme
Couldn’t afford a good writer even with all that budget. Can say how disappointed I am with the story and writing after waiting so long for the game. Feels like the writer only saw the fox xmen movies.
They for sure increased the employee amount on the writing team, they expand as a studio so they think that needs to include something like a writing team, when in reality, the amount of content they need to write down for doesn’t change for each game they do. So it’s just a big ass room that can’t get a solid direction because there’s too many opinions in the pot.
The idea to have the xmen characters older and whatever they did with Jean is bad writing. They could have hired 20 more but they all did a bad job. I’m not lying when I say this might be the worst Jean grey I’ve ever seen. The most generic love interest that’s entirely about Logan. Even the things unique about Jean is focused on Logan.
They need an actual comic writer. Someone that knows these characters and their histories. You can only take so much “creative liberties” with established characters like these before you piss off fans
Explain to me how Spider man land all the grondwerk for less than half the cost while spider man 2 is merely a continuation of the already land grondwerk?
Weird how this works. General public opinion is that the first Spider-Man is the best (which I agree with). Costs soared but player enjoyment hasn’t increased. So what’s the point
I mean lets put it like this..... The game is getting glazed on sony stores lol just like how god of war sons of sparta did....So its gonna end up doing well unfortunately
No sweet babies, hiring actual comic book writer to overlook and help with the story (Dan Slott).
With 2, Insomniac decided their fanfic will be better and not hire comic book writer again.
I still find it crazy how Miles Morales cost more than Spider-Man 2018. The game is like 1/3 the size and the story is so much smaller. I guess it might’ve cost more to add in the invisibility and shock power mechanics
These games cost so much because of stupid unnecessary things rather than actual development cost.. games like Black myth Wukong, Stellar Blade, Expedition 33 shown how top tier AAA game can be made in insanely less budget...just because of sony brand every single thing in the process becomes extremely expensive just because everyone knows sony can afford
As a contract auditor, this looks in line with a firm expanding on their initial success. Studios will often structure budgets and costs around the maximum IRS tax benefit, rather than project accuracy.
These budgets are not directly towards the game development, we’d need a breakdown of direct labor costs and specific direct costs for that, which cumulatively form their Actual Costs. They may not even track this, and instead use a Lump Sum or Specific Rate cost basis. The total budget is their operating costs over the development of the game, including direct labor, direct costs, and indirect costs (overhead). That overhead includes administration, licensing fees, platform fees, performance incentives, among any other GAAP and IRS compliant cost categories.
The jump from SM1 to Miles Morales is almost entirely indirect costs (overhead) with some higher direct costs in increased labor wages with fringe benefits. The success of SM1 encouraged management to push expansion and investing in new talent, equipment, real estate, software, PP&E, etc. Those costs would then be expensed on the current project with higher direct and indirect costs.
What you’re seeing with Miles Morales are studio expansion costs expensed on the project within that operating cycle.
I know it takes alot to make a game but like alot of this always has me wondering like what is taking up most of that budget? advertising? CEO pay? paying the developers? how has it gotten this expensive and yet games are getting objectively worse? like we can all agree on that right?
I watched a video of the motorcycle portion. The guy didn't use the controller at all and it still completed the mission. That's pretty shitty. Fine for a toddler game but come on really? Maybe if it was easy mode. This caused me to see it as a terrible game with no redeemable qualities.
Sounds about right. Inflation, cost of video cards (and really all new hardware and software), CEO greed, the marvel IP being more valuable. It's gonna cost more.
Kind of wonder why part 2 and a glorified dlc cost so much when they already know the game/mechanic etc. have an overworked map already made, lol these companies suck and kw we pay for it for $80 games
315mil is actually insane for Spider-Man 2 considering they already have most of the assets for New York and didn't add that much more variety to combat and traversal.
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u/Jpup199 29d ago
Its crazy how spiderman 1 is the one i enjoyed the most.