The Callisto Protocol

$50m a year? That was some serious spending spree. What a shame I wasn't involved in this project

 

It wasnt that bad i think. Visuals are very impressive. I still didnt finish it sadly but i will when my new cpu arrives.

 

The Steam reviews at not encouraging.

 

Yeah i think most people are turned off by combat.

 

Either this was some scheme to launder money, or the dev team spent most of the money on cocaine and hookers.
No way this game cost 160millin to make.

 

Also worth noting, something the article doesn't state, the majority of the time budgets like that also include marketing and marketing materials.
So... massive booths at conventions, commercials...

Those marketing videos where they had famous horror related celebrities...
That budget most likely also includes the cost of building, hiring and filming all those pieces.

Most reports say the "average" budget for a AAA game is around 80 million. With tons of games going way past that.

Cyberpunk cost more then 300 million.
CoD: MW2 (original) cost 250 million.... because marketing costs are included.

 

@rflair I kind of agree with you, but I'd like to remind that only the content of a review matters, since, as an example, Steam's overall user ratings are completely useless. There are tons of accounts who don't play games more than an hour or two and just drop a silly "gud" comment, completely avoid of any substance or even the basis to write a review, and I don't mean by that, that every game should be finished. Recently the trolls there have began upvoting silly and useless reviews in vast numbers, which is baffling. So even if user reviews spell the correct picture, trolling and fanboyism has made it so that you have to hunt, really search, for the useful takes.

I personally think The Callisto Protocol is partly a victim of such mass minded approach where basically all the hype made the wrong customers buy the game, which leads to disappointed reviews. For horror fans, the game is simply solid, like I have stated in this thread before with my quoted Steam review.

 

This is true, but the Callisto protocol does not show that 160 millions were spent on it.
For comparison, Control was done with a 30 million budget. But it has much more content, better story, much better gameplay, better use of ray-tracing, more voice acting, etc.

 

Well you cant compare it to Remedy really those guys are at top of their game.

 

The Callisto Protocol January 19th Patch Notes
NEW GAME+

• Users who previously completed the game will have access to NewGame+ after the patch.
  • Application restart may be required.
  • Requires an active save file from game completion.

GLOBAL

• Fixed an issue where some users were not correctly granted the “The Protocol is About Life” achievement
• Added New Game Plus. Complete the game to unlock New Game Plus and carry your pression over to a new save. All weapons, upgrades, and Callisto Credits can be collected at the first Reforge
• General performance optimizations across all platforms
• Players no longer take damage when vaulting over obstacles
• Fixed multiple issues where certain camera angles or progression paths could cause environments to stream out and allow Jacob to fall through the ground
• Consistency pass on cabinets, lockers, and shelves to display correctly in High Contrast mode
• Voice leveling and subtitle mismatch adjustments across localized languages

PC

• Fixed low frequency crash in the Tunnels level during the Two Head fight
• Skip Cinematics button has been mapped to the Interact/Pickup input
• Fixed a long hitch when enabling Ray-Traced Shadows in the main menu
• Prevented mouse cursor from displaying during some area transitions

 

Well, if they can keep up the patches, I might pick this up later, although seemingly not before the DS Remake (unless that too comes out broken).

 

As said above, comparing to Remedy is not the way to go.

They have spent their entire time in the industry learning how to do more with less. Every game they've made has been done with smaller budgets and resources.
An average budget for a AAA game these days is around 80 million. And budgets include marketing expenses.

 

The people that made Callisto protocol are not some noobs. They made several AAA games prior to Callisto Protocol.
Still, Remedy made a lot more with much less money. Yes, this speaks a lot about the high level of competence of the teams at Remedy.
But it also speaks volumes about the incompetence of the team Striking Distance Studios.

 

We don't have a break down of the costs of the actual game development compared to marketing costs.

We have one total budget.
That does not speak to any levels of incompetence. I've said this before...

Again, CoD: MW2 had a budget of 150 million. Where the game development only cost 50 million. 100 million was spent on marketing.
Their "Mastering Horror" videos alone probably set them back an insane amount as they had to pay the celebrities appearing in the video.

 

How ironic is this... I got the game running on my old PC at a stable 30 fps with all the eye-candy and ray-tracing at 1440p to the point where I was actually enjoying it but now, several patches later, on a significantly more powerful new system with 32 GB of memory, the game is back to being a stuttering mess with noticeable framerate stalls and barely holds a locked 60 fps on the same settings! Optimisation seems to be incredibly poor in this game with the game having low GPU and CPU utilisation but still managing to dip below 60 fps. The developers do not seem to be doing anything about this.

 

Personally, I think people keep sticking with the budget number (when we never got a breakdown of what paid for what)....
But, people are completely ignoring the fact that the publisher set sales expectations.... for a brand new, survival horror property... at 5 million.

RE Village sold 6 million in it's first year. And that is one of the most popular survival horror series. And it did 6.
Yet, KRAFTON set sales goals for their brand new IP to 5...
That's the same crap that EA did with Dead Space 3 that killed the franchise. Setting sales expectations to unrealistic levels, all but promising the game would fail.

 

Didn't EA also do a cringy overpaid PR campaign for Dead Space (the one where they've had pensioners get scared by the game)? There seem to be more similarities between the two titles than meets the eye. Both also suffered from technical problems on PC, although the DS ones were never fixed by the company, and the port till this day relies on fan made fixes for the mouse. Here's hoping that at least those get patched in Callisto.

 

This one?