Stray pulled off AAA quality on a tiny budget using something loved by a lot of people (cat protagonist) but it had a number of advantages, primarily you don’t need licensing fees for cats, the dev time was deep into “purely a labor of love” length, and I don’t think it came out near any releases of a superior direct competitor. Any adventure epic right now had to contend with FF16 and people still messing around with Tears of the Kingdom.
I think licencing agreements are the death of many games. I maintain that the failure of Cyberpunk 2077 was primarily due to their involvement with Keanu Reeves and I need to bring in revenue to satisfy his Hollywood contract.
They were probably thinking they could get AAA game quality and indie game budgets, just by injecting a well known license.
I kinda hate that about companies. The ones who make hairbrained decisions are never the ones who pay the consequences.
Stray pulled off AAA quality on a tiny budget using something loved by a lot of people (cat protagonist) but it had a number of advantages, primarily you don’t need licensing fees for cats, the dev time was deep into “purely a labor of love” length, and I don’t think it came out near any releases of a superior direct competitor. Any adventure epic right now had to contend with FF16 and people still messing around with Tears of the Kingdom.
I think licencing agreements are the death of many games. I maintain that the failure of Cyberpunk 2077 was primarily due to their involvement with Keanu Reeves and I need to bring in revenue to satisfy his Hollywood contract.