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Sony just spilled confidential Playstation information because of a Sharpie
- jandrese 3y agoCall of Duty revenue for PlayStation for 2021: $15.9 billion
- nomel 3y agoThat's incorrect. That's the total spent by players of CoD.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoI'm not an accountant, but I think that's what revenue is.
- aidenn0 3y agoLets say you have a hotdog stand. If I buy a single hotdog from you this year for $3.00, you get $3 in revenue. The fact that I spend $4800 total this year on eating out doesn't mean you have $4800 in revenue.
- GaryNumanVevo 3y agoAs in, people who own Call of Duty are responsible for that much spending across the PS catalog
- filoleg 3y agoYou missed the point. It isn't the money spent ~on~ Call of Duty by Playstation users, it is the money spent ~by~ Call of Duty Playstation players on Playstation products/services/etc overall (some of which have nothing to do with Call of Duty).
- SkyPuncher 3y agoIt’s a part of revenue. Pretty sure they have some licensing revenue (clothes, accessories, products,etc) and, possibly, some exclusivity income.
- dmonitor 3y agoIn 2021, 1 million playstation owners spent 100% of their playtime in Call of Duty
- that_guy_iain 3y agoThis really explains why I get totally destroyed at Call Of Duty since I spent about an hour a year playing it.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agoWhen I got my first full-time job, for about 6 months, I spent basically all my time when I wasn't working or sleeping just playing CoD. I think my ADHD enabled it. I got really good, really fast, was in something like top 5% of players. Then I got into music and mostly stopped gaming
- that_guy_iain 3y agoWhen I was 18 I used to be crazy good at EA's NHL. Sadly it was before internet gaming or I would have been super awesome. I was spending 8-10 hours a day playing, beating the computer at the hardest level 20-0 with 2-minute periods. No one I knew would play me. It's such a shame that when I really needed internet gaming it wasn't a thing and now it's a thing I like story games.
- doubled112 3y agoHave you recently tried to play any other old FPSes? Quake, Quake II, or even Unreal Tournament 99. If you manage to find a server, and active players, you can tell those players have been at it since 1999, and it takes all of the fun out of it.
- autoexec 3y agoIt reminds me of when I'd buy used PS2 memory cards and find them full of nothing but different versions of the exact same sports titles. As someone who plays a ton of different games in very different genres I can't imagine never branching out. If any of those 1 million call of duty players are here. I want to tell you that you're missing out.
- that_guy_iain 3y ago> The Last of Us Part II cost $220 million with around 200 employees: That just seems like crazy high figure. One of the things that is kind annoying me with games these days is how long it takes them to build the next one. Edler Scrolls is about 5-6 years away and that probably means Fallout is 10 years away. Sure we'll have Starfield but decades between games in a series is just bonkers.
- ender341341 3y agoElder scrolls has it's MMO at least (which as someone who hates MMOs doesn't mean much) but agreed, it's insane that we went from 4 years between morrowind/oblivion, then 5 for skyrim to likely 15 years for another mainline game. Especially since it feels like morrowind to oblivion probably had a bigger change in gameplay style than I'd expect from jumping from skyrim to the next one.
- CapricornNoble 3y agoMaybe I'm an outlier because I play tons of games that are 10+ years old, but... Skyrim w/mods is totally viable to me as an open-world RPG for years to come. I skipped Fallout 4, but if I had a refreshed (optimized, less-buggy, Linux-friendly) version of Fallout: New Vegas I wouldn't be concerned about getting another FO entry anytime soon either. Hugely excited for Starfield though, it scratches an itch I've had for years: blending Mass Effect, Deus Ex, Fallout, and Elder Scrolls.
- that_guy_iain 3y ago>Maybe I'm an outlier because I play tons of games that are 10+ years old, but... To be fair, everyone is playing 10+ years old games. GTA, Skyrim, Fallout, etc. The next versions haven't been released and are still all years away. > Hugely excited for Starfield though I pre-ordered it which is huge for me since normally I just wait years until the price drops. I just picked up Cyberpunk at the weekend which should show how long I am willing to wait before getting a AAA game.
- wing-_-nuts 3y agoLooking at the revenues from one game is pretty shocking. Once upon a time I went down a rabbit hole trying to figure out what percentage of a games revenue was made on on PC vs console. I've long since forgotten the source but for GTA V, something like 80%+ of rockstar's revenue was from console. Every time a game comes out for PC and the community complains about how 'unoptimized' it is, that figure pops in my head. Companies almost always develop to the most popular console, and put in the barest minimum of effort to port it to PC and elsewhere. On console the ram is shared, and moving data to / from ram can be accomplished via onboard streaming hardware. PC lacks this, so they try to load everything in one shot to avoid studders. That's why you see so many games these days that need 12-16gb of vram. Devs don't bother optimizing for PC as it's simply not worth the effort. This kind of shifts the price / perf curve way out on PC, and a lot of people are unhappy about it, but publishers don't really care anymore.
- Drakim 3y agoConsidering how much money people drop on gaming PCs these days, why is that sorta hardware advantage not available on PC as well? You'd think there would be a market for it, if offers such an advantage.
- constantly 3y agoPeople may drop more money on PC than the average console person drops on their co sole, but the number of people doing this to their PC is vanishingly small. So per capita it’s better, but in aggregate spending a bunch of dev time on such a small market isn’t smart. Put succinctly: even if this hardware advantage were available on PC, game devs wouldn’t optimize for it.
- nemothekid 3y agoAs I understand it, you can only get that advantage by having an SoC, where the CPU, RAM and GPU are all one unit (like Apple's M1 chip). If you want a system where to upgrade the RAM, you have to upgrade the whole system - well that already exists, it's called consoles.
- alexb_ 3y agoHow on earth does a game make sixteen BILLION dollars annually off a game? That's an absurd number. And that's on one system. You'd think with all that money there would be more competitors with much larger budgets.
- downrightmike 3y agoDestiny from Bungie makes billions, but that's largely from the in game cash shop.
- jsnell 3y agoDestiny does not make billions. The estimates when Sony bought them were on the order of $200M/year.
- rdw 3y agoIt's a very risky industry. It's quite likely to sink a ton of money into a game and earn very little back, basically wasting everything. Game series that consistently make revenue are even rarer so they're extremely coddled while they last, though it is expected that eventually they will die, too. The rare successes cover the costs of the common failures.
- autoexec 3y agoThat's a lot of DLC.
- jsnell 3y agoYou're misreading the text. They're not claiming that CoD makes that amount of money per year. They're saying that people who played even a minute of CoD spent that much across the PS ecosystem as a whole.
- jsnell 3y agoCan anyone here actually read the claimed text on those images? I'm seeing literally nothing there but compression artifacts. Are there higher quality images somewhere?
- sidewndr46 3y agoThis looks like the result of that weird compression "algorithm" that was transposing digits on scientific papers, not actual figures from the report.
- WalterBright 3y agoI can. Just zoom in a bit.
- autoexec 3y ago> almost half of PlayStation 5 owners in the United States also own a Nintendo Switch They say that this data comes from an "internal survey". I'm guessing PS5 consoles are using bluetooth to read whatever other console's controllers are in range and reporting that back to Sony.
- xadhominemx 3y agoNah I’m sure it’s literally just a survey.
- autoexec 3y agoIt'd be pretty bold to go around making claims about ownership rates across the entire country based on a poll of employees. Not only is that a tiny sample limited to specific areas of the country, people who work for the video game industry are probably a lot more likely to have multiple consoles than your average person.
- pie_flavor 3y agoOr, internal survey just means they didn't publish the results, not that they only polled employees.
- autoexec 3y agoI'd guess not publicly published, but it wasn't "internal" in the usual sense because it was found on confidential documents Sony was sharing with publishers. I'd hope they weren't giving publishers inaccurate data based on a biased employee survey so I assumed they'd use the easiest technical means of getting accurate numbers available to them, which would be polling nearby bluetooth devices. Other ways they might get that kind of data would be collecting it from data brokers, or by analysis of PS5 player's conversations/in game chats and messages.
- fckgw 3y ago
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago> Sony redacted the documents with a black Sharpie — but when you scan them in, it’s easy to see some of the redactions Man, I'm dumb. Does this mean they printed out stuff on paper, put ink on that, and scanned it back in? Because if it was done by hand, those black strips are damn regular. ???
- bagels 3y agoThat or they used a paintbrush in a digital app that isn't 100% opaque (many have alpha effect).
- nomel 3y agoRelated, I've always had trouble finding a black highlighter to purchase.
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y agoSounds like it, and I've seen it ventured that it was an intentional, but deniable, leak - to help scuttle a studio acquisition by showing the massive market impact.
- sidewndr46 3y agoit is plausible that someone who is a calligraphist did this redaction, they would have that kind of hand steadiness.
- unyttigfjelltol 3y agoSome lawyer goofed preparing a document and rather than respond with courtesy and grace, the Verge writes a story amplifying the error. I don't care about video game revenues but I think this trend of "gotcha" journalism is regrettable.
- kjs3 3y agoI understand that it's in fashion with a certain crowd to attribute to journalists every sin imaginable, but how is "you tried to hide something relevant, and you didn't hide it, so we're reporting what you tried to hide" somehow "gotcha journalism". What constitutes "courtesy and grace" here? "Well, gee-wiz Mr. GiantMegaCorp, we're real sorry we legitimately received some information you don't want disclosed, so as our solemn duty as 'journalists' we want to know if it's okay to publish it...you know, only if it's okay with you...totally fine if you want us to pretend we never saw it"? What's exactly 'regrettable' here, that a journalist didn't bury an inconvenient fact? How is this a 'trend', as if pointing out when people with power screw up never happened until recently? Before the current fad of "anything I don't like is fake news", this would have just been 'journalism'. Of course, these are also the kind of folks who call people like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein 'traitors', so what do I know.
- unyttigfjelltol 3y agoThere wasn't any real claim the redaction was illegitimate, only that the attorney for the party who wanted to protect it used the wrong technique to protect it. If the journalist wanted to publish the ... above-board way to do it would have been to ask the judge to order an unredacted version filed, or a change in the redactions... which I don't see any reason here a judge would do that.
- pipeline_peak 3y agoWell, the sharpie secretary is definitely fired. But this is nothing compared to the Apple employee who left the iPhone 4 prototype at a bar. Steve Jobs' minions made sure that man would never be physically capable of holding an iPhone ever again.
- WalterBright 3y agoYeah, I've also noticed that sharpies aren't effective for this. Scanners scan with 256 levels of black, so this can be enhanced to bring out the inked over characters. Some solutions: 1. use a grease pencil. The grease is opaque. 2. scan in monochrome black & white, and turn up the sensitivity of the scan. 3. use MS-Paint to draw a filled rectangle over it. 4. black tape
- nashashmi 3y agoThe best thing I do is scan the file digitally and use PDF blackout. And then “print to image” to a PDF printer. Other PDF editors have a pdf redaction feature that replaces the image pixels with white space. That works too.
- bastawhiz 3y agoI don't think that's sharpie. It's very uniform. In some of the images, it's done per word for adjacent words—who would do that by hand, making all the intricate rounded corners? And in some, the censored areas overlap, and the overlapping area is transparent (like a Venn diagram), which suggests it was done digitally. I don't think it's physically possible to achieve that effect by hand, at least not without being extremely deliberate. Which begs the question, if this was done digitally, did nobody look at the result? Nobody saw that the redacted text was easily still readable? From the look of it, it's like they used a tool for highlighting, with the color set to something dark. Without being too much of a conspiracy theorist, it almost seems like this was an intentional leak. Hanlon's razor and everything, but it wouldn't really be "malice" if they were trying to either sow false information or reveal details that they wanted to make seem like they were trying to keep private.
- xypage 3y agoI wonder if they did a black highlight digitally and then printed that, not taking the time to verify that the black was dark enough that it was actually making the text under it unrecoverable.
- nashashmi 3y agoI too have noticed all sorts of legal filings being blackened out ineffectively. And majority of the time it is not apparent unless you on a very bright monitor and zoom into the text. (I never said anything because I didn’t want anyone to feel embarrassed that the data they were trying to protect didn’t stay secret). I always wondered what happens when my lawyers do the same thing. When scanners shine green light into a page, the kinds of details they reveal is extraordinary. I have been able to recover hidden text this way. The same thing happened when I took a camera snapshot of a page. And used filters to make it gray. Hidden text security feature pops out.
- musicale 3y agoNot the first time Sony has run into trouble with Sharpies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key2Audio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key2Audio
- paulmd 3y ago> Sony says 1 million PlayStation gamers play nothing but Call of Duty. My colleague Sean Hollister has analyzed the document, and it appears to show: > In 2021, over [14?] million users (by device) spent 30 percent or more of their time playing Call of Duty, over 6 million users spent more than 70% of their time on Call of Duty, and about 1 million users spent 100% of their gaming time on Call of Duty It certainly helps that the game hit 250GB+ even back in the MW2 days, such that you basically have to empty everything else off your console to keep MW2 on it. Nice little perverse incentive to not care about disk space/not properly implement the ability to take singleplayer off (you can take multiplayer off though! in... COD... meaning it's single-player-only COD...)
- Freedom2 3y agoThe Last of Us Part II costing that much is absolutely crazy, considering the drop in story quality and the shattering of character's growth and arcs. It makes me wonder where the money went to.