And we also learned about how Days Gone, the current Sony Interactive Bend Studio game, might not have reached eight million sales after all.
Jeff Ross, Days Gone‘s director, was the guest of David Jaffe (Twisted Metal, God of War creator…) on his podcast. Here’s what Ross said: “[Sony asked,] are there any other IPs that we have that we can use? We only had Syphon Filter, but honestly, I have zero ideas on how to reboot it. I was not interested in that at all.
The pitch I was making was [an] open-world Resistance, (which) would be f___ing rad. We figured out all these open-world loops almost wrote themselves with Resistance or so many aspects of that property that lends itself to open-world gameplay. They weren’t interested in that either, and I don’t know how well it sold. They were interested in almost anything but a Days Gone 2,” Ross said. Remember: Bend was behind the PSP game Resistance: Retribution! (The series was primarily handled by Insomniac Games, though.)
GameInformer reported about how Ross wasn’t on the money with his comment of Days Gone hitting eight million sales (after Ghost of Tsushima has reached this milestone officially), as he took this data from a now offline website called Gamestat. “Where I got my data from, I had access to a lot of telemetries, and I could see stuff, and when we were at 5 million copies – when we were announced at 5 million copies – the telemetry data was at 5.8 [million].
I was using an external website – I think they’re offline now – but they were using trophy data, and it lined up with our internal telemetry data, so for me, it’s like ‘good enough’. I think [Gamestat] still has the data archived. Based on the 8 million mark, it matched out telemetry, and so I’m like, ‘good enough’. So maybe it was 7.7-ish, perhaps it was 8.2-ish, I don’t know,” Ross added.
Indeed: this site couldn’t keep track of physical game resales (in other words, the used game market) or the fact that Days Gone was a freebie for a month for PlayStation Plus subscribers. It’s too late now, regardless.
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