Heavy Rain cost €16.7 million, Sony made “more than €100 million” on it

By Stephany Nunneley

Quantic Dream’s Guillaume de Fondaumiere has said Heavy Rain cost €16.7 million to develop, and once distribution and marketing costs were added, the total came to €40 million. Still, the game was profitable: “Sony earned more than €100 million with this game,” he told the Digital Dragons audience in Poland today.

During his talk, de Fondaumiere said such success should give publishers reason to push for innovation.

“We should stop thinking that innovation rhymes with unprofitable,” he said. “Creating new experiences is also a way to expand the market.

“We need, as an industry, to be probably more creative, and probably stop creating, every year, the same games over again. Maybe create new IPs. We need publishers of course to take the risk to create new IPs. But we also need the audience to [vote with their wallets].

“It’s important that the entire ecosystem be more creative for this entire media to step up. I don’t want to convince everyone. Part of the industry is going to continue to create sequels on a yearly basis.

“There are cycles. We’ve seen that in the past, at one particular moment, a franchise, when you overdo it, the franchise falls apart and needs to be reviewed. Tomb Raider is a very good example of a prime IP that iteration after iteration became almost irrelevant. People didn’t want to play any more Tomb Raider. It took several years for a developer to create a new iteration that would again be attractive to the market.

“What I would like to see is publishers taking more risks and have a balanced approach between the sequels they are financing year after year, and the new projects that they are developing, and this balanced approach will make for a more appealing industry overall.

“Today we are seeing a crisis. We are seeing a market that is in decline… there is a certain creative crisis that is, in part, the reason why some gamers are playing less”.

de Fondaumiere feels this can only be resolved by offering new IP which will help “woo a new audience to games.”

Thanks, Eurogamer.