Game Development: Starting with Recreating the Anime Game Style

Chapter 581 Sony's Troubles

In addition, StarCraft has already released single-player games such as "Final Source", "Final Survival Guide", "Final Squad", and "Neko Neko", although they are small in scale.

But the price is also low. Compared to PSNs that cost tens of dollars, these little guys that cost a few dollars, or at most a dozen dollars, and are often on sale, are just too cute.

More importantly, these games are of decent quality, which is why they sold well on the PS4.

Finally, don't forget that the games in Project Star are not only exclusive to the Star Games platform, but Star Games itself is also their distributor.

A large number of games distributed by StarCraft, such as Lost Castle, ICEY, Runestone Guardians, Home Away From Home, Midnight Ringtone, and Dust Storm, have also been launched on PS4 with the technical assistance of StarCraft.

Starry Sky appears to be a game company, but in reality, it is currently the largest "distributor" in the entire China.

18年1月到5月，星辰系游戏在索尼PS4平台就已经突破了2亿美元的营收，要知道去年《尼尔：机械纪元》也才给索尼带来了的2.4亿美元的营收啊。

This caused those die-hards within Sony who insisted that "the console platform is all about buy-out" to question their own understanding for the first time.

Not to mention that StarCraft's recently released "Final Zone" hasn't even been released on PS4 yet.
However, amidst their excitement, Sony suddenly realized something: when Sony signed the contract with StarCraft, there was also a performance-based agreement.

When annual revenue reaches $100 million, Sony needs to reduce its commission rate from 30% to 25%, to $300 million to 20%, and to $500 million to 15%.
This reduction will be settled virtually as a promotional fund for StarCraft at Sony.

At the current rate, StarCraft will definitely reach $5 million by the end of the year.

In other words, Sony will put $75 million of its $150 million share into a marketing and promotion fund. Although this money is in Sony's account, it is nominally part of Star's marketing and promotion fund.

Soon, the person in charge at Sony Games discovered that this was a sweet torture.

There's money in the account, but it's not my own.

You can see it, but you can't touch it; what's worse, you can't spend it.

Seventy-five million US dollars, converted to Japanese yen, is a string of zeros that would make the accounting department work overtime.

In theory, this money should be used by Sony to promote and advertise the games in the StarCraft series. The problem is that even if Sony scrutinizes every penny, it wouldn't be able to raise that amount of marketing resources for StarCraft in a year.

That's US dollars! Not Zimbabwean dollars!
Shortly before E3, Sony Interactive Entertainment Japan held a separate meeting.

"We've added every possible clause to the Nogizaka46 endorsement contract, and the offer has been raised to 1.5 times the market price," a marketing manager reported, his face clearly showing that he had done his best.

"I've booked the entire homepage spot on the PSN store for the whole year, and the price is set at the highest level."

“We’ve placed offline ads in Akihabara and Shibuya, and all the billboards in prime locations have been reserved for Starry Sky Games.”

"And all the promotional resources for our partner media outlets within our channels have been fully allocated..."

As each department reported, everyone felt they had brought out all their most treasured possessions and labeled them with the price of "family heirlooms."

When the finance staff tallied up these exorbitantly priced resources and projected the total amount, an awkward silence fell over the meeting room. The numbers on the screen were far from the target of seventy-five million US dollars.

"Ahem." The person who organized the meeting cleared his throat, trying to break the silence. "Don't we... have some untapped potential resources? Besides Nogizaka46, could we also talk to Hoshino?"

However, no one responded.

After all, this topic itself is problematic. Sony doesn't have a dedicated person in charge of advertising revenue, and even this meeting was attended by people drawn from various departments within Sony.

Everyone knows that unless the security booth at the company entrance is also counted as an advertising space and charged according to the land price in Ginza, this hole simply cannot be filled.

This pain of seeing something but not being able to have it made Sony realize for the first time how terrifying Chu Chen was.

When the contract was signed, everyone's attention was focused on revenue and commission rates, and no one thought much about the "promotion fund" clause.

Who could have imagined that Starry Sky's money-making ability would be so terrifying? And who could have imagined that the seemingly insignificant additional clause would become so troublesome?

What made these executives even more uneasy was that, according to the contract signed back then...

Although in name, Sony doesn't have to allocate this money to StarCenter and it stays in Sony's own account, if the marketing and distribution expenses weren't used up that year, the excess portion would have to be returned to StarCenter.

In addition, all publicity and promotion expenses must be within a reasonable range and approved by Xingchen.

These additional conditions were all reasonable, and no one objected at the time.

But this boomerang-like attack means that while they can inflate the figures slightly, Starry Sky will definitely not accept excessively high marketing expenses.

Only when Chu Chen signs the settlement slips can the money be considered truly "spent".

Sony's marketing department once tentatively sent a promotional plan to Xingchen, which touted an offline event organized by Nogizaka46 as a phenomenal marketing event, and the price naturally skyrocketed.

As a result, although Chu Chen signed the document, he also replied with an email, which included a more detailed quote from another third-party advertising company for a similar event, at a price that was only one-fifth of Sony's.

The email contained only one sentence.

"The girls from Nogizaka46 are cute, but this is a one-time exception."

This incident ultimately led to Sony laying off the person who wrote the proposal, and the department head personally flying to the StarCraft headquarters to apologize.
After apologizing, Sony realized that from the beginning, StarCraft's attitude towards the revenue sharing was that StarCraft could provide it, but Sony had to be sincere.

Trying to deplete this fund by inflating prices is simply not going to work.

Since we can't focus on price, we can only try to improve quality.

We must offer some truly substantial, valuable, and top-tier resources that are difficult to measure using conventional market prices.

(End of this chapter)