It’s been an absolute gossip bonanza in the past couple of weeks for those of us who follow the games industry. The hearing on Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has exposed reams of previously confidential data about how Xbox and PlayStation do business, and some of the juiciest info was released accidentally. Some poor clerk with a black marker did a poor job redacting some of the documents involved in the case, meaning that they were easily legible from the court’s official scans. The documents were quickly removed from public view, but not before journalists had had a field day with them.
This is how we now know exactly how much Sony is spending on its showpiece PlayStation 5 games (previously we only had an estimate from ex-PlayStation boss Shawn Layden, which turned out to be roughly accurate). Horizon Forbidden West (pictured below) cost a reported $212m over 5 years, with a team of 300; The Last of Us Part II came in at $220m and took even longer. And those figures don’t even include marketing costs.
