You were talking about Japan when I responded to you.
Yeah, he's wrong. For actual game development SCE, MGS and Nintendo are all roughly the same size now. More studios =/= more staff, Nintendo EAD alone is larger than Naughty Dog, Guerrilla, Polyphony Digital and Media Molecule combined for example.
Creative? Creative would be trying to spin PS3's Japanese sales as some sort of clear victory which you seem pretty intent on doing.
SCE doesn't have a single studio with 300+ staff even. Only Nintendo does among the first parties.
There's no vital necessity for a big press conference at Gamescom like there is at E3. It's more about the people - there are 250,000+ core gamers i.e. consumers visiting the show and Microsoft don't even bother having an own booth. That's embarrassing (the same applies to Nintendo, especially considering their upcoming Wii U launch).
Employees =/= game development staff. There's administration, marketing, tools/engineering and a ton else folded into that.
New IPs and 1st party.
The only SCE studio "with multiple hundreds of employees" is Naughty Dog, and it's under 300. Every other game studio has under 200 staff afaik, and many are actually under 100. Again, your figures simply don't add up, name each of these 16 studios and count their staff. You won't even get to half of 2700.
Actually since EAD is an R&D unit and not a seperate wholly owned studio, their staff pretty much is 100% games development, though they have been branching out recently and working with IRD directly on hardware engineering/design and they also have a small technology team for tool/engine support. They don't house admin, marketing, hr, etc, they're not a "company within a company" like Sony's studios are structured, or Nintendo's own external studios (ie: HAL, Intelligent Systems, Monolith, etc). In fact, Nintendo's employee count doesn't include subsidiaries afaik, so those external studios aren't even included in the ~5,000 figure.
They didn't abandon them and put 90% of their manpower on PS Move.
obligatory tag quote
So you can't account for that 2700 figure then, or you won't even try? I want to know which it is.
Similar in what respect? Naughty Dog isn't just an R&D unit, they're an owned subsidiary in themselves. That's not similar to Nintendo's internal R&D groups (EAD, SPD, SDD, EAD Tokyo, etc) but it is similar to their external studios (Monolith, Retro, NdCube, IntSys, etc). EAD doesn't house their own admin staff, they're just an internal division of Nintendo at large. SCEWWS has a different structure, and their 2700 staff would include stuff like admin/mgmt/communications/etc, as do many of their studios themselves have their own admin staff. For example, when Evolution and Studio Liverpool were merged two years back, there were redundancies but they were all administrative and managerial, the actual games development teams remained essentially intact. When Nintendo EAD absorbed R&D2 (who basically became EAD4) back in 2004, there weren't any redundancies because both are purely R&D divisions within a company.
HAL Labs, Intelligent Systems, Monolith Soft, Retro Studios and NST all have over 80 staff members. HAL and IntSys are each well over 100 in fact, I'm not sure where you're getting these figures?
You haven't even given any meaningful figures, you just keep quoting a PR figure you can't even begin substantiate for SCEWWS, and you're self-evidently unaware of Nintendo's actual size with everything you've claimed.
I don't think the world can take this much irony.
Can't or won't? That's all I asked?
I'm not denying it though, in fact that's what I've been repeating? It's just that it doesn't apply to NCL's internal R&D units (EAD, SPD, IRD, SDD, NSD), as Nintendo has a centralized studio structure within it. SCE doesn't, they're largely fragmented (as is Sony company at large).
Admin/HR/MGMT is small for a studio sure, but SCEWWS has additional staff not housed within those studios as well. Which is also sort of the point, SCEWWS doesn't employ 2700 people working directly on game software, just as Nintendo doesn't employ 5000.
And that 5000 Nintendo figure doesn't include the staff at HAL, IntSys, etc. Again, this is why you need to compare like with like and do actual studio counts to even start approaching a realistic figure. Anything else is going to be fundamentally inaccurate.
You've given zero meaningful figures, all you delivered was a useless 2700 PR figure that isn't at all reflected in actual studio counts versus a rough 1000 estimate which is clearly based on faulty information given the ignorant comments you've made on Nintendo's studio counts thus far. And then you accuse me of trying to unreasonably twist numbers? Do you have even a shred of self awareness?!
GAF am disappoint.
Haven't read the entire thread (yet) but after reading the first few pages of replies it seems many GAF members have a very negative view on this article and/or Sony's Gamescom Presser. Sometimes it seems like the first few posts in a thread tend to set a trend that carries on for the next few pages, that for what ever reason, everyone likes to agree with. It feels like some kind of band wagon at times. I don't know what causes such a large number of one sided opinions to appear in a row, maybe its a case of a bit of Group Think going on. In regards to this article I think the incredible amount of negativity is unfair and below I'll detail why.
While I agree the article itself comes off like it was written by a Sony Patriot, I don't disagree with the heart of it and the general point it was trying to make. Sony did as a matter of fact turn up, and for that matter put on a good showing. Their announcements were all pretty good (even if they weren't mind blowing) and I don't understand why more people can't agree on this. They had some good looking new IP like 'Tear-away' and 'Until Dawn' and introduced an extremely generous new offer to their customers in the 'Cross-Buy' initiative.
The point of that article (out side of the whose winning nonsense) is more that Sony showed up with some serious substance to Gamescom. If we are being fair and objective its not outside the realm of being reasonable to suggest that they outclassed their competitors new offerings at this show.
It never means anything. Sega/Dreamcast "won" E3 2000 by a landslide, if nothing else that should remind everyone what the value of trade show victory really amounts to.
