Proves that IP alone doesn’t sell games, they still need to be good.
Guardians is good. GOTY material, easily on par with God of War (I thought it was better than GoW, actually).
Avengers has a decent 7/10 campaign. But its terrible marketing and GAAS soured so many people, no wonder it sold peanuts (I even finished its campaign during free weekend) and even poisoned Guardians.
What we don’t know (I presume we can easily find out with a few searches) is how much it cost to make The Avengers and Guardians. What the overall salary of the teams sold. I mean are they ridiculously overpaid?
Crystal Dynamics is in Bay area US and has around 500 employees. Rough math, 5000 dollars per employee gives you 2.5 million USD burn rate monthly, 30 million yearly. A game like Tomb Raider or Avengers thus easily costs 100 million USD on development alone, and then there is another 30-50 million to spend on marketing.
To recoup that, you need to sell at least 3.5 million copies at release at full price.
And that's just to recoup.
Meanwhile, game like Kingdom Come Deliverance cost 20 million USD including marketing, and it is much larger and mechanically rich game than anything by Crystal, with comparable production values.
Embracer should invest more in central and eastern europe
