14 DAY TRIAL // Quantic Dream has shared some extremely interesting details about Heavy Rain, its last big project, and how it didn't cost that much to make but resulted in a serious profit for the French studio and for Sony, who published the game exclusively for the PS3.
Heavy Rain was one of the most interesting games of 2010, delivering a dramatic interactive experience that emphasized storytelling and all sorts of new gameplay mechanics.
What with its extremely polished graphics and its high production values, many people believed the game had cost a lot to develop and market and didn't even consider the chance of it making a profit.
That's not true, as Quantic Dream boss Guillaume de Fondaumiere revealed during a speech at the Digital Dragons conference in Poland, via GI.biz, that the game had cost around $22 million (€16.7 million) to produce and, after marketing and distribution, it cost Sony a total of $40 million (€30 million).
The actual earnings of the game were around $100 million (€76 million), which resulted in a considerable profit for both Quantic Dream and Sony.
Fondaumiere emphasized that even smaller independent projects, like thatgamecompany's Journey, were also quite profitable despite not fitting into traditional video game genres or being completely new intellectual properties.
"Heavy Rain was the ninth best selling game in the year it was released, so we made the top ten. It's true of Journey, too. I don't know the details of the budget, but I know from speaking to members of thatgamecompany that it was a profitable game for them and for Sony."
The Quantic Dream executive emphasized that people in the video game industry need to "stop thinking that innovation rhymes with unprofitable."
The studio is currently getting ready to release Beyond: Two Souls, a new type of interactive experience, and is also working on a PlayStation 4 game.