Keeping Uncharted 3’s multiplayer running would be difficult if everyone playing hadn’t paid, says Naughty Dog.
Naughty Dog, developers of the Uncharted series, says that without the money from Sony’s PSN Pass it wouldn’t be able to afford to include as much online content as it has with Uncharted 3, and would possibly have to separate the online and offline content into separate products.
“We’re giving out a huge amount of content,” said Uncharted 3 director Justin Richmond, “and part of the reason for the online pass is that when that stuff goes online, it isn’t free. We have to pay for servers and all this different stuff to maintain it, and so at some point, you know, games have to make money.” Richmond also said that besides bandwidth costs, the actual content – which he said was different from anything else in the industry – had taken a lot of time, and presumably money, to create.
He said that the online content wasn’t just a “throw away death match,” and that the co-op mode was essentially an entire alternate history. In fact, he said that if played in the correct order, the co-op missions told a single, continuous story. He also said – predictably enough – that the sheer amount of content made it worth the price of admission.
Sony must have projections and estimates about how much money it can expect to make from the PSN Pass; otherwise Richmond’s comments just seem silly. It’s also a slightly disingenuous argument, because pre-owned sales don’t add additional load on the game’s servers; they just replace one user with another. Online passes are a great way for publishers and developers to try and make some money on pre-owned sales, but acting like it’s the only way that significant online components are viable just isn’t true.
Uncharted 3 comes out for PS3 on November 3rd.
Source: The Sixth Axis
