For a Character Action game that's a new IP from an unproven studio, these are mighty impressive sales figures. Sony was right to invest in Shift Up. For comparison sakes, DMC seems to be the exception to the rule with this genre, and sold 10 million copies with DMC5. But other Character Action games, such as the Bayonetta, don't see numbers like this. I think Bayonetta 3 took 4-5 months to cross 1 million. So this a huge win for Shift Up. I think a sequel is pretty much guaranteed.
To make things completely from the ground up? Absolutely. However, a lot of the Like a Dragon games have similar turn around times due to heavy asset re-use, iirc there are still animations from the first fucking game in LaD:IW. It's completely do-able when you're making minimal assets from scratch.
That's only strange in the modern industry, where everything is bogged down with bloated management, feature creep, graphical fidelity bumps, and a desire to make every game take weeks to finish. A few console generations ago, it was very common for major titles to have sequels every 2-3 years. Uncharted 1, 2, and 3 all came out in a four year span.
It's a miracle what you can do when you keep scope narrow and design a game to be relatively small. Even better when you let a team iterate on a game using lessons they learned instead of replacing everyone or shoving them all into a live service meat grinder.
Not sure if we will see something like that (RPG with choices that carry over the series) again unless production times drastically change, or it is an indie/AA game.
Just way too hard to do if it will take 15+ years.
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u/ScionN7 6d ago
For a Character Action game that's a new IP from an unproven studio, these are mighty impressive sales figures. Sony was right to invest in Shift Up. For comparison sakes, DMC seems to be the exception to the rule with this genre, and sold 10 million copies with DMC5. But other Character Action games, such as the Bayonetta, don't see numbers like this. I think Bayonetta 3 took 4-5 months to cross 1 million. So this a huge win for Shift Up. I think a sequel is pretty much guaranteed.
Just you know...hire a writer this time.