Solely a small fraction of builders’ concepts for video games ever truly get made. Even ones that make it by means of the prototype stage usually by no means see the sunshine of day. A newly unearthed 2010 pitch for a Sony recreation from Japan Studio offers a tiny peak backstage of how builders attempt to persuade a writer to greenlight their undertaking.
New prototype supplies for an unreleased Sony recreation, together with a short trailer and pitch deck, have been lately shared by Obscure Video games on YouTube and archive.org. Titled “Stamp,” the undertaking aimed to be a 2D motion platformer for the PlayStation Transportable the place PlayStation button symbols (sq., triangle, circle, X) have been used to navigate obstacles and create new buildings within the surroundings.
Triangle would damage enemies, circle would create bouncy objects, sq. would create platforms, and X would act because the delete button for objects. The story, in the meantime, revolved round a hero known as Stampie rescuing his bug family and friends from the nasty oil bugs that had captured them. The sport would additionally characteristic a multiplayer mode with co-op puzzles or battles the place gamers tried to outlast each other.
“It’s like LocoRoco combined with Freakyforms from 3DS,” remarked one fan on Reddit. “I like it and need it.”
However the PSP recreation clearly by no means got here out. It presumably by no means acquired previous sure inner evaluation gates wanted to greenlight all the product. Whereas it’s inconceivable to inform why that was from the prototype supplies, the pitch deck reveals the forms of issues that go into making that sort of choice, no less than for a small, first-party transportable recreation again in 2010.
A manufacturing schedule estimates the time and prices to finish the sport and localize it (roughly 12 months and $3 million). A enterprise case part initiatives break-even factors for unit gross sales and the anticipated return on funding at varied ranges of promoting spend. It additionally factors to different “Kawaii style” video games available on the market and their respective gross sales numbers to provide a ballpark, together with Pokémon Coronary heart Gold and Soul Silver at 2.8 million copies and LittleBigPlanet at 2.5 million copies.
A lot of the pitch deck is simply charts displaying what number of copies the sport would wish to promote at varied worth factors and advertising budgets with a purpose to break even or exceed sure ranges of return on funding. Apparently, the folks making the decision didn’t suppose the maths panned out. The sport itself appeared like a neat thought, although possibly too small stakes for the place Sony’s first-party ambitions have been going.
Japan Studio was in the end shut down in 2021 and its remaining groups spun off into different divisions, together with Staff Asobi which produced final 12 months’s imaginative hit Astro Bot. Nonetheless, Stamp is precisely the kind of smaller whimsical experiment we don’t see as usually from Sony as of late, partially as a result of it not has a gaming handheld to promote them on. Perhaps that can change if the corporate ships the brand new transportable gaming machine it’s reportedly engaged on.
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