Jane Abbys’ “Blood Desert” rejects Sony’s PS5 exclusive contract, and the multiplayer mode will be launched after the launch of “Dokobi”

Pearl Abyss’ new game “Crimson Desert” will be available for trial play for the first time at Gamescom 2024. The release date has not yet been announced. Officials revealed game promotion, platform release strategy and other information at recent investor events, including ” “Red Blood Desert” will not apply for a version number in China, the PC version is almost completed, and there are reasons for rejecting Sony’s exclusive invitation.

“Red Desert” focuses on an open-world action-adventure experience. It is the latest masterpiece after “Black Desert”. It has entered its seventh year of development. Jane Abbys provides a few minutes of updated content almost every one or two years. As the release date of “Red Blood Desert” approaches, Jane Abbys will pay more attention to the actual experience marketing model this year.

South Korean financial bloggers attended Corp Day, an investor event held by securities company Kiwoom on September 26. The minutes of the meeting were translated by players on the Resetera forum. At the beginning, it was mentioned that “Red Blood Desert” continues to emphasize the characteristics of the open world, but Gamescom’s actual machine was not complete. Showing this part is disappointing for players.

“Time is limited, and the Gamescom display mainly focused on character actions and boss battles. We later uploaded a 50-minute video to emphasize the open world real-play experience. The upcoming G-Star event (exhibition content) is still uncertain, but we We are considering adding more content that showcases the characteristics of the open world.”

Participating in large-scale gaming events requires a lot of money. Jane Abbys shared that they spent 1.5 billion won on Gamescom alone. G-Star is expected to spend 1 billion won, but the company will not give up spending money on promotion and believes that through live broadcasts Word-of-mouth communication is very important, and a marketing budget of 20 to 40 billion won has been allocated for this purpose.

The release schedule and new sequels of “Red Blood Desert”

Jane Abris expects to announce the release schedule of “Red Desert” at the end of 2024. In view of the fact that this game is a traditional home console masterpiece, the official will focus most of its marketing on Western players. “In the future, it will provide global players with More trial opportunities, including media and live host experience events in various regions.”

As for why it took so long to make “Red Blood Desert”? In fact, Jane Abs originally planned to launch it earlier, but in order to create a high degree of freedom experience, they spent time modifying their own game engine. “The epidemic has had some impact. The main reason is that they started rebuilding their own engine Black Space in 2018. At that time, The open world adds many features that were not originally available, which lengthens the development time.”

“Red Desert” is said to refer to a number of games. It drew a lot of inspiration from “The Witcher 3” in the early stage. The development team also obtained various aspects such as high degree of freedom, narrative techniques and overall atmosphere from “Assassin’s Creed” and “The Legend of Zelda”. “Our chairman Kim Daeil (김대일, Kim Daeil) believes that Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Legend of Zelda are among the best games in history.”

The interaction between game characters, NPCs and the natural environment is a feature of “Red Blood Desert”. In order to achieve diversified interactions, the team uses AI to allow NPCs to make situational judgments, such as escaping from battle based on the player character level or the number of people.

Jane Abbys is also applying AI on a large scale in its own engine. It not only imports NPC decision-making, but also improves development efficiency. The workload of half of the art designers on the development team has been greatly reduced after using generative AI.

“”Black Desert” has been in operation for more than 10 years, and the update team has about 250 developers.In comparison, the development of “Red Blood Desert” only used a maximum of 250 people, all thanks to the efficiency of the new engine. “As of the end of the second quarter of 2024, the development of “Red Blood Desert” has almost been completed, and the development team has been reduced to about 170 people. The remaining employees are devoted to the development of the multiplayer RPG “DokeV” (DokeV).

There has been no update since the official debut at Gamescom 2021. There are rumors that the development of “Dokobi” has been stopped. Jane Abs dismissed the rumors and said, “We must focus on making “Red Blood Desert” first.” The development team is now gradually moving to “Red Blood Desert”. “Comparable”.

The team plans to launch “Red Blood Desert” in the second quarter of 2025and will subsequently develop online content similar to the multiplayer mode of “GTA 5”. Among the 170 developers, about 50 will stay in “Red Blood Desert” to develop the multiplayer mode, and the remaining 100 people will move to “Multiplayer” Comparable” team.

The single-player plot game of “Red Blood Desert” lasts about 50 to 80 hours, and will have a clear plot ending. The multiplayer mode is expected to be launched within one to one and a half years after the game is launched.the time point will be launched after the release of Multi-Comparable, the multiplayer mode will add fashion styling, limited weapons and other in-app purchase elements to extend the long-term revenue of the console game.

Jane Abbys expects “Red Desert” to sell 300 to 400 million units, with an internal target of 5 million units. “We collected feedback from about 700 players at Gamescom, and 80% to 90% of the responses were positive.” Negative. Reviews said that the environmental effects were too strong, the game was too difficult, and the perspective did not have a camera lock function.

“We do have the function of locking the camera, and the effect can also be adjusted. The difficulty may be due to players being directly thrown into challenging boss battles without relevant game experience. Most of the negative feedback can be easily solved by us. question.”

Exclusive offer from Sony

In addition to Jane Abby’s internal evaluation, Sony has basically seen the entire game and expressed its strong intention to release it, which made Jane Abby think for a long time. Sony commented that the experience and story of “Red Desert” are close to that of “Ghost of Tsushima”. The latter has sold more than 10 million copies so far and only launched on the PC platform in May this year after its launch on PS4 in July 2020.

“If we choose Sony as the publisher, the game will be exclusive to PlayStation for a year, will not be released on Xbox, and the PC publishing rights will belong to Sony. Despite these limitations, Sony’s marketing capabilities and various unique bonus sales strategies are very attractive force.”

However, after evaluating the expected sales volume and revenue profit sharing structure,Jane Ablis has decided that it would be more advantageous to publish Red Desert on her own, and is 99% sure that she will publish the game herselfin a traditional publishing contract, 30% of the game’s revenue will be used for platform fees, and the remaining 70% will be divided between the developer and the publisher.

“Recently, Stellar Blade signed an exclusive contract with Sony. That was mainly because they did not have the required distribution team, unlike us.” Jane Abs has global distribution capabilities and has overseas branches, plus Based on the stable performance of “Black Desert” for 10 years of operation, the conclusion is that “Red Desert” has more advantages in using its own resources to promote and publish.

Unlike most console game developers’ strategy of “developing for consoles first and then porting to PC”, “Red Desert” claims to be a traditional console masterpiece, but it was developed on the PC platform first.

“We are currently conducting QA testing for the PlayStation version, including bug fixes and optimizations. Although the PC version can be released first, we plan to release the PC and console versions at the same time. This is the main reason why “Red Desert” has not yet been officially released. .

Some people are curious whether “Red Desert” will apply for a game license in China?Jane Ablis said she did not intend to pursue this version number,Because players of popular games in China usually play through Steam and VPN, “therefore we believe there is no need to apply for a version number. China’s console market is relatively small, accounting for only about 3% of the total market.”

“I’m not sure how many players will play games through VPN, but the recent success of “Black Myth: Wukong” in the Chinese market has caused PS consoles to be in short supply, which may be beneficial to us. We are also preparing for digital downloads and physical packaging sales .

Regarding the game features and design concepts of “Red Desert”, the reasons why commercial engines such as Unreal Engine 5 are not used, and the gameplay details of “Dokobi”, please refer to Resetera’s translation content. All information is subject to the official website.