this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2024
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I mean... It's hard to really find solid numbers because Bethesda hasn't published them, but we know that Prey's opening week of sales was 60% less than Dishonored 2's was. All the estimates and discussion i can find on the Internet either concludes that the game lost money or, at best, broke about even.
It got great critical reviews. People who identify as "gamers" seemed to love it. But it gets compared to Bioshock a lot- Bioshock Infinite came out 4 years earlier and the market was saturated with similar games by the time Prey came out.
So I don't think it's unreasonable for management to want to move in a different direction. That direction ended up being a terrible one with Redfall, but i can't automatically assume that the studio would have been any better off making another game like Prey.
You can find every example you could look for in history. Studios who changed direction successfully, like Insomniac going from FPS to 3D platformer. Gamefreak went from platformers like Pulseman to making JRPG's and ended up making the most successful media franchise in history, while all of their later attempts to do anything else have failed miserably.
And it's not as if it would have made sense to have Arkane make Weird West. You can't just slash a AAA studio down to an indie overnight.
This is ridiculously well trod ground, but Prey also wasn't at all helped by Bethesda's marketing.
They had what is probably the truest successor to System Shock 2 that's been made on their hands and Bethesda made Arkane use the title of a 15 year old portal based shooter that had absolutely no relation to the game and didn't do particularly well because they owned the IP.
The entire Bethesda-Arkane relationship has been pretty thoroughly mismanaged.
Wait, I thought that was just a remake of Prey. System Shock 2 is one of my favourite games of all time.
lol and this is exactly why that decision was so baffling.
The game has absolutely nothing to do with the 3D Realms Prey game. It's truer to System Shock than the Bioshock series ever was. It routinely goes on sale for next to nothing -- highly recommended if you're a fan of SS2.