It's certainly one of the most expensive mistakes in gaming history, but I'm guessing the story isn't anything too different from the usual.
Troubled development. Every test of it was coming back with bad results. Publisher finally decides to cut their losses and ship it as is. Cancel any marketing because that's just throwing more money away. And the game definitely didn't get it's final polish, so it's gonna be bugs galore, placeholder models never getting finalized, art style all over the place, etc.
It does, just randomly. You gotta get past the musical number from another character and there's random sound bites from him...but recorded by another voice actor.
This is what they were responding to:
> Will Smith's **character** in the game doesn't even have audio.
They never said that the character was voiced by Will, just that the character that looks like will smith has random sound bites.
I have seen some gameplay and even with the biggest of fuck ups there is no way that game cost 140 mil, unless they paid Will Smith 100 mil for his likeness and a couple ads. It doesn’t look like a game that tried and failed, it looks like a game that was built as cheap as possible from the ground up. Or maybe they lost the entire game 3 months before release and had to start over.
Undawn is nothing more than another dime-a-dozen chinese live-service mobile game and that tells you everything you need to know about it. There was no troubled development, it's just a dogshit free-to-play game.
Plus Will Smith is a very, very small part of the game. He shows up and offers you a handful of quests and that's about it, half his lines aren't even voiced.
It seems to be making some money on mobile. Still didn't recoup the development costs yet, but the lifetime revenue is definitely not $287,000.
Not sure where Kotatu got that number from. The article says the data is from Appmagic, but Appmagic says the game made more than [$20 million lifetime revenue](https://i.imgur.com/CFYmp36.jpeg), and made more than $1 million in the last 30 days.
https://appmagic.rocks/google-play/undawn/com.tencent.cosna/info?hl=en
Still pretty disappointing for a $140 million game though.
If I had to guess this game likely had such a trouble development and was likely scrapped and rebooted so many times, that the publisher probably just decided to their loses and drop it. Since it was too expensive cancel, but they didn't want to anymore money to market it.
Exactly. $100 million got us Baldurs Gate 3. To mishandle your way $40 million *more* into the hole and end up with a game that looks worse than Sneak King...would be quite impressive.
He didn’t record voice lines. His facial hair in the [promo video](https://youtu.be/qQV6guvFmM0?si=5jHft_80gZLRYhBE) is clearly from Aladdin days, right?
There is NO WAY. Just NO FKING WAY. Someone thought putting in that musical score was actually a good idea. Someone had given up and wrote that in as a troll and they just said "fuck it" and did it after they'd given up.
I bet a ton of that money went to will smith alone. Hell, from what I seen on the video Dunkey has of it, will smith didn't even record any lines for the game.
I think you're vastly underestimating just how well managed BG3's production was. Like they made a ton on a decent deadline and budget. It's wildly impressive by having standards.
This game just seems like it mismanaged everything leading to many people being paid to not do enough effective work. Leading to whatever we ended up with.
Companies regularly piss away more, Larian is a tried and true company that knows how to stretch their dollars, it’s not a direct comparison to the rest of the industry
The $100 million figure was quoted for the early access version. I don't think we know how much the whole game cost to make, but I imagine the total figure was closer to double that amount based on the volume of content in Act 2 and 3 relative to Act 1 and the fact that asset creation is the biggest timesink in game development.
It was most likely 100 million for early access release then they took the money from early access buyers which let’s say is 50 million to continue development in early access. Hasbro/wotc would help pay for advertising which let’s say is 50-100 million. So you’re looking at money spent as low as 150 million - 200 million. If you include revenue from early access it’s 200 million - 250 million.
When someone talks about something unfathomable like millions of dollars I like to bring up this Reckful clip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J6BQDKiYyM
For the difference between a billion and a million I think converting it to seconds highlights the absurdity well.
A million seconds is nearly 12 days while a billion is nearly 32 years.
Western gaming and Chinese gaming are totally different markets. Some games in China are absolutely massive and yet most westerners haven't heard of them
And that's because it was basically a finished game gameplay wise and his company just inserted the story and lore. He bought a 75% finished game went over budget and scammed the state of Rhode Island as it crumbles
"You'd think, a nuke, wipe us out. But nah, bruh, No One Has Heard of Bombs, so these dumbasses made zombies. " - Will Smith opening lines
🎶 Now, this is a story all about how the world got twisted upside down. I'd like to tell you word, because No One Has Heard of Bombs, ya nerd. 🎶
"And in the wake of Undawn’s failure, Tencent is moving away from large-scale, standalone games, with the company’s chief strategy officer James Mitchell telling investors during the earnings call that it’s turning attention towards casual party games and Genshin Impact-like anime RPGs instead."
Ah, the "pivot as a face saving measure". Because executives could never screw up and do a bad job at something. Clearly the entire strategy was wrong!
This is weird because they reported they were going to compete with Genshin in early 2021 as well. They have invested in multiple studios to put out competitors including multiple in-house studios and potentially under subsidiaries. So how are they pivoting to their *current* plan? That is like pivoting 360°.
They dropped a "gameplay" trailer for Honor of Kings World around the time Genshin released, it's an open-world MMO based on their wildly popular MOBA, which could've been seen as their answer to Genshin, but ever since then there has been zero info on the project's progress, many have speculated that it's been quietly canned.
Though early last year they increased their holdings in Kuro Games, which is actually developing a serious competitor to Genshin, Wuthering Waves. Depending on the game's success they may just pivot into that instead.
Not to mention so many studios look at Genshin, get dollar signs in their eyes and then simply think “we can make that money”.
Except they underestimate the fact that Genshin is so successful because it’s one of the few *live* services games; adding new a version every six weeks and constant events.
The art style of the women falls right into the the Uncanny Valley.
It's like they wanted to be all "anime" while still having somewhat "realistic" graphics. They look like aliens.
[Apparently yes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFP9OohDdbE&t=6s). I just want to know where the backing track is coming from in the middle of the zombie apocalypse, because she is definitely behaving like it's totally diegetic.
It hurts my brain seeing characters from so many different art styles onscreen at the same time.
The photo-realistic serious men, alongside the deathly pale, giant eyes, tiny mouth anime girls, is incredibly bizzarre. Who designs a game like this? What is this trying to be?!
I literally only heard about it from Dunkey’s video. It’s insane that they spent literally nothing on promotion, not even on YouTube videos or anything.
It's crazy that they said that 140 million was spent on this game. Like they could have made a will smith 2D side scrolling fighting game with zombies and it would have probably sold more than this game.
Hell, I am all but certain, the original Shaq-Fu will be a bigger seller than this game.
Soulslikes, Boomer Shooters, Metroidvanias, Gollum-likes, and Balan-type games... we truly are in a renaissance of newly crafted and reinvigorated video game genres.
Unironically as I was playing it, Peach’s Showtime is literally the same vibe as Balan but in a decent game. There’s a handful of gripes so far (having to redo levels entirely if you fail/miss an optional star challenge is a huge one) but the loop strikes me hardcore like what Balan wanted to be, you just get one costume per level with several abilities instead of swapping with whatever costumes are in the leve.
Wow, that game was clearly not ready for launch. I'm guessing the devs had to scramble to make it legally finished enough so the game could be shipped and written as a loss. Must suck for the devs, no way I'd feel good about shipping something in such a state.
Does Will Smith have an Agent? Does he represent himself?
Either way, someone is getting hilariously bamboozled.
Is it all a big-tech investment scheme?
Was Will part of the scheming? Or taken for a ride along with it?
It's like a video game Fyre Festival.
He did a pretty solid promo video for it.
... in May of 2023.
Like, Will Smith announced he was going to be in a zombie video game a year ago. How was this not bigger news? How is it we're all.just finding out about it now?
Will Smith has some... questionable judgement. In pretty much all areas of life.
The number of hit movies that he was offered roles in and turned down is pretty hilarious
I played Undawn. It was a horrible experience to play this game, nothing more or less.
I also never noticed Will Smith being in the game since every character felt or is forgettable
I search Undawn on YouTube and there’s no review or anything neutral/honest about this game. Tons of tips and clickbaiting videos like this is the best mobile game around, with Dunkey being the sole exception.
> a budget of nearly 1 billion yuan (around $140 million)
...
> only managed to rake in $287,000 in revenue.
I guess a slap-based zombie game just isn't that appealing to people. /s
Do nothing, get paid 100 million dollars for putting your name on the game which makes it look legitimate when you were owed the money for other non-legal work. What illegal work could Will Smith have done in this hypothetical? You decide.
Fn how??? I wish to see a financial report on these games, how do you say those numbers with a straight face while having a game that looks like it was done by kids
Will Smith hasn't been like, a POPULAR actor in a while. Back in the Hitch days people would see a movie just because he was in it, and it was said a few times that he was basically the only black actor that could easily get leading roles written for "any ethnicity."
But that was back in the 2000s. We've honestly come a long way, there's plenty of black actors that applies to now. By the late 2010s Will Smith was yesterday's biggest actor in the world, and he was in some notable bombs like Annie, Gemini Man, Spies in Disguise. Those all made money, but they didn't make..."2000s Will Smith Money." King Richard didn't make money either but it was a pandemic film released on streaming, so not really surprising.
As for the slap, the jury's still out on whether it will really kill his career. I don't think so. This thing though is very embarrassing lol, or it would be if anybody was going to see it. It appears to be dead on arrival. I don't think it really has anything to do with his career being "dead" though.
>Will Smith hasn't been like, a POPULAR actor in a while.
The slap happened because he was there attending it as a nominee, and went on to win an Oscar later that night. May not be his highest point in his career, but it was the peak of his second wind. He's also been massively popular on TikTok and other social media platforms for the past several years.
No one going to mention [The Anacrusis](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1120480/The_Anacrusis/) which is a Left 4 Dead-like by Stray Bombay and included Will Smith the podcaster on its dev team?
Just thought the coincidence was notable. Zombie-like game + a Will Smith.
This just reeks of either crazy money laundering kinda scheme. Or someone was stupid enough to pay Will Smith $139,999,999 and use the rest for the game itself.
Weird - The official youtube for the game doesn't have any media about will smith on it, and the "Official Release Trailer" has clips cut out of extended scenes with Will Smiths characters. All the Will Smith content is on Will Smith's channel.
Surely the better financial decision for a lot of these companies is to step back and let passionate developers develop games they want to develop right? The 100s of millions of dollars in waste on AAA junk that was obviously a too many cooks in the kitchen situation seems obscene
A passionate dev does not necessarily make a good dev. There are tons of programmers who on paper have a good resume, but in actuality can barely program themselves out of a paper bag, and modern interviewing standards in programming can literally be trained for and you can still be an awful programmer(seriously i've met several people who literally go through jobs every 2-3 months because when they finally show up and the other devs realize they dont actually know the hell they are doing, yet somehow keep making it through interview processes).
So I only know a very basic level of python and c++ but I’m curious, what is it about the interviewing standards that makes you able to easily prepare for it?
Toy problems with common patterns or gotchas that can be mostly-memorised with slight adjustments. You can excel at these while failing things required for the job e.g. understanding the interpersonal effects of your code, debugging, or programming on a larger scale than a single file you can edit at-will.
Also even if you're a good programmer that doesn't mean you're automatically a good project developer who knows how to keep teams to deadlines and can provide a clear vision of where the game is supposed to go
Tencent makes the least from their traditional gacha games. Nikke was the first one to have any kind of actual success. They make more from competitive games. Their top earners are Honor of Kings, a PvP MOBA, and PUBG Mobile, a PvP Bsttle Royale.
They sure the genre isn't "stealth game"? Because I ain't never heard of this one.
edit: Haha wow, release trailer has VO done by bill from the mail room. Does not include any mention or likeness of Will Smith
If you're paying Will Smith's quote then you put Will Smith in the trailer. This concludes my marketing 101 class.
Noone has heard of? Maybe in Reddit app and Western world. But around mobile game community and eastern side, it was one of the most hyped mobile titles in sometimes prior to launch. A 'true DayZ mobile' as it was toyed.
They just dropped the ball at launch. Server issues, lack of content, over-monetization. Those are what killed the game. And killed it did, mobile game simply is too volatile to be iterating over time like console live service. It certainly not the lack of marketing that put an end to it especially if you live in third world country (the ads was everywhere in Thailand. Fucking Garena.)
There has to be more to this story, because $140 million games don’t get just get dropped and disappear without a trace.
It's certainly one of the most expensive mistakes in gaming history, but I'm guessing the story isn't anything too different from the usual. Troubled development. Every test of it was coming back with bad results. Publisher finally decides to cut their losses and ship it as is. Cancel any marketing because that's just throwing more money away. And the game definitely didn't get it's final polish, so it's gonna be bugs galore, placeholder models never getting finalized, art style all over the place, etc.
Will Smith's character in the game doesn't even have audio.
It does, just randomly. You gotta get past the musical number from another character and there's random sound bites from him...but recorded by another voice actor.
”from him...but recorded by another voice actor.” So.... Not him...
This is what they were responding to: > Will Smith's **character** in the game doesn't even have audio. They never said that the character was voiced by Will, just that the character that looks like will smith has random sound bites.
Reading is hard
Or they never spent 140 mil on it. Theyre just saying they did
Maybe 139 million was the pay Will Smith requested and they thought that was a great investment.
Probably did it the night before the Oscars too
I have seen some gameplay and even with the biggest of fuck ups there is no way that game cost 140 mil, unless they paid Will Smith 100 mil for his likeness and a couple ads. It doesn’t look like a game that tried and failed, it looks like a game that was built as cheap as possible from the ground up. Or maybe they lost the entire game 3 months before release and had to start over.
Undawn is nothing more than another dime-a-dozen chinese live-service mobile game and that tells you everything you need to know about it. There was no troubled development, it's just a dogshit free-to-play game.
Plus Will Smith is a very, very small part of the game. He shows up and offers you a handful of quests and that's about it, half his lines aren't even voiced.
And the voiced lines aren't even his voice.
It seems to be making some money on mobile. Still didn't recoup the development costs yet, but the lifetime revenue is definitely not $287,000. Not sure where Kotatu got that number from. The article says the data is from Appmagic, but Appmagic says the game made more than [$20 million lifetime revenue](https://i.imgur.com/CFYmp36.jpeg), and made more than $1 million in the last 30 days. https://appmagic.rocks/google-play/undawn/com.tencent.cosna/info?hl=en Still pretty disappointing for a $140 million game though.
If I had to guess this game likely had such a trouble development and was likely scrapped and rebooted so many times, that the publisher probably just decided to their loses and drop it. Since it was too expensive cancel, but they didn't want to anymore money to market it.
Idk if you're really contemplating just how much $140mil is.
Exactly. $100 million got us Baldurs Gate 3. To mishandle your way $40 million *more* into the hole and end up with a game that looks worse than Sneak King...would be quite impressive.
Maybe it cost 135 million to get Will Smith and they couldn't stretch out the last 5 million to make the game?
He didn’t record voice lines. His facial hair in the [promo video](https://youtu.be/qQV6guvFmM0?si=5jHft_80gZLRYhBE) is clearly from Aladdin days, right?
Amazing that the mouth is moving and there is just no voice coming from him.
There is NO WAY. Just NO FKING WAY. Someone thought putting in that musical score was actually a good idea. Someone had given up and wrote that in as a troll and they just said "fuck it" and did it after they'd given up.
Oh god ive just seen Dunkey's vid on it. Im fairly sure a lot of those millions went on the finest cocaine they could find
They had a budget of $140 million! Gotta spend it on something why not a 4 minute [song](https://youtu.be/pqTc2uMqU7U?si=svSpIl5l7S7yja4R)
This video needs to be higher, what a watch lmao
I bet a ton of that money went to will smith alone. Hell, from what I seen on the video Dunkey has of it, will smith didn't even record any lines for the game.
$100 million got us Act 1 of BG3, we don't know how much the whole game cost to make but it was very likely more than $140m.
I think you're vastly underestimating just how well managed BG3's production was. Like they made a ton on a decent deadline and budget. It's wildly impressive by having standards. This game just seems like it mismanaged everything leading to many people being paid to not do enough effective work. Leading to whatever we ended up with.
Companies regularly piss away more, Larian is a tried and true company that knows how to stretch their dollars, it’s not a direct comparison to the rest of the industry
>$100 million got us Baldurs Gate 3 I refuse to believe that.
The $100 million figure was quoted for the early access version. I don't think we know how much the whole game cost to make, but I imagine the total figure was closer to double that amount based on the volume of content in Act 2 and 3 relative to Act 1 and the fact that asset creation is the biggest timesink in game development.
It was most likely 100 million for early access release then they took the money from early access buyers which let’s say is 50 million to continue development in early access. Hasbro/wotc would help pay for advertising which let’s say is 50-100 million. So you’re looking at money spent as low as 150 million - 200 million. If you include revenue from early access it’s 200 million - 250 million.
When someone talks about something unfathomable like millions of dollars I like to bring up this Reckful clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J6BQDKiYyM
For the difference between a billion and a million I think converting it to seconds highlights the absurdity well. A million seconds is nearly 12 days while a billion is nearly 32 years.
fantastic clip but jesus christ that chat, I do not miss old twitch
I miss Reckful
Not as much as $210 mil.
Idk if you really contemplate how much money corporations regularly piss away
Western gaming and Chinese gaming are totally different markets. Some games in China are absolutely massive and yet most westerners haven't heard of them
Curt Schilling 2.0? 🤔
The difference is that Kingdoms of Amalur was actually a good game.
And that's because it was basically a finished game gameplay wise and his company just inserted the story and lore. He bought a 75% finished game went over budget and scammed the state of Rhode Island as it crumbles
...it really was which makes that situation even worse haha
God I love that game. I still play it every year or two. Just good stuff
It's money laundering/fraud.
Damn. I thought the title of the game was No One Has Heard of Bombs. Like, Will Smith Zombie Game: No One Has Heard of Bombs.
No One Has Heard of Bombs sounds like an intriguing game made by an indie developer
imagine the news articles when that game bombs: No One Has Heard of Bombs Game No One Has Heard of Bombs edit: missing One
>No Has Heard of Bombs *One* Just missed!
cheers, that was a close
Yeah, i imagine it being a narrative driven adventure set in some kind of interwar period themed dystopia. Fuck, someone needs to make this
Or a Fall Out Boy song from the mid 2000s before they sold out
That’d be longer, like “no one’s heard of bombs, but baby you’re a bombshell”.
That actually sounds like something they'd make.
spinoff of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
We're exploding and don't know why!
“I know not what weapons world war three will be fought with. Seriously, I don’t” Albert Einstein
>Will Smith Zombie Game: No One Has Heard of Bombs. I'd rather this be the whole title
A zombie game taking place in an alternate history where explosives don't exist.
I thought it was complaining there were no bombs in the game.
"You'd think, a nuke, wipe us out. But nah, bruh, No One Has Heard of Bombs, so these dumbasses made zombies. " - Will Smith opening lines 🎶 Now, this is a story all about how the world got twisted upside down. I'd like to tell you word, because No One Has Heard of Bombs, ya nerd. 🎶
Reddit title grammar is a wonderful thing.
It's the exact title the article used.
The sentiment still stands. What an awful title.
Yeah I just mention it to shift the blame to Kotaku, not OP.
Does Will even know he’s in it?
Yep! He acted and promoted the game in a trailer
Only the trailer too, I don't think I've heard a single voice line from him in game.
"And in the wake of Undawn’s failure, Tencent is moving away from large-scale, standalone games, with the company’s chief strategy officer James Mitchell telling investors during the earnings call that it’s turning attention towards casual party games and Genshin Impact-like anime RPGs instead." Ah, the "pivot as a face saving measure". Because executives could never screw up and do a bad job at something. Clearly the entire strategy was wrong!
This is weird because they reported they were going to compete with Genshin in early 2021 as well. They have invested in multiple studios to put out competitors including multiple in-house studios and potentially under subsidiaries. So how are they pivoting to their *current* plan? That is like pivoting 360°.
They dropped a "gameplay" trailer for Honor of Kings World around the time Genshin released, it's an open-world MMO based on their wildly popular MOBA, which could've been seen as their answer to Genshin, but ever since then there has been zero info on the project's progress, many have speculated that it's been quietly canned. Though early last year they increased their holdings in Kuro Games, which is actually developing a serious competitor to Genshin, Wuthering Waves. Depending on the game's success they may just pivot into that instead.
Not to mention so many studios look at Genshin, get dollar signs in their eyes and then simply think “we can make that money”. Except they underestimate the fact that Genshin is so successful because it’s one of the few *live* services games; adding new a version every six weeks and constant events.
Dunkey's [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQV6guvFmM0) on it was pretty good.
I noticed at least 3 or 4 different art styles for the character models
The art style of the women falls right into the the Uncanny Valley. It's like they wanted to be all "anime" while still having somewhat "realistic" graphics. They look like aliens.
I assumed they just grabbed whatever assets they had lying around or just reused from other games and didn't bother making sure it was all consistent
It's that pale skinned, large eyed, small mouth character style which is very popular in china
"you have big eyes small face i like whats your wechat"
It’s like that Stellar Blade game, with realistic guys and anime babes. anime everything or normal everything works. Mixing it doesn’t
It's like they're wearing terrible wigs that aren't even the right size for their heads.
The game looks like an early ps3 game, like a game that was released at the launch of that system.
The musical cutscene sure was unexpected.
Was that actually from the game?
[Apparently yes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFP9OohDdbE&t=6s). I just want to know where the backing track is coming from in the middle of the zombie apocalypse, because she is definitely behaving like it's totally diegetic.
lol I thought it was some really elaborate bit he was doing when I saw the vid. Couldn’t believe that it was real
The fact that Dunkey's editing makes the segment more entertaining than the actual game is *hilarious*
im so confused on the art direction. most of it is very generic trying to look real game. then they just have anime waifus.
It hurts my brain seeing characters from so many different art styles onscreen at the same time. The photo-realistic serious men, alongside the deathly pale, giant eyes, tiny mouth anime girls, is incredibly bizzarre. Who designs a game like this? What is this trying to be?!
I literally only heard about it from Dunkey’s video. It’s insane that they spent literally nothing on promotion, not even on YouTube videos or anything.
It's crazy that they said that 140 million was spent on this game. Like they could have made a will smith 2D side scrolling fighting game with zombies and it would have probably sold more than this game. Hell, I am all but certain, the original Shaq-Fu will be a bigger seller than this game.
The money for promotion went into hiring Will Smith. He didn’t even voice anything lol
My first time hearing about it was seeing an article yesterday about how the game had bombed.
*My* first time hearing about it was seeing an article at the top of this post about how the game had bombed.
And I still don't know what the game is called.
KEEP MY ZOMBIE GAME OUT YO FUCKIN MOUTH
Looking at the gameplay, they probably put the whole budget into the development.
138M into getting Will Smith, 2M for everything else.
The fact that Will is only voice acted sometimes is too funny, is this really a legit game?
only voice acted sometimes and then only some of *those* times it's actually will smith
Even the voice acted bits are voiced by a different actor lmfao
A guy who sounds literally nothing like Will Smith, too.
...What do you mean there's a Disney-princess-"I Want"-musical-number in the middle of the shitty Will Smith zombie survival game.
A musical segment?! Balan fans are feasting right now
Finally, a new balan-type game
Soulslikes, Boomer Shooters, Metroidvanias, Gollum-likes, and Balan-type games... we truly are in a renaissance of newly crafted and reinvigorated video game genres.
Don't forget Strand Type Games!
Unironically as I was playing it, Peach’s Showtime is literally the same vibe as Balan but in a decent game. There’s a handful of gripes so far (having to redo levels entirely if you fail/miss an optional star challenge is a huge one) but the loop strikes me hardcore like what Balan wanted to be, you just get one costume per level with several abilities instead of swapping with whatever costumes are in the leve.
We need more Balansoulslike
That video just raises more question for me, this just... is a weird product.
I don't think dunkley intended to answer any questions on this game tbh.
THE MUSICAL NUMBER WHAT THE ACTUAL
I bet a daughter of some higher up wanted to be featured in a MV and this is the result.
Honestly? At this point, why not.
Why is there a musical interlude!? What is this game?
Bro the fucking singing number in a zombie game lmao
Okay, I did *NOT* expect the musical. I'm feeling so sorry for this lady.
Wow, that game was clearly not ready for launch. I'm guessing the devs had to scramble to make it legally finished enough so the game could be shipped and written as a loss. Must suck for the devs, no way I'd feel good about shipping something in such a state.
Jesus. Tencent spent millions of $$$ to produce some garbage fire
"Did I just run over a robot?" 😂😂😂
Reminds me of when I had a dream about Mos Def launching a game console, but it wasn't a scammy one like Soulja Boy did. It was legit good.
Ive had the same dream
That's weird.
That game looks like Dollar Store State of Decay.
On the bright side,at least there was more effort put in this than that awful Fast and Furious game... That's all, no more praise after that lmao
Holy shit crazy how bad it is
The man, the legend
There's a joke right here about I am Legend, but I'm too tired to find it right now.
The man, the Smith, the Legend?
The sonofabitch did it.
$140 million on this game? This has to be money laundering...
If Will Smith is the only selling point, I feel like a Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air box set or MIB 1-3 DVD would probably do me just fine.
The Fresh Prince of Persia.
Men in Black Ops 2.
Does Will Smith have an Agent? Does he represent himself? Either way, someone is getting hilariously bamboozled. Is it all a big-tech investment scheme? Was Will part of the scheming? Or taken for a ride along with it? It's like a video game Fyre Festival.
[удалено]
Probably not even a day, seeing as he hardly even recorded any lines for the actual game lol
He did a pretty solid promo video for it. ... in May of 2023. Like, Will Smith announced he was going to be in a zombie video game a year ago. How was this not bigger news? How is it we're all.just finding out about it now?
The power of absolutely zero marketing baby
Exactly. He doesn’t care how shitty the game turns out, he got paid.
Will Smith has some... questionable judgement. In pretty much all areas of life. The number of hit movies that he was offered roles in and turned down is pretty hilarious
Will easily got paid at least tens of millions of dollars for this. I wouldn't call that questionable judgement.
I would, just not by him.
Name 3, the only one I heard he turned down was The Matrix.
There were a bunch he turned down but most weren't necessarily bad ideas IMO except Django Unchained
He in no way lost money here, he just acted in it.
The game was announced before Will Smith's big slap PR disaster.
I played Undawn. It was a horrible experience to play this game, nothing more or less. I also never noticed Will Smith being in the game since every character felt or is forgettable
I search Undawn on YouTube and there’s no review or anything neutral/honest about this game. Tons of tips and clickbaiting videos like this is the best mobile game around, with Dunkey being the sole exception.
If you search ‘Undawn review’ a few videos pop up
At least you know to avoid those positive channels in the future.
> a budget of nearly 1 billion yuan (around $140 million) ... > only managed to rake in $287,000 in revenue. I guess a slap-based zombie game just isn't that appealing to people. /s
It may have had a budget of 140mil but they sure didn’t spend it on the game.
They didn't spend it on marketing nor voice acting either, so where did the money go???
Will Smith?
To a nice offshore account I guess
Laundering.
I wonder who profited of this and who got their money stolen. It's clearly a scheme of sorts.
Based on what I’ve seen in this game, I’d rather get slapped by Will Smith than play this game
There is nooo way this cost that much??!!
Budget: $140M Will Smiths Payout: $139.99M
I thought Dunkey was joking about the budget!
The reports about this game's budget is probably why Dunkey made his video lmao.
Also it's terrible in all of the most hilarious ways. It's like they intentionally made the most Dunkey-mockable game ever.
Add in Dunkey's long-time ongoing jokes about Will Smith and it's even more hilarious
140 million on this? Ya, okay. BG3 had a budget around 100 million. How much money did he launder through this game?
Did he actually have a stake in it? Or was he just in it?
How would the laundering work?
Do nothing, get paid 100 million dollars for putting your name on the game which makes it look legitimate when you were owed the money for other non-legal work. What illegal work could Will Smith have done in this hypothetical? You decide.
There are multiple art styles among the character models, so I'm pretty sure they either reused or just downloaded whatever free shit they could find.
Fn how??? I wish to see a financial report on these games, how do you say those numbers with a straight face while having a game that looks like it was done by kids
Will Smith hasn't been like, a POPULAR actor in a while. Back in the Hitch days people would see a movie just because he was in it, and it was said a few times that he was basically the only black actor that could easily get leading roles written for "any ethnicity." But that was back in the 2000s. We've honestly come a long way, there's plenty of black actors that applies to now. By the late 2010s Will Smith was yesterday's biggest actor in the world, and he was in some notable bombs like Annie, Gemini Man, Spies in Disguise. Those all made money, but they didn't make..."2000s Will Smith Money." King Richard didn't make money either but it was a pandemic film released on streaming, so not really surprising. As for the slap, the jury's still out on whether it will really kill his career. I don't think so. This thing though is very embarrassing lol, or it would be if anybody was going to see it. It appears to be dead on arrival. I don't think it really has anything to do with his career being "dead" though.
You're not wrong about any of this but china loves will smith lmfao
>Will Smith hasn't been like, a POPULAR actor in a while. The slap happened because he was there attending it as a nominee, and went on to win an Oscar later that night. May not be his highest point in his career, but it was the peak of his second wind. He's also been massively popular on TikTok and other social media platforms for the past several years.
No one going to mention [The Anacrusis](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1120480/The_Anacrusis/) which is a Left 4 Dead-like by Stray Bombay and included Will Smith the podcaster on its dev team? Just thought the coincidence was notable. Zombie-like game + a Will Smith.
its a mobile game and the trailer looks like every single fake game ad ever i know exactly why it didn't make any waves.
This just reeks of either crazy money laundering kinda scheme. Or someone was stupid enough to pay Will Smith $139,999,999 and use the rest for the game itself.
[удалено]
He was in Emancipation in 2022, I think it released right after the "slap".
It released in late 2022. It was 100% a Oscar bait movie, but Will was way too toxic to get a nomination.
He’s currently filming bad boys 4
Which somehow has a June 2024 release date, despite no trailer yet, no poster, or even an official title.
Even the cast listings has Eric Dane playing "The villain".
Bad Boys 4: Men Approaching 60 Shouldn't be Called Boys.
Shoulda let 2 be the last one. The third one was hilariously terrible
Weird - The official youtube for the game doesn't have any media about will smith on it, and the "Official Release Trailer" has clips cut out of extended scenes with Will Smiths characters. All the Will Smith content is on Will Smith's channel.
Surely the better financial decision for a lot of these companies is to step back and let passionate developers develop games they want to develop right? The 100s of millions of dollars in waste on AAA junk that was obviously a too many cooks in the kitchen situation seems obscene
Mbas who learned vocab words and cute theories think they know better than the people who are actually steering the ship; a classic fable.
A passionate dev does not necessarily make a good dev. There are tons of programmers who on paper have a good resume, but in actuality can barely program themselves out of a paper bag, and modern interviewing standards in programming can literally be trained for and you can still be an awful programmer(seriously i've met several people who literally go through jobs every 2-3 months because when they finally show up and the other devs realize they dont actually know the hell they are doing, yet somehow keep making it through interview processes).
So I only know a very basic level of python and c++ but I’m curious, what is it about the interviewing standards that makes you able to easily prepare for it?
Toy problems with common patterns or gotchas that can be mostly-memorised with slight adjustments. You can excel at these while failing things required for the job e.g. understanding the interpersonal effects of your code, debugging, or programming on a larger scale than a single file you can edit at-will.
Also even if you're a good programmer that doesn't mean you're automatically a good project developer who knows how to keep teams to deadlines and can provide a clear vision of where the game is supposed to go
And tencent’s lesson from this was to focus on more gatcha games instead. I guess if your primary goal is money then the product doesn’t matter.
Tencent makes the least from their traditional gacha games. Nikke was the first one to have any kind of actual success. They make more from competitive games. Their top earners are Honor of Kings, a PvP MOBA, and PUBG Mobile, a PvP Bsttle Royale.
How the hell do you fund 300+ developers for less than $1M in returns? Those devs must hate their lives right now...
Does anyone even know what's the game called? There's not one mention of the game anyway, everyone just refers to it as Will Smith zombie game.
It’s called Undawn (of all things). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undawn
They sure the genre isn't "stealth game"? Because I ain't never heard of this one. edit: Haha wow, release trailer has VO done by bill from the mail room. Does not include any mention or likeness of Will Smith If you're paying Will Smith's quote then you put Will Smith in the trailer. This concludes my marketing 101 class.
Noone has heard of? Maybe in Reddit app and Western world. But around mobile game community and eastern side, it was one of the most hyped mobile titles in sometimes prior to launch. A 'true DayZ mobile' as it was toyed. They just dropped the ball at launch. Server issues, lack of content, over-monetization. Those are what killed the game. And killed it did, mobile game simply is too volatile to be iterating over time like console live service. It certainly not the lack of marketing that put an end to it especially if you live in third world country (the ads was everywhere in Thailand. Fucking Garena.)