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Some of you may be surprised by Dean Hall’s announcemnt. One the other hand, some of you might have seen this coming. I found it interesting that Hall’s voice had such a suitish timbre to it. Let’s hope this isn’t a hallmark of dayz to come.

For those of you that haven’t kept your ear to the street, lets take a walk down emory lane and look at exactly how this acquisition unfolded. E3 2013 (June 11-13), Dean Hall claims that the reason he was leaning towards Sony was that unlike Microsoft, Sony lets developers self-publish.

“Yeah, we talked to both of them. But, as I’m sure you’re aware, Sony lets you self-publish and they don’t make you pay for updates. Microsoft requires you to have a publisher. They have no digital distribution strategy and they require you to pay $10,000, or whatever it is, for updates.”

“That’s definitely something we’d look at, but we have to do the PC version first. Once we get the alpha out, that’s a good time for us to run it up on a [PS4] dev kit and see what happens.”

Moving on to an 2/25/2014 interview with Dean Hall and Eurogamer where Hall spoke about his closed meetings with Microsoft and Sony. Hall states that a decision regarding a console port of DayZ was likely to be made by the end of 2014 and would take 12 months to make.

“I would be surprised if we hadn’t made a decision by the end of the year. Whether that means it’s being actively developed or released… I’d be surprised if any console port could be developed in 12 months; we haven’t fully started developing anything yet for a console, so…”

“I care a lot about the PC, obviously, and I have nothing against consoles, and there’s some really interesting and exciting things happening.”

Flash forward to 4/6/2014, Mike Holmes at Gamesreactor UK caught up with Dean Hall to talk about some pressing issues.

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“So, really the bottleneck is us. We need to get the PC build to the right state where it can then pull across. And I think everybody can recognize that. That, there is no sense in trying to pull something across that is dramatically changing all the time. So really our focus is on delivering the right stuff and answering all the questions as we go through the early access with the PC.”

As you can see Hall has stated on numerous occasions that the PC build would be devloped first. So for those of you thinking Hall is leaving us for console or that PC development will fall off because of redirection for a console port, fret not…they got us covered. Finishing the PC build is priority.

According to our research, doing a console port was always the plan. When first asked about a console port, Hall stated that if DayZ did 1M in sales they would consider it. Mind you, this was when Hall projected 350k in sales during his pitch to Bohemia which they obviously thought was profitable enough to green-light the project.

Chronologically speaking, Hall has never faltered on his stance on finishing the PC build first. To me, that is a solid trend. He also stayed in line with the intent to start a console port by the end of this year.

With the delay’s in getting new developers trained and up to par, the roadmap has been extended. With that said, I’m sure this will reflect in the console port timeline as well.

Looking back at LastGen, it is common knowledge that Microsoft’s Xbox 360 dominated the PS3. History recollects Sony was too slow off the line. Not only that but they lacked exclusive content as well as a cutting edge marketplace and server structure…however free it was.

Acquiring DayZ is massive for Sony. Currently, Sony is winning the war on console sales, but its an empty victory as there very little profit to speak of. My research shows that MSFT is making a 100/usd profit on each console as compared to Sony making 43/usd profit on each console. Who is really winning the war is naturally up for debate.

The point of the spear for Sony is exclusive content. DayZ is about as white hot as you can get even in its current Alpha state. My guess, H1Z1 will wither to ashes as in my opinion it was the fail-safe if they couldn’t acquire DayZ.

Hall sold the DayZ rights to Bohemia for royalties. With Hall leaving Bohemia in early 2015 I am very curious as to what Hall’s capacity will be with the console port as he has ZERO rights to DayZ. The plan was for Hall to stay on as a consultant after stepping down as the Project Lead. As it stands, I have no idea how this will play out. Spokesman or Sony Suit? Your guess is as good as mine.

Sources:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-02-25-dayz-interview-full-release-console-discussions-horses-and-rust

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-06-13-dean-hall-in-talks-to-bring-dayz-standalone-to-ps4