Contrast Having all Bronze Trophies Was “A Legitimate F*ck Up”, PlayStation Plus “Isn’t a Gold Mine”

Over on Reddit, Compulsion Games Community and PR Manager Sam Abbott posted about how they are aware of the glitches with Contrast, and revealed that a patch for the PS4 version (and other consoles) is in QA right now, with a planned release date of next week. If you’re experiencing framerate issues though, Compulsion recommends you re-download the game from the PlayStation Store.

Further down in that thread, Sam took a lot of time to answer many commenters, with one of them pointing out how all the trophies are Bronze. Here’s Sam’s response:

Yes, this is a legitimate fuck up, I do apologize.

We didn’t even realize until after release. We looked at trying to fix it two weeks ago, but the change is fairly substantial and we think it would result in everyone losing their existing trophies. We decided that it’d be better for people to keep their current trophies than update some to silver/gold.

The topic of PlayStation Plus was brought up, with Sam explaining:

It’s a complicated story, but basically Sony approached us. Winding back a year or two, we were talking to all the major console guys, but we weren’t getting any traction. So, we went ahead anyway, and just built the game we wanted to play. When we went to PAX East this year (April), Sony was looking around for projects, and got the ball rolling. When it looked like we could be ready for launch… then it all got very busy, very quickly!

And:

Honestly, I’m not 100% sure what I can or can’t say, so I’d like to err on the side of caution.

Basically, every deal is different. However, they’re all based around Sony saying “Well, we think this game is cool and we want to give it away for free. What would it take for you to agree to that?” Maybe some devs get lump sums, maybe others have royalty shares (this is a little uncertain, commercially, though), maybe others do it just for the publicity. It really is pretty varied.

What I will say is that Sony are not dicks about it. The deal is pretty fair, but it isn’t a gold mine. We’ll still need people to buy our game once the PS+ promotion ends, if we’re going to be able to make the next project without selling our souls 🙂 We hope you guys will recommend it to others, if you like it.

With Contrast being the game to replace DriveClub at PS4 launch, Abbott said, “Truth is, we didn’t know about DriveClub when we started negotiating – we should have negotiated harder ;).

Abbott then talked about the future of Contrast in multiple responses to different people:

“We have ideas/plans for additional content, but we’re not ready to commit to it yet. Even if we just stuck to additional challenge rooms etc (rather than try and build additional narrative, music, etc) it’d take us maybe 6 months to a year to create it – that’s a pretty big commitment and we still have no idea whether the game will make any money, yet!”

“We have plans for what we do next, but nothing is super set in stone yet. If Contrast becomes big, we’d be keen to create some DLC that explores some of the things our community is interested in. If we decided to do a sequel, it’d unlikely that we’d make it immediately – Contrast is a passion project, and wasn’t designed to become a franchise, so we’d want to think about how to do it properly for quite some time.”

“Yes, we will definitely consider [doing a sequel], although what form that takes is another question. I love the world, personally, and I’d love to come back. We might even give The City a name if we do that ;).”

“We’re thinking about what we can do (eg challenge levels that give you a bit more info about the ending). It’s all roughly planned, but creating it honestly depends on whether we make enough money to be able to do it.”

Have you tried Contrast yet? What did you think of it? Let us know in the comments below.

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