Hello and welcome to my easy to understand guide to Horizon Forbidden West, the video game and industry. This video is going to be particularly relevant for you if you are studying AQA, A-level media studies, as it currently appears as a set text on that specification. The game was developed by Guerrilla Games and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Sony Interactive Entertainment is a very large company and the biggest video games publisher in the world currently. It has offices globally. and it has literally thousands of employees. They're worth a very large amount of money and because Sony Interactive Entertainment is part of the bigger parent company Sony they have billions of dollars at their disposal. This has allowed them over the years to acquire a large range of subsidiary companies that you can see here on the screen and that makes them very powerful. Guerrilla Games is part of the PlayStation Studios. It's a Dutch company. It was originally called Lost Boy Games. and it went through a kind of merger, and it was bought out a few times. So first bought out by Media Republic, and then it was bought out by Sony Interactive Entertainment. So it's quite a good example of horizontal integration, big companies coming along and buying out smaller companies that are actually acting as their competition. So purchasing them, swallowing them up in order to kind of reduce that risk for them and bring those smaller companies within their kind of umbrella. Because it's published by Sony, it means that the game is only available on the PlayStation 4 and 5. This exclusivity to their platforms helps to really drive the purchases of the PlayStation, and it helps to bring audiences particularly into buying their consoles and not going to competitors like the Xbox. It was published in conjunction with the release of the PlayStation 5, in particular to try and help push those PlayStation 5 sales. And people bought the game in order to try and test out the graphics of this new console. So releasing those two products together really helped to push sales of each other. Nearly 50% of the sales of the game were digital and that really reflects the fact that a lot of audiences now are moving away from those hard copy discs and they're moving towards streaming their games, downloading their games online. The production of the game was delayed due to COVID. Obviously a lot of people could not be in the office to produce the game. Also they wanted to do a lot of motion capture work with the actress that played Aloy. motion capture obviously is a reasonably new technology within the last sort of five or six years and it's become much more widely spread in terms of its use within films and video games and it helps to make a character feel more realistic the fact that this game is a sequel to a previous game helps to reduce the risk it means that it already had a pre-solved audience so being a sequel helps to ensure that they've already got fans who will come and buy and play this game of course Any kind of video game industry, it's all about competition now. And Sony was particularly concerned about Nintendo's Breath of the Wild series. It was quite popular. It was developing quite a big kind of fantasy action adventure audience. And so this game was developed specifically to try and compete with that game. Expansions are a good way of maintaining your audience. Once they've played the game, you release an expansion pack, maybe a few months later or a year later. And it helps bring those players back to the game. and it helps encourage people to spend more money. There is a comic book series based on the game as well by Titan Comics and that kind of synergetic marketing will help to bring in audiences as well as help to make more money too. Guerrilla Games also released the soundtrack and EP. Video game soundtracks are increasingly popular amongst cult fans. The singer and actress Nathie Peluso actually released a music video called Emergencia for the game so having her music video released at the same time. really again helped to drive people to the video game. The video game was promoted by ANC Media so particularly on things like Twitch and on Instagram there were content creators who were offered the chance to review the game early and it was those kind of reviews that helped to really promote the game. The people who voiced other characters so for example Carrie-Anne Moss and also Lance Reddick they also tweeted behind the scenes content from the video game as well. and talked about promoting the game in the run-up to its release, and that would have helped to appeal to their fans too. The game was rated as a Peggy 16 in the UK, and that is because there was obviously some violence within there, and there was some threat from the kind of monster machine type creatures, but it wasn't particularly graphic violence. There was no kind of like blood or guts within the narrative. and it wasn't particularly gory. So that 16 rating helped them maintain a wider audience than perhaps they would have got if they had got a higher rating. The game was also awarded a PEGI 16 certificate because of the use of language within the game, and also because players could access the PlayStation storefront, and the Games Rating Authority wanted to make parents aware that users could spend real money on this. So that was my easy to understand guide to Horizon Forbidden West and industry. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel. I've got lots of other videos about this video game and other set texts relevant for you. And if you would like a video that I don't already have or if you've got any questions, just leave a little comment below and I'll see what I can do.