Tearaway: Good budget, great design

One of the reasons that many games fall foul of the economic climate is because they are not budgeted accordingly. They end up bloating; fostering multi million pound development budgets with hundreds of staff and, in addition, enormous marketing budgets to try and drive as many customers to those games as they possibly can. Tearaway, a game by Media Molecule for the Playstation Vita, did the opposite.
The system’s audience is much smaller than that of many other platforms and, as such, creating games with enormous budgets would simply be a waste of time and money. Instead, Media Molecule put a small of team of people on the project and set to work to create a game with a small budget and a low price point. The game, at its peak, has 10 people working on it and released for £20 – a move which saw many more people buy it than they would have if it were a £40 game. While it didn’t set the charts alight it turned a tidy profit.