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> Overwatch - a great game - that was effectively abandoned because the original team heavily discouraged monetization. I don't believe it's the team. Blizzard

> Overwatch - a great game - that was effectively abandoned because the original team heavily discouraged monetization. I don't believe it's the team. Blizzard has a track record of abandoning perfectly good games (although I'll grant Overwatch was uniquely difficult to monetize). SC2 is a great game, too. They even dabbled in paid story DLC with Nova's mission pack, which was cool, but then they fell back to only developing co-op commanders for people to grind co-op content with instead of making more cool story DLC. And they've even stopped making co-op commanders now (people probably got tired of grinding through the same handful of scenarios). Diablo 3 had one (desperately needed) expansion and one class DLC, but since then have cycled through a carousel of "seasonal" content, with only cosmetics and some mechanical adjustments, no new gear. Basically, they have these games that absolutely could be platforms for more ("healthy") things to sell and at the same time prolong the lifetime of their games, but for whatever reason they don't sustain investment in them. My hypothesis is it's because Hearthstone is better from a strict ROI perspective, but I don't know that for sure. > I don't know how you maintain a game like Fortnite (or GTAIV) with just a $60 one time purchase. Games like Hollow Knight or Minecraft that are one-time-purchases sustained further development through market saturation. Every free DLC increased the value proposition for people who hadn't purchased yet. In traditional marketing, you'd sell your game for X, realizing there's an audience out there that will only buy at X-10 (or whatever), so after you sell at X for a while you apply a discount to reach that audience too. What Minecraft and Hollow Knight have done is sort of the inverse of that (in addition to traditional discounts, at least in the case of Hollow Knight): increasing the value for the price so if the base game at $20 is a questionable deal, the base game + free DLC at $20 draws in people who were on the fence before. Even though the DLC is free, the company still makes money on it. That said, those games don't incur server costs for the company. Once server costs get involved, people want higher ROI to offset them.

nemothekid 5y ago
>Games like Hollow Knight or Minecraft What's unique about Hollow Knight or Minecraft is that they are either 2D, or low detail enough where they can be reasonably maintained by a small team. A game like GTA or Overwatch could have voice actors, motion cap, animation teams, detailed 3D models, maintained servers, in-game events; the list goes on, it's not just server costs. My point is, it's unreasonable to think that something like that can be maintained by a $20 DLC, and worst still DLC is only enjoyed by a small portion of the player base.

nemothekid 5y ago

>Games like Hollow Knight or Minecraft What's unique about Hollow Knight or Minecraft is that they are either 2D, or low detail enough where they can be reasonably maintained by a small team. A game like GTA or Overwatch could have voice actors, motion cap, animation teams, detailed 3D models, maintained servers, in-game events; the list goes on, it's not just server costs. My point is, it's unreasonable to think that something like that can be maintained by a $20 DLC, and worst still DLC is only enjoyed by a small portion of the player base.