4 ms·
Man, some of my sibling commenters are out of touch. Tens of millions of dollars funding for log analysis / picture / messaging b2b startups, selling $100/host
by llanowarelves 4y ago
Man, some of my sibling commenters are out of touch.
Tens of millions of dollars funding for log analysis / picture / messaging b2b startups, selling $100/host/month is fine, using mostly off the shelf tools (every part of the stack, even the UI components, nice).
But wanting $60 for a game that you spent $60m+ and 4 years to make, is "corporate greed" and send people into passionate youtube video style opposition. Despite needing to sell over a million copies to break even in a hit-driven business (how many b2b or even b2c businesses here do that?).
I would love to see people try to work with those rough economics (and no, it's not "reduce the price by half and sell 2x as much" when you want to make something AAA with a niche (apparently 1 million is niche) audience. This is why when the price is not allowed to rise, the quality drops: it has to appeal to more people, lowest common denominator). Instead, they are making $300k a year tweaking load balancers for picture, chat, advertisement, and api connector apps, when they arent trying to automate away artists with AI, the only decently paying job artists had being in games.
It is no wonder there's so many "live service" games now. They simply see how much, how predictably, and how risk-averse they can be with the payment of people paying into SaaS-tech is and got inspired.
- rockbruno 4y agoI would have no problem with that if you paid a sum and got the full game. However the situation we have today is that you pay $60 for what is essentially 10% of the actual game and is constantly milked for the rest of it. The scenario you're presented is how this situation worked in the past, but today the industry has changed into something else entirely.
- phendrenad2 4y agoOkay, which of the top 10 best-selling games of 2022 are 10% of an actual game? https://www.statista.com/statistics/1285658/top-ranked-video-games-sales-annual/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1285658/top-ranked-video...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- llanowarelves 4y agoYeah I get the frustrations gamers have around buggy "we'll patch it later" releases, And sure some level of things like lootboxes can become predatory (I don't believe they are in an of themselves: they are like crane games for toys). Especially for kids, when dollars are like 10x-100x more expensive compared to a working adult. But DLC->IAP/ads->live service is tempting to de-risk. Sure some behemoth publishers get greedy with it and shove it in games that have no business having those features in there. I just don't see those in and of itself as greedy. To be fair to the other side of the argument, Hollywood has a similar problem, and have kept prices flat. Though big budget things have to be de-risked in the form of predictable-earning superhero movies (which can be used to fund riskier projects, but don't have to be). I just don't like games becoming too much like Hollywood, dependent on huge brands and celebrities to guarantee enough sales. The budgets and expected quality moat are already approaching it