That would be the reasonable and rational conclusion, but capitalism is neither reasonable nor rational.
You can only throw away hundreds of millions of dollars on Avengers and Suicide Squad so many times before they decide to come up with something people are willing to pay for.
This is a false argument. They ARE profitable when they bother to try and make a good one. It’s when they fill it full of mtx and drag every aspect of the game except the enjoyment out for as long as possible to try and convince you to buy shit to make it actually enjoyable after you’ve already paid full price. They don’t get create poor games and then complain they’re not profitable enough - bad products aren’t profitable because they are bad products.
Even if every $200M game was good, you’re still competing against the other $200M games out there, and that’s very risky.
I suspect there wouldn’t be as many releases if they were only releasing good ones.
True. There would also be even more layoffs in this industry if they threw out years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars at the finish line because they decided not to release a game that didn’t turn out to be as good as they’d hoped.
That’s just another symptom of chasing perceived profits. If they were dedicated to releasing good products they’d understand retaining good talent that has experience working together is an important part of it.
Obviously that’s a pipe dream because they’re all vultures circling over a games publisher, picking off what they can until they can feast on its corpse, but still.
I was being facetious. If your development timeline is 7 years, you have no idea how it’s going to turn out at the end, but they all set out to make a good product, especially when it takes that much time and money to make. Guardians of the Galaxy was supposedly a very good game that bombed horribly, for instance. There’s a lot of risk when your game is that expensive to make, because there are only so many customers out there, and they’re already playing other big expensive games. Even Sony is finding that their marquis titles aren’t bringing in as many customers as they expected anymore, so they can’t keep spending more on games and expect them to be profitable.
That’s also partly because Microsoft is buying customers with gamepass, it’s unprofitable in the long run, but they just need to do it long enough to kill off competitors. Exactly what Netflix did basically.
Youve been able to start to see the ripples forming a few years ago. Devs aren’t making as much from the deal of being on it vs private sales as well.
What do you mean? It’s already profitable for them. I’m far more concerned with Nintendo’s online subscription than Microsoft’s. Nintendo’s already crossed the line, and Microsoft still stands to make more money by offering games for sale on Steam than to make them only available via a subscription that isn’t doing well with regards to acquiring more customers.
I feel like the natural progression is to roll back to the 2000s when every company was shotgunning batshit crazy concepts for games left and right… I miss those days
The history does indeed move in a spiral. We will see some of the old logic mixed with new concepts, as we do in every field of our life
The last people I need telling me the obvious is A16Z
Appealing to the widest audience possible for the largest gross profits, rather than appealing to specific audiences with a smaller budget, is part of the issue with modern gaming.
Yeah only the massive dudes are struggling cause they’ll never figure it out. They just chase the dragon.
