developers handle design, not finances. Microtransactions have always been in the interest of profit, not to make the games better. They were the markets compromise with gamers being unlikely to pay enough to cover costs of a Triple A development cycle.
Reminder that when the NES came out, it was still $60 dollars for a game, which would be about $180 today. And that’s not accounting for all the extra manhours that now go into the major titles. Microtransactions and DLCs are the deal with the devil we made to keep games from being $200+ a pop
two business partners are chatting and one says, “We’re losing money on every sale”, so the other one responds, “Yea, but we’ll make it up in volume!”
Software costs nothing to copy and paste, only to design.
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If a response would be satisfied by inserting the word “essentially,” please do not make that response.
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Alan Wake 2 (for example) did not spend a decade in development, but somehow blow “pretty much 100% of the budget” after launch.
You can maybe salvage that sentence fragment by insisting we’re talking about multiplayer-only “live service” crap that goes on for years and years after launch… but the topic you named is distribution. The marginal cost of software is essentially zero. Supporting customer N+1 is a rounding error. Valve basically has a monopoly on PC game distribution and only employs a couple hundred people. Do those salaries cost money? No shit. But relative to, conservatively, half the money spent on PC games? Fraction of a percent.
“Keeping people employed” takes a lot of money because making a game takes a lot of people a long time. Shipping is the cheap part. Has been since CD-ROMs. In many infamous cases, people were not kept employed once their game shipped, because all those people were not necessary to make all of the money off of the game.
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Games are so damn cheap. It’s insane how cheap games are now. Final Fantasy XVI is going for 50 bucks on Steam and that’s an expensive release. Yesterday I bought several Disgaea games for like ten bucks each and those are a good hundred hours a pop. The top seller list on Steam right now includes multiple games cheaper than 20 bucks. And that’s not even counting all the free to play stuff and the constant sales.
There are great looking and playing games out there that cost less than a movie ticket and a bucket of popcorn. I had to save for six months to get a game when I was a teenager.
