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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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Gaming
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The big difference with physical goods is that it's much harder to steal a McDonald's burger that it is to crack a single player, offline game. Furthermore, once you ate your burger, if you want more, you have to buy another because it's a consumables.
On the other hand games are prone to piracy, expecially on pc, you pay once but can play anytime while patched and updates require prolonged work after you purchase.
It isn't strange that developers look at dlc, microtransanction or game as a service with subscription, because they allow a stable flow of income that can support development, and it's harder to avoid paying when the game is always online and stuff like that.
The same goes for single-player offline games, though. There's only so much entertainment you can get out of one before you've seen everything, get bored, and look for another one.
If a studio fails to budget for that and make sure those costs are included in the price of the game, it frankly deserves to go bust.
You're absolutely right, but that's true from "your perspective". For you the fame might last 50 hours and that's all, but the developers still need to work on big patches, content and fixes even years after release.
And this introduces another topic I think. Would the average consumer willing to spend more for a game with everything in it? AAA already cost 70$ at launch, would the average consumer accept further price increases, or would selling plummet in comparison with reduced price+dlc or free to play with microtransanction?
At the end companies are not inherently "evil" they just look for what works and what doesn't by trial and error
Why would they need to do that? If it's years down the line, there shouldn't be any bugs left to fix by that point. And offline single-player games don't need regular content drops. Sure, an expansion or two might be nice, but those don't come free. Only online games need to constantly feed their players new content in order to keep them hooked and coming back to buy more MTX.
Oh sales would plummet for sure, but it would still make a profit, just not as much. If From Soft and Larian can do it, everyone can. They just don't wanna. (see below)
That really depends on your definition of "works". Sure, it's a business, but what's the goal? To me there seems to be a noticeable difference between companies that want to make good games, for which the business side of things is just a means to an end, and companies that want to make as much money as possible, where the games are the means to that end. Is that latter category 'evil'? Maybe not strictly speaking, but I have no concern for those companies whatsoever, they can go fuck themselves.