It’s never enough, it will never be enough. They don’t just want to make more money, or tons of money, they want to make all the money. They are willing to do whatever it takes and if fact, they are legally obligated to do whatever it takes to increase shareholder profits.
Why do you think these companies do everything they can do avoid disclosing their revenue, sales figures, odds of their loot crates etc? Think about it. Sure, every once in a while they’ll “leak” their supposed development or marketing costs. These companies will literally go to court or go to war to keep all of that data hidden from customers. Like what Blizzard did when China tried to force them to disclose the odds on their loot crates. There’s a reason they are so secretive, if all of that information came out, gamers would lose their ******* minds.
The whole “games are too expensive to make these days” is propaganda, that people eat up. They hear these astronomical numbers like $100 Million and $265 Million, they can’t even comprehend that these companies gross more than 5x, 10x, even 18x (GTA5) what they spent to develop and market the game on game sales alone at $60..
Of course we know that games don’t only cost $60, with deluxe, silver, gold, collectors editions, DLC, expansions, in game currency, loot crates, skins, etc.. These companies are making insane, small-medium sized country GDP levels of money.
To put it into prospective, the global film box office revenue was $38 Billion in 2016. The overall revenue of the US Motion Picture/TV Production & Distribution Industry reached $64.43 Billion in 2015. The Global Video Game Industry revenues increased from $83.6 Billion in 2015, to $99.6 Billion in 2016 and are expected to jump to $107 Billion for 2017. A lot of the recent increase is due to mobile games, no doubt. The video game industry still dwarfs the motion picture industry.
Let me clarify that I'm aware that there are more costs than development & marketing, like the publishers cut but those two have the most affect on profit margin. If you believe that these companies have to do these things because “games still only cost $60”, you're falling for or promoting propaganda talking points thought up by the MBAs and Marketing executives of these multi Million/Billion dollar companies.
THESE COMPANIES ARE PLAYING US FOR FOOLS. We’re not even customers anymore we’re more like cattle, dairy cows or hosts for the tapeworm that AAA devs/publishers have become.
It’s not about how can they make a great game that everyone will want to buy and enjoy. It’s what can we do to extract every available dollar/Euro out of these marks with the least amount of effort.
That’s why a game like GTA 5, the devs broke their promise of single player DLC in favor of shark card ********. A game that has sold 80 million copies, grossing at minimum $4.5 Billion dollars from sales alone (if everyone just bought the $60 base game), decided that wasn’t enough.
It’s not even that they wouldn’t have made a ton of money on single player GTA 5 DLC, they would have made mountains of money on launch day alone. These companies aren’t satisfied with tons of money or even mountains of money, they want all the money.
Horizon Zero Dawn was substantially more ethical than the rest of these games, it had a production budget of $47 Million. A conservative estimation of its sales is around 3.51. Million Copies on just PS4. If everyone bought the $60 base game (I didn't, I bought the $70 Digital Limited Edition), that works out to $210,600,000. Subtract $47 Million, that is $163,600,000.
Fallout 4, generated $750Million in the first 24 hours following its release. A generous estimation of Fallout 4's production/marketing costs would be around $120M to $150M. Within 24 hours, Bethesda had already made 5x-6x that, in 24 hours.. Fallout 4 has sold an estimated 13.8M copies, again if every single person only bought the base $60 game, that's over $829Million.
That doesn't include the $120 Pip Boy Edition, $90 Digital Deluxe Edition, $80 Gold Edition, the $30 Season Pass, or the individual DLC. All this reusing an engine they already had.
Battlefield 1 cost roughly $100M to develop. Sales figures (Which companies so everything to hide) were anywhere from 7.19 million to 16.5 million the first year. That doesn't include DLC or micro transactions, just units sold. Conservatively, at $60 for the base game, that's $431.4 Million to $954Million Dollars.
Rockstar reportedly spent $265 Million to develop and market GTA 5. As of today, they have sold over 80 Million copies of the game. Once again, at $60 (that the game still costs in 2017), that is $4.8 BILLION. ($4,800,000,000).
That's excluding the $76 "Great White Shark Card Bundle" and the $135 "Meglodon Shark Card Bundle". Or the $3, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 Shark Cash Card packs.
Batman Arkham Knight sold an estimated 5.95Million copies globally. Again, if every one of these people bought just the $60 base game, no DLC, Season Passes or Upgraded Editions, that comes out to a grand total of $354.6Million. Do you really expect anyone to believe that most of that wasn’t profit?
These are conservative sales estimates, again excluding all massive amount of extra money these companies received from DLC, Editions, Season Passes and various micro transactions.
Please ******* spare me the "Well games still cost $60" ********. Especially since they don't, every single game has a stripped $60 base edition and at least a $80 and $100 "special editions" (aka, the real game).
We all know why companies are axing single player games in favour of multiplayer. Because multiplayer shooters take exponentially less effort/time to develop, are infinitely easier to monetize, players are willing to accept a lot more of these anti consumer practices in multiplayer games, therefore they make more money. I’m not telling anyone anything they don’t already know. There have been how many CODs, COD knock offs and the like?
Stop buying into this ****, these defenses that you parrot were created by MBA's and Marketing snakes sitting in a board room. None of these companies need to do these things, they do them because they can and they exist to suck as much money as possible out of our wallets.
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