The dev seems surprised by what is pretty common knowledge:
You get only roughly 50% of gross revenue paid out after distributor cut (30%), vat (10%) and returns (10%).
Games make the vast majority of profits in their first month, only ticking back up slightly when releasing DLCs.
So there are only three things to do really:
be happy the game did well, do 1-3 months of patching, and go on to the next game (and do your best to ignore angry gamers yelling that “the game is abandoned”)
the paradox route: keep releasing regular DLC to keep cash flow up while also releasing regular free updates (and do your best to ignore angry gamers yelling that you are a greedy evil corporation)
introduce micro transactions, subscription models or any other way to keep making money after release (and do your best to ignore angry gamers yelling that you are greedy)
Instead, for some reason the dev seemed to think they can keep up developing the game indefinitely and that somehow, it would keep making money? There are like 10 games in history that made enough money to allow development for years: Minecraft, Terraria, Witcher 3, Stardew Valley, etc. And I don’t think they are even cash flow positive on their own.
Yep. The whole story to me was a textbook example of “this isn’t how this works, at all”. And the only way to prevent it is to spread stories like this far and wide so that everyone who gets a decent shot at success doesn’t do the same stuff.
What stuck out to me was:
Mochi went on to explain that momentum for Rise of Industry dropped off, so he tried to “hold it together with duct tape and 80 hours a week.” While the studio hoped patches would help, “it never stabilised,” and Mochi’s health and personal life were heavily impacted – he even faced losing his home.
There was a similar story about… I think the big asian market crash in the 90s or something, where one of the traders thought he could just buy enough stock that his action alone, the demand he “created” would stop the market from crashing and lessen the loss. But of course all he did was take all his company’s funds and threw them into a black hole.
It’s understandable as a panic reaction. But… yeah.
Back to the story, at that point, what was even the expectation of what the publisher would do? Also throw more money in? More advertising for the game that had a big moment, captured the audience that it can capture, but is not working well enough to keep that attention?
Go above and beyond the contract? Nobody will do that, that’s why the contract exists.
Anyway, I hope the dev is doing ok, I don’t mean to hate on the person and truly wish him happiness and success.
Yeah I don’t understand peoples obsession with continuous development. I understand there’s more competition now, but counter-strike 1.6 stood on it’s own legs for a decade without meaningful updates. If you find a new game that appeals to you more, then go play that. Same with Early Access, if you don’t want to buy an incomplete game, don’t buy early access titles. Of course it would be nice if developers communicated any development breaks or pauses, but they don’t really owe you anything.
I feel devs should push major bug fixes for free—something something games released with more bugs not just because of increasing complexity but because they just ship immediately due to easier distribution of an update instead of testing before shipping. That’s all we’re entitled to. If you want content updates you should probably pay for continued development costs, which is where DLC and subscription comes in. Those also have potential for abuse and unfair pricing, though, so that’s a whole other minefield.
(and do your best to ignore angry gamers yelling that you are greedy)
No, listen to those people. They’re right. Fuck microtransactions. Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
Also the distributor cut is fucking obscene and needs to be sharply reduced. Steam takes an entire third of your revenue, clean off the top, for the privilege of participating in their monopoly.
I feel like there’s a difference between cosmetic microtransactions, game-balance altering ones, and the predatory ones most gamers including me dislike. The ones where you only have 10 energy for actions and every action depletes your energy, so you wait 10 hours or PAY 10 IN GEMS, DON’T HAVE ENOUGH GEMS? BUY 55 FOR $2.99! Which are acquired quickly as you learn the game and then you get a very slow dripfeed of them once you have completed all tutorial/onboarding tasks, and which you are forced to spend in the tutorial. Or the lootbox gambling ones. I’m all for cosmetics to support the dev, but take a dim view of the game-balance altering ones and outright predatory ones.
Although I do wonder how much whatever-dollar-horse-armor opened the floodgates to this.
It’s all the same abuse. You will be made to want something that costs nothing to provide - as often as possible, for as much as they can take.
Your support for devs was buying the game.
Horse armor is fine, compared to this. You downloaded content you didn’t have. It wasn’t paying to unlock something already on the disc. No in-game merchant asked for your credit card. Horse armor is the point of reference everybody recognizes, and it is fundamentally better than any form of this industry-swallowing manipulation.
Nobody was ever going to blow a thousand dollars a month on horse armor. But now - that behavior is the only reason some games exist.
I don’t like microtransactions, but can you come up with a source of revenue for a game that allows for constant updates that include new features, mechanics, artwork, audio, etc. that isn’t MXT or ads?
The people that will be angry about MXT are the same that would be angry their game hasn’t seen any major updates in 5-10 years, like their initial investment somehow supports unlimited development. It’s just not feasible.
Otherwise you have to sell new products to make new money. You can make a sequel, or a no-kidding expansion, instead of charging ten actual dollars to let your character wear a hat that’s already on your god-damn hard drive.
Or… you can make another game. This era dragging out games for ten years is a bizarre blip that’s only maximizing their investment in antipattern suck-zones with instant access to your wallet.
Zero respect for ‘people who rightly despise this also secretly crave it.’ Cram that garbage.
None of this is about what I like. Charging money in games is a scam. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that is what makes them games. There is no intrinsic economic value to putting balls through hoops or clicking on heads. The exchange rate between enchanted scimitars and real-life hamburgers is nonexistent. It’s a category error.
This abusive business model is half the industry, by revenue. It’s in every genre, on every platform, at every price point. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else. Only legislation will fix this.
I’d argue subscription is seen as very similar to micro transactions, although I can see that one is capped and other is not, so maybe subscription is less predatory
Charging repeatedly for local software or… using your car battery… is an intolerable abuse. But MMOs are plainly a real service, with simple ongoing costs, and new content you access by playing the damn game.
And even MMOs are pulling this shit. WoW wanted $90 for a magic horse that’s also an auction house. The entire base game costs less than that one fucking object inside the game. This is fundamentally different, and obviously worse, and it has infected ev-er-y-thing.
Small team + great game and that’s what you get. According to steam revenue calculator, factorio made 83 million net revenue. Probably is quite a bit lower because its using the updated price.
They have like… 4? People working on that game + accounting and maybe community management. They could go indefinitely.
Another viable path is early access for ‘free’ testing and a dripfeed of a few sale, and then effectively a second release. Have your cake, and eat it, if you can live off a small slice initially.
It frontloads a lot of ‘post release’ development devs might want to do. Not that its easy by any means, but it is kind of a ‘hack’ since storefronts will treat your existing game as a new release.
The dev seems surprised by what is pretty common knowledge:
So there are only three things to do really:
Instead, for some reason the dev seemed to think they can keep up developing the game indefinitely and that somehow, it would keep making money? There are like 10 games in history that made enough money to allow development for years: Minecraft, Terraria, Witcher 3, Stardew Valley, etc. And I don’t think they are even cash flow positive on their own.
Yep. The whole story to me was a textbook example of “this isn’t how this works, at all”. And the only way to prevent it is to spread stories like this far and wide so that everyone who gets a decent shot at success doesn’t do the same stuff.
What stuck out to me was:
There was a similar story about… I think the big asian market crash in the 90s or something, where one of the traders thought he could just buy enough stock that his action alone, the demand he “created” would stop the market from crashing and lessen the loss. But of course all he did was take all his company’s funds and threw them into a black hole.
It’s understandable as a panic reaction. But… yeah.
Back to the story, at that point, what was even the expectation of what the publisher would do? Also throw more money in? More advertising for the game that had a big moment, captured the audience that it can capture, but is not working well enough to keep that attention?
Go above and beyond the contract? Nobody will do that, that’s why the contract exists.
Anyway, I hope the dev is doing ok, I don’t mean to hate on the person and truly wish him happiness and success.
Yeah I don’t understand peoples obsession with continuous development. I understand there’s more competition now, but counter-strike 1.6 stood on it’s own legs for a decade without meaningful updates. If you find a new game that appeals to you more, then go play that. Same with Early Access, if you don’t want to buy an incomplete game, don’t buy early access titles. Of course it would be nice if developers communicated any development breaks or pauses, but they don’t really owe you anything.
I feel devs should push major bug fixes for free—something something games released with more bugs not just because of increasing complexity but because they just ship immediately due to easier distribution of an update instead of testing before shipping. That’s all we’re entitled to. If you want content updates you should probably pay for continued development costs, which is where DLC and subscription comes in. Those also have potential for abuse and unfair pricing, though, so that’s a whole other minefield.
No, listen to those people. They’re right. Fuck microtransactions. Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
Also the distributor cut is fucking obscene and needs to be sharply reduced. Steam takes an entire third of your revenue, clean off the top, for the privilege of participating in their monopoly.
I feel like there’s a difference between cosmetic microtransactions, game-balance altering ones, and the predatory ones most gamers including me dislike. The ones where you only have 10 energy for actions and every action depletes your energy, so you wait 10 hours or PAY 10 IN GEMS, DON’T HAVE ENOUGH GEMS? BUY 55 FOR $2.99! Which are acquired quickly as you learn the game and then you get a very slow dripfeed of them once you have completed all tutorial/onboarding tasks, and which you are forced to spend in the tutorial. Or the lootbox gambling ones. I’m all for cosmetics to support the dev, but take a dim view of the game-balance altering ones and outright predatory ones.
Although I do wonder how much whatever-dollar-horse-armor opened the floodgates to this.
It’s all the same abuse. You will be made to want something that costs nothing to provide - as often as possible, for as much as they can take.
Your support for devs was buying the game.
Horse armor is fine, compared to this. You downloaded content you didn’t have. It wasn’t paying to unlock something already on the disc. No in-game merchant asked for your credit card. Horse armor is the point of reference everybody recognizes, and it is fundamentally better than any form of this industry-swallowing manipulation.
Nobody was ever going to blow a thousand dollars a month on horse armor. But now - that behavior is the only reason some games exist.
I don’t like microtransactions, but can you come up with a source of revenue for a game that allows for constant updates that include new features, mechanics, artwork, audio, etc. that isn’t MXT or ads?
The people that will be angry about MXT are the same that would be angry their game hasn’t seen any major updates in 5-10 years, like their initial investment somehow supports unlimited development. It’s just not feasible.
Subscriptions. Y’know - like a service?
Otherwise you have to sell new products to make new money. You can make a sequel, or a no-kidding expansion, instead of charging ten actual dollars to let your character wear a hat that’s already on your god-damn hard drive.
Or… you can make another game. This era dragging out games for ten years is a bizarre blip that’s only maximizing their investment in antipattern suck-zones with instant access to your wallet.
Zero respect for ‘people who rightly despise this also secretly crave it.’ Cram that garbage.
None of this is about what I like. Charging money in games is a scam. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that is what makes them games. There is no intrinsic economic value to putting balls through hoops or clicking on heads. The exchange rate between enchanted scimitars and real-life hamburgers is nonexistent. It’s a category error.
This abusive business model is half the industry, by revenue. It’s in every genre, on every platform, at every price point. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else. Only legislation will fix this.
I’d argue subscription is seen as very similar to micro transactions, although I can see that one is capped and other is not, so maybe subscription is less predatory
Charging repeatedly for local software or… using your car battery… is an intolerable abuse. But MMOs are plainly a real service, with simple ongoing costs, and new content you access by playing the damn game.
And even MMOs are pulling this shit. WoW wanted $90 for a magic horse that’s also an auction house. The entire base game costs less than that one fucking object inside the game. This is fundamentally different, and obviously worse, and it has infected ev-er-y-thing.
State subventions
not super familiar with your idiolect. what do you mean by MXT? i tried looking it up, but nothing i found made much sense in this context.
Sorry, accidentally swapped the letters. Answered by brb
MTX = microtransactions
Factorio too.
The DLC was… Good…
Small team + great game and that’s what you get. According to steam revenue calculator, factorio made 83 million net revenue. Probably is quite a bit lower because its using the updated price.
They have like… 4? People working on that game + accounting and maybe community management. They could go indefinitely.
Also No Man’s Sky, somehow still getting free content
Another viable path is early access for ‘free’ testing and a dripfeed of a few sale, and then effectively a second release. Have your cake, and eat it, if you can live off a small slice initially.
It frontloads a lot of ‘post release’ development devs might want to do. Not that its easy by any means, but it is kind of a ‘hack’ since storefronts will treat your existing game as a new release.