People just won’t pay it. But they WILL pay if it’s an extra $20 later, and then another $20…
How expensive games are getting to make is probably a hard question to answer. AAA, all the bells and whistles, you’ve never seen anything as realistic before? Pretty sure it’s going through the roof.
OTOH, the tools for a small team to make really interesting and awesome looking games are getting more and more available and easy to use. Not to mention that there’s enough of an audience now that “our latest shooter is so realistic, you’ll get PTSD” isn’t the only thing to aim for, you can make a game that wouldn’t have been called great looking in 2002 and people will call it awesome (Vampire Survivors for a recent example).
More to the point, some people will pay an extra $20, and then some other, different people will pay additional $20 on top of that, still others an additional $5 for that skin they really want etc. etc.
Having a cheaper base game + lots of add-ons at an additional cost allows you to sell to people who wouldn’t normally buy at the higher price for “the full game,” while at the same time allowing other people to then buy extras up to the level they’re willing. Free-to-play is the extreme version of that, where the base game costs $0.
In a purely abstract, theoretical world, having a free-to-play game with a bunch of pay-to-pay extras - an extra for literally everything any player deems valuable - could get the developer both the absolute maximum number of players and the absolute maximum amount of revenue, because every single player would pay exactly as much as they are willing to pay for the game, neither more nor less.
In practice, this is impossible because you can’t really turn a lot of things into separably purchasable DLCs - important things like “balance,” “good-looking art” or that intangible thing called “fun.” Plus there are costs to breaking things up into an infinite number of DLCs, both from the devs’ administrative side, but more importantly from the players’ side. Confronting the player with a giant list of DLC is both confusing and alienating. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of noping out of DLC because we can’t be bothered trying to figure out whether we want the Gold Edition VIP Pack, the Ultra Premium Pack, the Bonus Diamond Premium Pack etc. etc. etc.
But that theoretical concept of getting every single possibly penny of revenue out of every single possible player is what drives the cheap base game + tons of DLC model we see today.
He wasn’t at the helm of EA in 2019 (left in ‘13) but he probably was partially responsible for monetizing Anthem without the game itself finished. Remember how well this worked out?
Greedies gonna greed, for sure.
While Anthem itself was a mess, I think a bigger disaster is how the image you shared here vastly complicates something that’s otherwise pretty routine.
- Everyone gets access to a demo
- Premier subscribers get early access to the game
- All other subscribers get a 10-hour trial
- Everyone can buy it a week later
He’s just telling game devs that they need to do the same as he is making Unity Technologies do. There was a time when Unity was about making game development accessible, but that time is long gone. Now it’s about selling shovels and spirits to the gold diggers.
The recent Gigaya announcement makes me happy that I’ve never sprung for Unity:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/introducing-gigaya-unitys-upcoming-sample-game.1257135/page-2#post-8278305
Think about it for a moment. Basically, Unity created an internal game project to better understand the challenges of using their engine. But despite being the creators of the game engine, with better support available to build a game than anyone else in the world… they find it too time consuming and expensive to actually build a game with their own engine, or even produce game code that is useful as a demo or sample.
Man they only announced it 1-3 months ago and to suddenly do an about face and lay them all off without warning.
Anthem definitely could have been a great game, but it was clearly fucked over by someone in management.
It’s interesting because our experience with Unity is basically the polar opposite of what’s stated on that tweet.
Profiling and performance capabilities have rapidly improved, and you get amazing tools to review performance bottlenecks to a very low level now (thinking about the deep profiler, frame debugger and physics debugger). You can get deep down what the engine is found and optimize as much as the target platform and the engine’s architecture lets you. You have very high visibility and very good documentation.
What the engine has become is increasingly more complex on the deep end, since they are exposing much more functionality. I can understand it tripping up very small teams with not enough engineering redundancy, but I feel the overall engine’s assessment in the tweet is inaccurate and focused on the experience of very small teams that have not correctly budgeted technical preproduction.
One issue the engine has is the ease to get something running. The engine is versatile, and most times the most direct way of implementing something might not be the best for the project long term.
I think this is probably the key for most devs. Unity does a lot of things in a strange way and it’s pretty easy to do some ugly stuff especially while trying to get a project off the ground and it can even feel like the platform is pushing you to do some of that. That’s true of any platform, Unity just has some extra quirks in the mix and is still stuck with a lot of their early decisions that I’m sure they’d love to change if they weren’t so deeply embedded.
I still haven’t shipped a Unity project(but I hope to!), but my experience with the profiling tools so far hasn’t been bad at all.
If Unity has become bigger and less performant, are studios trying to keep up with better hardware for developers? I could see a studio handing out laptops when they should be providing real workstations.
Seems like a rather rushed response given the text itself and the fact that they didn’t even bother disabling the grammar/spell-check for the screenshot.
Well, yeah, calling your industry fellows “fucking idiots” is probably not an ideal way of saying things. Most of us, regardless of industry, have felt like saying something similar about our colleagues at times, but usually we don’t have the sort of wealth, status, and consequent arrogance to actually say it. Or maybe most of us aren’t quite the bung hole this guy seems to be.
Still, he is not stupid. An ass, yeah, but even a donkey can sometimes have something worthwhile to say.
As someone who once had to have weekly design calls with JR, I feel like I understand his point. I’ve seen a number of teams struggle to figure out how their game will actually make money and come to that realization way too late in the process.
Now, by far the most important thing is to build a fun, engaging game that makes players happy. Without that those monetization discussions are pointless. However, I’ve seen games nail their fun core loop and not be able to figure out how pay for servers and ongoing development. Most of this applies to online service, ongoing development games, though box product games have fallen into the same trap. For example, there is at least one example where I’ve seen the numbers of a game that most everyone on this forum has played and enjoyed that sold a ton of copies at launch and lost money over the lifetime of the game because they never thought about how to pay for all of those servers and patches.
There are good and bad ways to monetize and some crazy, exploitative shit out there. Thinking about how your game makes money isn’t dirty though and teams that don’t at least think about it in design are more likely to struggle to figure it out.
Is it kind of telling that the CEO of a game engine company doesn’t have devs in their autocorrect?
True CEOs know the value of saying “Developers”
Virtua Fighter 2 in Tokyo arcades was an experience.
It’s 2022, and companies like Apple and Google continue to have zero interest in combating SEO abuse on their platforms. (This isn’t a gaming-exclusive problem by any means, but we’re in the gaming forum, so we’ll limit it to that here.) Here’s Mike Rose of indie publisher No More Robots, trying to search for their hit downhill-biking game Descenders on the App Store:
Descenders is available on the App Store, but it doesn’t show up after pages of results in a search for the game’s title because something in Apple’s search algorithm is heavily prioritizing keywords over actual app names. It seems to be the old YouTube “keyword cloud in description” problem, but, y’know, on a storefront, and despite Apple’s insistence that they provide so much value for developers via discoverability and other benefits that they should be entitled to a 30% cut on all app and IAP sales, the reality of Apple’s search results clearly isn’t reflecting that.