Comment by f17
3 years ago
Counterpoint: Stardew Valley. No IAP bullshit, no lootbox chicanery... and yet I doubt its creator is hurting, financially speaking.
Of course, we're talking about an outlier here. Excellence doesn't guarantee anything, but it is a strategy that sometimes works.
The irony is that you'd expect the big publishers to be the ones willing to take on risks and put out products that are excellent but maybe not financial blockbusters. They're the ones who can afford to parlay a reputation for excellence into further success of their more commercial products (since they're diversified and more likely to live long enough to realize the returns). Yet, it's only indies and self-publishers who seem to care about doing the best work... and this isn't limited to games, but visible in all the arts right now. The entities that can afford big risks and long-term plays (inherent to excellence strategies) nevertheless avoid them, and the small actors are invariably the ones making them.
When people say Stardew Valley is a counterpoint, are they saying publishers shouldn't pay developers at all until their game is a massive success? ConcernedApe spent 4 years working on the game on a pretty much ramen salary and then hit a success; I vastly prefer whatever dysfunction we have now, to publishers not paying any salaries unless you come with a 1-in-100 success.
Games are a hit driven business; so if you have a success you are incentivized to milk it; if you don't want to be forced to milk it, then don't build 100M-budget games. If you are building a $100M game and not baking in monetization, then you are an idiot.
> Stardew Valley sold over 400,000 copies across Steam and GOG.com in two weeks,[13][72][73] and more than a million within two months.
Stardew Valley sold at $14.99. At 1 million copies in two months that's around 15 million gross, which works out to a 3.75 million payout for each of those 4 years of Ramen living. I would happily live off Ramen for a payout like that, and I think this is usually what people are talking about when they say this game is a counterpoint.
No, this doesn't mean you don't pay developers if you're a giant company. But it does mean that you don't need to put in MTX or AAA quality to have a successful game. 3.75 million a year could support 37 developers at 100k a year. Which means you could lead a small team to mild success instead of busting out 100s of developers for a 100 million budget game.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardew_Valley#:~:text=Senso....
I think the problem is that we have to have $100M games - or bust. There is very little funding available for those "less than blockbuster" titles.
Even with predatory monetization it is extremely hard to recoup costs caused by such budget - there is a market for only so many Worlds of Warcrafts or similar long running games where the huge costs can be amortized over millions of players and years of subscriptions.
If you don't build the game around the "AAA" assumption that requires you to ship (and have made!) hundreds of gigabytes of artwork, scripting and what not, then a lot of these monetization pressures go away - unless your producer pushes to put it back in, because, hey, free money!