Publishers overestimate their necessity.

[Euphoria14]

JayWood2010 said:

Euphoria14 said:

JayWood2010 said:

Horrible article. The same people saying this guy is right are the same people buying Grand Threft Auto, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Halo, Beyond, etc These games are expensive. Lot of workers, costly engines, actors, voice actors, etc Show a little respect instead of whining all the time. Apparently because you can name two games that gets away with a AAA budget does not make you right. Throw in nintendo because they can get away with it too, but other developers focus on AAA because AA and class C games dont sell well.  Stop acting like developers/publishers owe you something.  

How is it horrible? It is absolutely true that if a game is unprofitable when selling 4-6M copies then something is wrong on the developer/publishers end and is not the fault of the consumer.

How so?  First off you are wrong on the Tomb Raider end as it was profitable.  The developers was happy with Tomb Raider numbers.  Square Enix on the other hand expected more.  Tomb Raider was suppose to be SE's savior and it wasn't good enough for them.  So that argument is moot.

Truth is AAA games is what people wants, but then we have this loud abnoxious group on the internet whining because they feel entitled to these for cheaper.  Doesn't work that way.

My problem with used sales is that somebody goes and buys a game and then resells it 24 hours later. That person saves about 25 dollars so instead of paying $60 he/she pays $35. The problem is the next purchase. Now the developer is in a situation where companies such as gamestop are selling a brand new game with a used sticker for $55 rather than $60. Not only is that a ripoff to the customer but the developer really got ripped off because a brand new game just got sold used. Correct me if Im wrong but I dont believe there is another industry that does that. Now you can still resell your games with the new setup so the person who bought the game for $60 can still take it back for that $25 again. That is a pretty good deal. Now Gamestop, developer, and user gets a reward from that. The only difference is now gamestop cant sell that next game with a $5 discount and developers get paid as well as gamestop.  

If you dont want to pay $60 for a game i highly doubt you want to pay $55.  If you want to pay $60 and then take it back for $25 then you can still do that.  

The 6M copy example was for Resident Evil 6 I believe. He probably used Tomb Raider because it took years to complete and if I am not mistaken also had delays because they wanted to continually add more polish to the title.

Also, developers do not need to keep making new engines for each game they produce. This is why he used the Source Engine and the CoD Engine as examples. Creating new engines is very expensive and majority of the time is not needed. Naughty Dog sticking with their engine for next gen alone will significantly reduce costs.

 

His point was that there are plenty of examples of very high quality titles that do not have exorbitant budgets of $60-$100M and experience profits on sales of 1-2M. His point is that devs and more importantly the publishers refuse to aknowledge that they themselves are contributing to their own issues and instead blaming and wanting to punish the consumer. If you're making a new IP and are not sure of how it will sell, don't spend $60M on it and then huff and puff because 6M people didn't buy it. They should be figuring out how to correct the mistakes they are making on their end and finding ways to reduce costs instead of trying to find new ways to get the consumers to fund those mistakes.

 

Your example of a person buying a game and selling it 24 hours later is irrelevant. Once a person buys a game they can do whatever they want with it since it is theirs. They own it. If I bought TLoU today and wanted to sell it tomorrow, I shouldn't be punished for doing so, nor does Naughty Dog deserve any of that money from my sale. My copy, my sale, my money. They already got their money from me and in addition gained an additional potential fan and buyer for their next TLoU title.

Don't want us to sell your games? Make it so we don't want to. This is something that not only I believe in, but Nintendo does, Rockstar does and I am positive you could find many others.

It is their job to please the customer. Not the other way around, and if they make a judgement call to put $100M towards their new title and their judgement call ends up falling way short, then that is nobodies fault but their own.