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Slimebeast on 29 May 2008
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Revenue is much more interesting than profits, by far.

Profits. Usually I don't care if the owners of a company make money (as in profit) or not, as they are no-names to me. I don't know who they are, and btw they're not always physical persons but sometimes pension funds or some other abstract agents.

Also, there are many people getting rich even if a company doesn't show profit. The high salaries of CEOs and other bosses, and their bonuses, they're included in revenue but usually aren't tied to profit per se.

Profit is somewhat interesting as a driving force for future projects. Like if a certain game made huge profit, therefor the publisher will push dev to make sequels (although not always very innovative). But on the other hand, profit isnt always neccesary, because a certain developer might be perfectly happy to just get enuff amount of revenue so that they can keep on making games by their vision. As long as the revenue pays the salaries of the CEO, programmers, artists etc they're happy.

Profits don't reflect how BIG something (company, dev, publisher, market segment or whatever phenomenon we're talking about) is as well as revenue does.

You can have 0 profit but if your revenue is big, you are still big (affecting peoples lives, market penetration, investment, R&D... whatever parameter you examine). But even if you have 35% profits, that's still not a big deal if the revenue is also small.

Sony had losses (or tiny profits) for years. So what? That doesnt take away the fact that Sony are BIG. It's actually a HUGE company. So by revenue alone they are influencal.

Nintendo has almost always been pretty profitable. But they were always small company(until the DS/Wii). Because profits are only a % of revenue.

Same thing with publishers. Nowadays EA arent making much profit. So what? They have HUGE revenue, and that means they can keep on buying devs, making big budget games, having multiple game studios worldwide, doing huge advertising, being all-present on game-shows etc. And the market, analysts, magazines, gaming websites, the gamers, they all listen to EA and check out whats going on. So EA is like a BIG machine regardless if it makes profit or not. And the CEO, executives etc in the company sure make money (only the share holders suffer).