Whats up with the revenue?

[Sqrl]

johntonsoup said:

Sqrl said:
Sometimes I feel like I'm screaming in the middle of a room and nobody hears me lol =P

I'm not debating the business uses of analyzing revenue guys. I just don't see how it is useful for gamers on a website talking about specific games, or possible future games, hardware sales, and of course future hardware sales.

Sorry, Sqrl, I should have made the connection explicit.

Since game companies are usually publicly traded companies, their ability to make games in the future is largely dependent on public perception of how they are currently doing. The big boys like Sony, Microsoft, etc. might be largely immune to any temporary setbacks, but everybody eventually has to pay the piper. If a company is not doing well (stock price goes down), they could be either a) forced out of the industry or b) taken over by a rival company (usually resulting in massive lay-offs and game cancellations).

Therefore, if we take it for granted that the public perception of a game company can affect the games that we see, every little bit of financial information becomes important to detail oriented jerks like myself. The relative importance of that financial information is up to debate, though I tend to agree with you that revenue by itself is not very informative.

Yeah I'm definitely glad you made that connection explicit because I don't know that I have ever seen that argument made here.  I could easily be wrong here, it wouldn't be the first time, but it just seems like a stretch to say that a good use of revenue for the "average joe" observer is to make inferences about public perception in order to make predictions about a companies abilities to release a game.

I definitely agree with you that public perception can impact their ability to make a game, but I can only see revenue actually impacting that image in a few extreme circumstances. 

At the very least we have common ground on the idea that revenue isn't all that useful without proper context.