Ryuu96 said:
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Seems like an odd statement to make by Matt Booty. I don't see how you can set an arbitrary number like 10m players needed for a game to be a success when each game has a different budget. For a small indie made by a single digit sized dev team, only a few hundred thousand sales and let's say 2m players thanks to a Gamepass release is a massive success bringing in enough revenue for the devs to live comfortably for many years and still have enough leftover to budget their next few games, whereas for a $100m+ budget AAA, only 10m players (not sales, but players) on a Gamepass release seems low and unlikely to turn a profit on the game. VR games tend to be on the cheaper side, no true AAA VR game has been made as of yet, save for VR ports of AAA games that first released on PC/console like Skyrim, Fallout 4, and LA Noire, actual original VR games tend to be AA budget at the largest, due to the fact that the VR market hasn't grown enough to support AAA VR games as of yet, and many have more single A budgets. I don't think you need anywhere near 10m players to be a success on a single A or AA budgeted VR game. Not saying that I want Xbox to get into VR of course, I think they made the right call waiting another gen to try and break into VR, but I doubt that most VR devs are struggling to even break even on their releases like Booty is suggesting here.
Worse though, Booty stating an arbitrary 10m players needed for success number like that is going to make the Xbox fanbase sweat, as quite alot of Xbox IP's did less than that, meaning that a sequel for them would be unlikely if Booty really means 10m is needed. Ghostwire Tokyo just hit 5m players 15 months after release, while HiFi Rush's latest update was 2m players in March, which likely means it hasn't yet hit 3m players. Quite a few other recent 1st and 2nd party titles are also below 10m players, including Pentiment, Psychonauts 2, Gears Tactics, Tell Me Why, and Battletoads. Even The Outer Worlds only hit 5m sales as of the last update (no player information) and that was a multiplat release on Playstation and Switch, the sequel will be Xbox and PC only.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 19 June 2023
