Azzanation said:
JWeinCom said:
I deleted everything that was irrelevant to the actual point. On what's left, obviously developers disagree with you, or they would not be making these deals. They may not always be right, but I'm definitely going to take their word over yours on what is profitable.
That being said, it would be trivially easy to ensure that the deal works out for the third party developer. You can make the amount paid for exclusivity dependent on the amount sold on the platform it does release on. Take FFXVI for instance. Square has released other FF games and similar games on both Sony and Microsoft consoles and can reasonably estimate the sales breakdown between the two sales. For instance they can estimate that sales on XBox for FFXVI would be about 30% on XBox than they would be on PS5. So, you arrange that the fee for exclusivity would be somewhere around 30% of the profits generated by FFXVI on the PS5 (adjusting for things like lowered development costs for developing on one platform) and voila. Square is basically guaranteed not lose money.
Alternatively, you can make the exclusivity conditional. The game will be exclusive assuming it sells at least X million copies by 20XX. And if not, they are free to release it on another platform. This again allows the dev to essentially guarantee the deal works out for them. Again, you would have to account for things such as the decreased sales that will come from launching the game later, and so on. And of course, profitability is not the end all be all. Companies often are willing to sacrifice potential profits for the sake of mitigating risks. That's basically the whole point of investing. There are tons of ways you can potentially arrange things, and it would be silly to analyze each of these hypothetical arrangements. The obvious conclusion though is this. If exclusivity agreements were not beneficial for third party developers they wouldn't exist. This thread is just an example of backwards reasoning (or just making intentionally bad arguments for engagement). You don't like third party exclusives, and you're entitled to that opinion, and are trying to come up with reasons it is bad after the fact. |
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I deleted everything that was irrelevant to the point. Which means, literally everything you just said.
Let me remind you of the point that you made.
"1) Developers have a larger market to sell their games on, increasing popularity and profits. Keeping the lights on."
Your first point was strictly about the profitability of third party developers. I don't know why you're pretending that you did not make this point but there it is in your own words.
Now, here is a counter argument. In actual argument form.
1: Third parties engage in deals as a result of free bargaining.
2: Third parties would only engage in such deals if they believed it would be beneficial to their business.
3. Considering these deals have been going on for 30 years, third party developers have enough evidence to reasonably conclude they are beneficial.
Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that these deals are in fact beneficial to third parties.
Therefore your argument that an end to third party exclusives would increase profits of third party developers is false.
Pretty sure the the logic there stands on its own, but as a formality, do you accept that your first point has been disproven? If you acknowledge that, or can explain why my logic here is flawed, then I might be willing address another point, but I'm not going to engage any further in a conversation where when one argument is proven wrong you just make 10 new bad arguments. That's just a waste of time.
