Steam Deck is shaping up to be the “Nintendo” of handheld PCs. Not the most powerful thing on the market, but cleverly put together with its own bespoke software that allows users to customise and tweak games at the system level via quick access to its features. Having windows on the other machines makes your access to games better but means you have to dig harder or install extra software to do what the deck does. To paraphrase Sega’s 90s marketing, It Does what Windon’t.
Most great games never get anywhere near this much buzz.
I think it’s a product of the genre. BG3 is in the CRPG category, which had a bit of a resurgence lately between Pillars 1+2, Pathfinder 1+2, and (perhaps most relevantly) DOS 1+2. Good games in an existing category of game helps build up buzz in that category and more players. More players creates more demand… but there hasn’t been that much being made in the CRPG bucket lately.
Then, on comes BG3. It fits in that bucket. It has much higher production values than the other recent games in that bucket. It’s got one of the most valuable CRPG IPs attached to it with Baldur’s Gate. And it’s reportedly amazing as a game on top. The last part wouldn’t get it anywhere near this much attention on its own, but in conjunction with the others it’s gotten lots of buzz.
I also feel like Larian handled the early access part really well for keeping the game in discussion without making the game oversaturated in gaming circles. They got a lot of “free” (not actually free, but you know what I mean) marketing out of that.
For me Half Life: Alyx was not even the best VR game but maybe one of the best games i played in my 20+ years gaming experience. It really shows how great VR can be if developers put an immense amount of time, effort and love into a game. Other honorable mentions: Pavlov VR, Blade and Sorcery (especially the Star Wars mods) and War Thunder
There is an audience for such games. Mainly for them to blow off steam and try to see if they’re a better crack shot than anyone, and sometimes to acquire a degree of fame. They have spent enormous amounts of money hoping to land more shots at a higher framerate.
I’m now more content quietly playing an offline sandbox game, no rush at all.
Red Candle Games said that “in the aftermath of the incident, some still possess different speculations about Devotion. As regretful as the incident was, we have to bear its full consequence.
I don’t know if this was an honest mistake, but… 😂
This and Balatro (and probably many rogue-lite deckbuilders I haven’t tried) are perfect compulsive time killers. Even though they’re newer, I would say they deserve serious consideration.
It would just require smaller teams making lower budget games that are more focused on Art than sales, which I would be really happy about honestly. Too many people are in this industry solely to rake in the big bucks.
If you are going to compete with AAA games it’s going to require a big budget, which not all Devs have access to.
A high quality AA game would probably do great, but would be unlikely to outsell a AAA with hundreds of millions of dollars for budget.
Obsidian made a fantastic game with Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire but it was considered a ‘failure’ sales wise (at least at launch), despite being well received.
Obsidian sold to Micro$oft despite making very high quality games and their crowdfunding campaigns consistently earning more money than they were asking for. The stated reason was they found it hard to keep their employees paid consistently and they didn’t want to lay people off. Also that they thought they could do just as good as other big players in the industry if they had access to larger budgets.
I think it was a bad move. They managed to survive the massive round of 9,000 jobs cuts to Microsoft’s gaming division (this time), but you just know that Microsoft would cut them in a heartbeat if they thought it would save them a dime in the future. That being said I think it’s understandable to want to see your employees paid, and it’s just a sad fact that AAA games require huge budgets nowadays, so I can kind of understand why they sold, even if I don’t agree with it.
Pretty much every popular indie game has a publisher. Publishers are great because they provide relatively low cost marketing, the trick is to be careful when signing a contract that you don’t sign away too much while still getting value from them.
It’s not so black and white, Clair Obscur : Expédition 33 has that level of quality and polish because the team behind it was able to find a publisher to finance it. Everything has nuance, we got shafted on subnautica 2 but we had other great games, some self published, some not
I’m at least willing to wait until it gets reviews to make a sound judgement.
I don’t think the bonus would have been a big enough reason to delay the game. Delaying a game like this relatively last-minute and giving it an extra year of development is waaaay more expensive than the bonuses would have been. That’s a gigantic revenue spike they were expecting to get this year and now have to push out to next year, and they may well end up paying out similar bonuses next year too.
My suspicion, from the history of Steve Papoutsis, is that Kraftom wanted to add in anti-player elements and the original founders refused. Probably micro transactions, or maybe even having a bigger multiplayer focus to make it closer to a live-service game. Some mechanism to get money from customers beyond the original purchase. I suspect crap like that will be reason enough not to buy the game when it comes out.
Delaying a game like this relatively last-minute and giving it an extra year of development is waaaay more expensive than the bonuses would have been.
Is it still more expensive if they just shelve it and pretend to give it extra development? I haven’t seen any details on why it wasn’t ready for release or what they are changing or adding? A quarter billion dollars in savings seems like pretty good motivation for a company to park a project for 6 to 12 months.
Agreed. Subnautica 1 steam revenue breakdown offers a bit of perspective on why they might want to play pretend.
“How much money did Subnautica make? We estimate that Subnautica made $274,113,745.92 in gross revenue since its release. Out of this, the developer had an estimated net revenue of $80,863,555.05. Refer to the revenue table for a full breakdown of these numbers.”
Bloomberg reported that the bonus was tied to revenue targets. So the $250,000 estimate must be estimating significantly higher revenues for them in 2025.
What you posted is just the sales on 1 platform for 1 game, whixh came out in 2018 when games were cheaper.
It’s far and away their most profitable game to date, so it would make sense to get some perspective from it. Can you offer anything concrete about their other platform sales? I’m not familiar with any tools for that
Yes. Like, it’s not even a question it’s more expensive to delay it. First of all, they are choosing to pay for 6-12 months of extra development, which alone is probably several times more money than the bonus that they would have paid out. I don’t know what their payroll is, but we don’t need to know because math.
If the bonus was for 1/2 annual salary per person (which would be insanely high), then the cost of the bonus would be the same as 6 months of additional payroll. Meaning that with any longer delay than 6 months or smaller bonus structure than 1/2 of annual salary, it becomes more expensive to delay the game. Both of which are incredibly likely in my opinion.
And that’s just salary. It’s possible the studio was planning on laying people off after release, but more likely that they would have moved to a other project that is currently wrapping up pre-production. So this is causing a cascading effect unless they hire additional staff to catch up.
Then you have marketing costs. The rule of thumb in the industry is that half the overall budget is marketing. There are all sorts of contracts they probably had- digital stuff like banner ads on websites, on the console digital storefronts, partnerships with twitch streamers and YouTubers and review websites, physical stuff like cardboard cutouts and fliers. They may have started printing for boxes for physical releases (though I’m not sure whether this game would have had one or not). They may have started acquiring merch inventory: shirts and stickers and backpacks and flashlights and more perhaps. Some of these contracts they may be able to postpone or cancel, but they certainly aren’t getting back 100% of what they paid.
And in all of this time they aren’t getting the huge revenue spike they were expecting. The vast, vast majority of a game’s revenue comes at launch (excluding live services, which this hopefully will not have). They need to survive another year on the trickle of revenue coming in from the sales of their other games, or Krafton may need to pump more of their own money into Unknown Worlds. Or debt.
According to one of the articles above the publishers operating profit last year was "only" $300m so that bonus would make the shareholders mad I guess.
A lot depends on how you use it and how accessible it is to the outside internet.
I have a few smart devices, but they are all controlled locally. If my internet connection stops working, I still have full control of everything. I also have manual options in case my home network stops working.
Not advice, do your own research: I don’t see a big problem it Bluetooth. It can be hacked, but the person hacking has to be near you. That alone protects you from about 8 billion people.
I’m not particularly knowledgeable about IT but I avoid IoT like the plague. Everything should run locally and if I want to control it from away I’ll use a VPN to home.
Haha that’s exactly what I do. 99% is local, the 1% is either “off site” in such a way it can’t be moved local, or I’m moving it to a local solution when possible.
Choom, you gotta remember any Edgerunner know they’re gonna flatline young.
Most people get chipped to perform their job, which is basically to barely survive a corpo life. Some have chrome for medical reasons. Most people don’t wanna be a chrome jock anyway, with cyberpsychosis and all.
Also, ripperdocs are the closest thing to medical attention proles can afford. And I suspect with the jack they make they can afford actual medical care.
I keep my boxes in two cases : the warranty is still valid, or the thing is fragile and has a form that make it hard to find a replacement for (usually large and fragile flat things, like screens).
All the other are waiting to be thrown away, in my garage.
When I was young my parents would not let me get DDR: Konamix. They wouldn’t even let me buy it to play with a controller. Nevermind that I’m at the arcade with all of my arcade friends multiple times a week.
I was at my local tiny game store hanging out as I usually did all the time, and the guy working there (I was maybe 12, he was like 24) EXCITEDLY asked “HEY I got my preorder of Konamix, do you wanna play?!” And I was SOOOOO ELATED to try. I told him about my parents and not letting me get the game, and he was like “yo that’s horrible, I am so sorry!”
I played there for about an hour, until he got off work. As I was getting on my bike, I hear
“RAI!”
“Yes?”
“This is yours.”
Like a movie with a sports guy handing over his jersey to an eager fan, he hands me his brand new copy of Konamix. It was the sweetest thing anyone had ever done for me. I told him he can’t do that, it’s his preorder, and he said “it’s okay, I can get another one; you can’t.”
My parents were PISSED (and they knew I didn’t buy it, I couldn’t afford 40USD at that time)… but they ended up buying me a shitty Madkatz pad so I could play at home. I probably put it 400 hours.
Thank you, video game store dude. I hope you’re doing amazing now.
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