They pay themselves for infrastructure costs effectively, so it would be the wholesale price. Would love to see their actual accounting book, public data says they made 2.8 billion, would love to see where it went.
I’ve heard (yes anecdotal) that on the books, Twitch pays AWS full retail for server time.
Makes me wonder if that’s done on purpose? Amazon just wants to kill Twitch and rent out IVS (their internal system) to other streaming platforms (like they do for Kick). THAT is outside money coming in.
From the point of view of AWS, they make money whether they host Twitch or some other streamer. If Twitch can’t make money paying retail hosting, the decision of what to do with it has to be made by people who control Twitch.
Because they kinda do it for every service of them, the point is to spread to all the markets with subsidies until kill the competition, and then keep a marginal profit to avoid competition while still makes a marginal profit (what in scale is a big profit anyway). This is usually what these megacorps do.
Do they? I wouldn’t be surprised if AWS even charges Amazon.com full retail for hosting. The point is the company has a lot of different business units that report up to the CEO, and business units generally act like mini companies.
The accounting of charging full retail to other business units is a lot cleaner than giving preferred rates and making it harder to understand the finances of what is going on with the different business units.
A CEO may be willing to operate a business unit at a loss for strategic reasons, but they have to understand that said business unit is costing the company money.
Amazon has every incentive to write down Twitches infrastructure cost as far higher than it needs to be, to make Twitch look unprofitable.
Both to audience and shareholders. It'll allow them to force more advertising and push up sub prices while making the main corporation revenue look better.
This while the long term plan looks to be more about getting an excuse to shut down the public facing side of Twitch and get rid of having to deal with the streamers and viewers as direct clients and renting out streaming infrastructure to other streaming sites instead.
They want to condense their streaming services to simply be simple products they can sell or rent out to other sites rather than having to deal with a load of consumers and legal liabilities that come with them.
Data is surprisingly cheap. It’s more than likely just reinvesting any profits into growth to boost stock price/investment. A lot of companies are hitting the point where growth is leveling off, so they’ve switched to cutting costs
They thought the party was going to last forever, so they ordered a bunch of jumbo pizzas and kegs
I mean it’s more like they paid themselves a bunch of bonuses and hired super duper growth hacking experts or whatever, and now they can’t pay for them, so god forbid they cut from the top
Wild card. Paizo. He’ll come in like “while pathfinder has been successful I see a lot of room for growth and restructuring”. 5 years later, there are now 28 low quality books, all of which are on a subscription model, half the staff are fired, and the company is owned by Amazon… Oh and a crossover with Jack Reacher.
This one did seem to come out of nowhere, and definitely seems a lot better than the common standard for games based off movies. The reviews are kind of in the middle, but given that’s been the case for prior Far Cry games and I’ve still enjoyed them, I wouldn’t mind picking it up.
Granted, not now…like everyone, I have a huge backlog and can’t justify buying a new game at full price.
If you think of it as an extension of the movies, then you know what to expect. Story wise, those are fairly mediocre (and this game is canon so expect about the same). Visuals are outstanding though, and I can’t speak for everyone but I’m really enjoying the gameplay and exploration.
“£36.85m ($46.75m) will be shared between claimants who claim that they were unfairly paid, and £7.1m ($9.1m) will cover associated legal fees” That’s a pretty good chunk of discrimination there. Probably not a lot of money for the company, but probably a lot of claimants
Feels like I’ve been hearing back and forth forever about whether it’s going to happen. I never tried the multiplayer personally, but I know this is sad news for many
Is it really? I thought the entire point of this game series was delivering a tightly scripted singleplayer narrative. That’s what attracts people to it. I think the overlap with people looking for some kind of multiplayer shooter is fairly small.
Used to be our favorite single player games came with multiplayer modes attached to them. You didn't expect them to get years of content. You just enjoyed them for a little while with some friends and then moved on. Not only is that totally fine, I'd argue it's preferable.
Absolutely, but that’s not how this works anymore and today, the expectation with every multiplayer game and even multiplayer mode is that it’s live-service. The industry has replaced the “natural” skill progression of players with dangling the carrot of permanent (and in my opinion mostly pointless) unlockables in front of their faces at all times.
I think some of it is the audience’s fault. I have heard many friends complaining about multiplayer games being “dead” or “abandoned” because there’s no new content and I’m like “I’m pretty satisfied, it doesn’t need anything else”. If there’s enough people playing for matchmaking, I’m good.
Let's change that expectation. Baldur's Gate 3 won best multiplayer at the Game Awards, and it's not a live service. In a talk with some friends, I realized how antagonistic the relationship between players and developers always ended up as well when the developers make more money with more "engagement". Diablo IV will get fun builds nerfed into the ground; Baldur's Gate 3 will let them rock, but only in the pre-existing difficulty levels before they add in extra challenge modes for fun. That's the difference.
Meanwhile, Agent Under Fire multiplayer for the Gamecube is more fun than any live service FPS I've ever played. It certainly didn't require years of support to be that fun, and you only need one other person to play it with, but preferably 3. Very easily doable regardless of how many people are in matchmaking.
It's a really good, well done stealth game that rewards very deliberate action and awareness of your surroundings. The multiplayer in the original was unique and really fun.
It had some pretty good aspects to it, but their reasoning behind cancelling (would need to “shift to a live service model”) it is pretty unfortunate and telling of the industry.
The game solely exists as a multiplayer team death match with the gameplay mechanics of The Last of Us. It was like Max Payne 3 meets Gears of War.
It was fun for PS3, I could see it faring well enough today but if their plan was to monetize it then it’s better off dead. Especially considering the state of the PC release, it just wasn’t the type of game to feasibly monetize. What can you do, skins? So any fun free unlocks are now paid or locked behind a battle pass, nice. What else is there, game enhancements? There were consumables so, we could have been paying for packs of those! Truly, we’re missing out.
I’m reminded of AlphaDream, which died as a company shortly after releasing a remake of a game where the original was still playable on the same console.
It has also secured an age 18 rating, with mention of violence and in-game purchases.
Hopefully they don’t get too greedy.
Capcom has been slowing morphing in to becoming yet another EA, Ubisoft or Activision with the monetization in their recent games (e.g Street Fighter VI, Exoprimal). Battle passes, Fomo-traps, social pressure, skinners boxes, Denuvo etc. At least most of their games are still good if you can ingore all the bullshit.
At least in this you can probably just throw all the pawns with paid costemtics to the nearest ditch for being walking advertisements.
The first Dragon’s Dogma had a ton of small DLC too, so this isn’t exactly new. They even sold rift crystals. I guess a lot of players don’t realize how much DLC it was because the later editions and the ports came with most of it included.
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