Wait… that math does not possibly check out. In the worst case scenario (Steam), they pay 30% of the revenue from the game in platform fees. If they spend less than that for settlement, simple math tells us that there is at least 41% of the revenue basically unaccounted for.
There’s a bit of overhead in every company, like HR, IT and facilities, so maybe these don’t count for “development cost” (which makes no sense tbh, that’s not how project budgets work). Marketing can eat a ton of money, too, but the numbers still seem bafflingly high.
What? It just means that they spend less than 30% on development. That doesn’t sound too far off, as a lot of the money probably goes to marketing, management, administration or (gasp) profits.
Unless I live under a rock I don’t see the point of spending a lot on marketing ads for games. Two big examples of games that sold extremely well that I never saw an ad for were elden ring and boulders gate three. If you just make a good game word of mouth will tell how good the game is not an ad on TV.
It seems like it can make sense. Platform fees aren’t an initial outlay, they’re effectively a cut of profits based on sales.
For the sake of argument using fake numbers, if a studio spends $1m making a game, and then they put it on Steam and it does $10m in sales, then Steam’s cut of that at 30% will be $3m
So, spending more on store fees than development seems possible - especially if your game is selling really well
it sucks having to wait on get it on PC. I want to be optimistic and say it gives them time to fix bugs but so far no delayed PC release I know of has ever done that or at least hasn’t introduced new issues when porting it over
Finally. The first one, I waited and waited for it to get PC port before I played it. When Forbidden West came out, I traded a smart watch for a ps4 pro, got FW from Gamefly, finished the game, and then immediately resold the ps4. Been waiting for it to come to PC so I can finally buy it on Steam.
What I mean is it isn’t a bad story, but in comparison to h:zd that had the slow plot reveal that made me go: what? What?! And want to eagerly know more about the story.
But gameplay is great and the skills you can unlock makes it very fun to play.
RIP Lance Reddick, him voicing Sylens is so great. I really hope they have enough recorded material for the next game.
Porting to PC isn’t minimal effort. It takes a lot of dev time to optimize and make it run well on the wide variety of PC hardware, not to mention the additional PC specific technologies like DLSS that often get implemented. First game had quite a few performance issues at launch that were ironed out over the span of several months.
The point isn’t that it’s quite literally free. It’s a figure of speech.
Between taking a game you’ve already completed and is already popular and reworking it to sell to a brand new audience… versus creating a new AAA title, which one is more expensive?
that were ironed out over the span of several months
It still runs like garbage on my 13700K and 3060Ti, depending on the area. Sometimes, High settings are fine, but way too often I have to drop down to “Original” to get somewhat acceptable FPS (>40) at 1440p with Balanced DLSS. Am I doing something wrong, or was it just even worse at launch?
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