Above 50%, but do you have any idea how much lower the bar can be for a bad video game than Redfall and Suicide Squad? Those are the games that typically aren’t getting coverage. Redfall and Suicide Squad, again, had some confidence behind them. When that much money is thrown behind a game and there’s no confidence in it, it usually doesn’t even come out.
It does shift review coverage, generally, toward the ones with the most advertising. Kane & Lynch is a weird one to pull out to support your argument, because despite the advertising, they got fairly poor reviews. (Also, as someone who’s played Kane & Lynch, those games are underrated.) The games with the big advertising budgets typically have a degree of confidence behind that spend, which again creates selection bias toward games more likely to review well, but that doesn’t mean that Redfall and Suicide Squad still can’t happen and review poorly.
“News”. The first video from each of those guys was news. Their follow-up videos show why actual journalism is so important and convinced me to never watch their videos again, not Jirard’s, funny enough. As a non-expert, it seems like the only reason donating this much money is complicated is because they wanted eyes on exactly where it was being used.
Distribution. It’s very easy to put your game on Steam next to Grand Theft Auto. You’ll have a much harder time getting your indie film in theaters or on a streaming service. High quality movies aren’t typically found on someone’s YouTube channel.
The things getting reviewed already have a selection bias that makes them more likely to review well. It’s not a problem that reviewers focus their time on the games that their audience is most interested in, as opposed to reviewing every asset flip published to Steam.
That still isn’t what the article was about. It was about how there are so many games coming out that even critically acclaimed games can’t break even, even though critical acclaim generally helps move copies.
Truthfully, you’ll likely see very little change in the next few years, but they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t see an advantage to it. The article outlines some of them.
Not every game costs $70. Expedition 33 in particular only costs $50 when it’s not on sale, unless you’re in a different region where $50 USD converts to $70 in your country.
The Saudi part matters a lot, as they’ve been grabbing lots of the gaming industry in their diversification efforts.
It also moves what their incentives and goals are. They’ll still try to make money, which means Ultimate Team isn’t going away without legislation, but when they’re private, they can probably afford to burn through some war chest searching for new franchises to replace their defunct franchises, and perhaps public investors wouldn’t be interested in losing that money in the short term.
Very true. And sometimes there’s an answer to those questions, even if we discount the games designed to disappear after a few years. You might be sensitive to spoilers, it might be the perfect game for you in the moment (like the right game for a handheld system just before a trip), your friends might want to play it with you or talk with you about it when you’re done, etc. But that competition with back catalogs absolutely exists.
I’m sure it looked great when they made Borderlands 2, but they also made Battleborne. Borderlands 2 devs still get royalties to this day. And hey, Gearbox still gets some stuff right sometimes. The entire Borderlands series still supports LAN, which even the people who manage the Steam pages don’t seem to care about. They can be good in some ways and shitty in others. Life is rarely so simple.