Maybe this comment will age poorly, but I have a feeling it will. Subnautica 2’s contract was signed in the middle of market mania with very unreasonable sums of money at stake. Krafton should honor the insane deal they made instead of everything we’ve seen lately, but I doubt they’ll make a deal like that again after the gold rush ended.
Any free to play game operates on the same principles that are as “horrible” as EA or Ubisoft, which honestly feels like a dated point of reference when your phrasing was “feels like you have to pay to have a good time”. First, it’s highly subjective. I came away from my time with Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey feeling like I had a bad time because I didn’t buy their XP boosters, but fans of the game said they never bought one and had a great time, perhaps because they had more fun with the game’s side activities than I did, so they got more XP from content that I was more than happy to skip. I haven’t bought sports games in a long time, but if I still did, I wouldn’t touch Ultimate Team with a ten foot pole; not just because of the business model, but because the fantasy to me would be playing with the real teams as they actually exist; and the parts that I would want to engage with don’t ask any more spending of me. And for as much as you associate predatory monetization with those companies, they also put out the likes of Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and work with partners on Split Fiction and The Rogue Prince of Persia, which use very normal and ethical monetization strategies.
For as much as mobile games often can be a different market, plenty of times they’re not. Thatgamecompany may be known for Journey in our circles, but their big hit is Sky: Children of Light, which started on mobile and came to platforms you and I are more likely to play games on. Uma Musume is blowing up regardless of platform, but it’s a gacha that’s typically found on mobile, and Cygames expanded from their mobile market to putting out console and PC GranBlue games. Mihoyo’s games are in both places and found success using gacha. My point in all of this being these companies, all self-published successes, operate in both spaces, because building a game in either place requires much the same skillset, and they’ve found an audience in both, often with the same exact games.
The last thing I’ll say about this being developer vs. publisher is that if you’re successful enough as the former, you often become the latter, like with Cygames or Epic. These kinds of monetization methods are very feast or famine, so you’ll get survivorship bias of some games getting so big that they’re a publisher now, like Riot, for instance, or they get bought by a bigger fish like Microsoft.
Developers are also incentivized by profit when they’re entitled to keep it rather than a publisher, and this is the case regardless of being AAA or not.
But this game is on Steam, and $80 is a price point companies are flirting with regardless of their ownership of the storefront, like Grand Theft Auto, for instance.
Sorry, I’m not following the A-to-B on your comment in relation to this topic. Sony isn’t charging $80 for games, and even $70 games regardless of consoles aren’t doing so hot. Microsoft hasn’t done console exclusives for a decade.
I think they only expect a subset of their consumers to get the DLC; most people don’t care if they got the full experience. If you’re playing with your friends, they’ve got the option to play with you DLC-less in every case I can think of. In something like a fighting game, they’ve just got a character that you don’t, or in something like Civilization, if they know they’re playing with you, they host the version of the game that doesn’t include the DLC you don’t have. The entry price exists because they know nowhere near everyone will go for their most expensive edition.
Sure, I’ve bought tons of games that are on Game Pass, because I like keeping the game when I’m done, and not having to rush to finish it before the subscription renews.
We were already seeing this at $70: the market is largely unwilling to support games getting any more expensive right now. And even though we had $90 SNES games back in the mid-90s, without adjusting for inflation, I think we can also say quite definitively that the market expanded exponentially as prices got lower, relative to inflation and in absolute terms, in subsequent years. Increasing prices further is pricing out those people. Plus, we’ve got tons of low-cost options that can often be higher quality than the games charging $70+.
I recall them saying that their tech stack in the first game couldn’t handle the influx of players that they got at their peak, and that’s what led them to start with a rewrite.