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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Pretty much western development studios in a nutshell, sadly. Try to go for a model that maximizes engagement and hope the mass monetization comes from various forms of MTX. But lootboxes can’t be used anymore, so you’re stuck focusing on skins. But skins are still expensive to produce and can’t be put out fast (which is how mobile games get away with that).

    So there’s big numbers in the beginning but not enough money coming in to justify the expensive production. Executives don’t let it cook on the market long enough and just shut it down early. Even though by all other metrics, it was a good game with potential to foster a new franchise/sub-franchise. No one wins. Its Multiversus all over again.











  • It seems that’s partially taken into account:

    New analysis of 99,206 Steam games illustrates just how extreme the economics can be on Valve’s PC gaming emporium

    Over 8,000 paid games analyzed never received a single Steam review

    This report also only looks at premium games, meaning free-to-play giants like Valve’s Counter-Strike are left out, as are “non-game software, adult-only titles and unreleased entries.” The list of 99,206 was selected from a base of 136,281.

    The only caveat is that revenue is estimated, so there can be big swings in the data.

    The standard multiplier here is 35, so this research assumes one Steam review is worth 35 sales at a game’s current listed price, though you can also use a more “conservative” 20 or “generous” 50 in the report’s impressive graphs.



  • Yeah, there’s 3 different lenses here. Preservation, ownership, and piracy.

    It’s a bit of a hot take, but I don’t value “preservation” in the way most gamers do. I prefer it instead of not, but my lens here is as simple as “piracy will always be the true preservation mechanism”. The ability to back up your games is legal and technically that game lying on my computer is “preservation”. But preservation without distribution is gatekeeping in a way. Distribution is what ensures true preservation, but we cross into piracy.

    What I do value is ownership and as you said, Game Key Cards give you all the benefits of ownership at the cost of preservation. It can theoretically be useless one day, and when that happens I see it as free game to pirate. But technically I believe even online Wii games you own can still be downloaded, despite not being able to buy on the store anymore. So we’ll see how long that lasts.