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What is the best way to make games profitable against rising budgets?

Best way to stay profitable

  • Episodic installments

    Votes: 8 3.9%

  • Raise prices

    Votes: 51 25.0%

  • Microtransactions

    Votes: 41 20.1%

  • Subscriptions

    Votes: 8 3.9%

  • Advertisements

    Votes: 10 4.9%

  • Support new platforms

    Votes: 23 11.3%

  • Other

    Votes: 63 30.9%
  • Total voters
    204
MysticGon

MysticGon

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 31, 2017
7,285
Budgets a ballooning thanks to more detailed art, more complex technology and the people needed to bring them into existence.

So naturally more money would need to be made to keep a company afloat.

Games have been released in episodic chunks, ran ads, used microtransactions, raised the average selling price, required subscriptions, etc etc...

What is the best way to generate more revenue? That could mean most ethical, effective or exploitative. Imagine it's your game on the market.
 

Deleted member 18944

User requested account closure
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Oct 27, 2017
6,944
It's MTX. I pay someone maybe 10k over the course of 3 months (maybe more on both sides) and the ROI i get is 10x ? Hell fuckin yeah.
 

Deleted member 7883

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
2,387
the best ways to generate revenue (from a financial/business perspective) are usually the same methods that piss gamers off the most.
 
Rosebud

Rosebud

Two Pieces
Member
Apr 16, 2018
43,494
Sony and Nintendo are doing fine without any of that (only advertisements) for SP games.
 
Sean Mirrsen

Sean Mirrsen

Banned
May 9, 2018
1,159
My opinion is just strangle the stream instead of building a bigger boat. I know it goes sort of against the question, but the best solution would have been to limit the budget, make a game first and a visual spectacle second. There's no catching up to the hardware power race, so choosing the weaker hardware as the target (i.e. the Switch, currently) and up-porting from there instead of the other way around, would be the best way to keep profits.
 

Deleted member 9746

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 26, 2017
5,406
The most obvious answer for executives is microtransactions.

It's easy to say "just make good games" but not everyone is Sony or Nintendo with legions of fans waiting to buy anything you put out.
 
DrArchon

DrArchon

Member
Oct 25, 2017
15,485
Keep budgets under control. Not every game needs to be a AAAAA Mega-Juggernaut game with 10 zillion hours of handcrafted content.
 
gblues

gblues

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,481
Tigard, OR
I don't grant the premise. Outside of F2P games, monetization hasn't been the difference between making a profit or taking a loss. It's largely been the difference between profit and more profit.
 
Gakidou

Gakidou

Member
Oct 30, 2017
1,612
pip pip cheerio fish & chips
budgets dont *have* to rise tho, especially not as dramatically as they have been doing in the last few gens. Big companies are just choosing to make bigger gambles in the same time frames. They could just *not* feel entitled to dramatic growth against a population of consumers that actually has an upper limit on how much product can be consumed.
 

Deleted member 17627

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
5,364
Asset reuse.

Seriously, I had a lot of fun playing Project Resistance and it was literally just the same assets that Resident Evil 2 had. Tales of Berseria pretty much recycled a bunch of Zestiria's textures, places, and models, and while the latter I think is the one of the least fun RPGs of all time (great presentation, lore, and soundtrack though), the former is now one of my favorite RPGs of all time.

So many games in the past reused assets for spin-offs and sequels and it worked out great, don't know why folks don't do it more often these days.
 
Eumi

Eumi

Member
Nov 3, 2017
3,518
Are games without extra revenue streams actually not profitable? My understanding was that all this monetisation was about making more money, not making money at all.
 
TheMadTitan

TheMadTitan

Member
Oct 27, 2017
27,208
Raise the official price by $10. With all of the launch editions and content, games may as well start at $70 these days anyway.

And maybe scale back on the graphics, but that's never going to happen.
 

Deleted member 7883

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
2,387
Eumi said:
Are games without extra revenue streams actually not profitable? My understanding was that all this monetisation was about making more money, not making money at all.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
they absolutely are! I mean sure there's a few exceptions, but if a game is popular, you can bet your buns (or the buns of a family member/friend) that that game is profitable.
 
Alienous

Alienous

Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,598
Rein in the scale. A publisher should maybe have one game a year at the open world, multi-studio scale.

With those big games I think there should be more '1.5' sequels. Uncharted The Lost Legacy, Far Cry New Dawn, RDR Undead Nightmare, etc.
 
krae_man

krae_man

Master of Balan Wonderworld
Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,594
Make good games and rein in scope. Not everything needs have a high 8 low 9 figure budget.
 

Deleted member 7883

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Oct 25, 2017
2,387
Nintendo and Sony don't need to worry about mtx/profits from their first party games as much as literally everyone else does. Microsoft included. Those systems actually have games that the masses are interested in playing, especially with Nintendo. Sony's first party games serve primarily as an incentive to the average consumer choosing a Playstation over an Xbox. You buy a Nintendo system to play Nintendo games (and as of 2017 you buy a Nintendo system to play those same games... on the go!). You buy a playstation to play all the other games, plus you get some rad first party exclusives every year.

Honestly, I'm somewhat surprised that Sony didn't try and put out at least one or two GaaS type games for the year. Nintendo is eternally 10 years behind the competition. Plus Nintendo's new president is prioritizing Nintendo's IPs a helluva lot more than any president before him. Even if Nintendo's software sales start dropping, they'll be making bank off that hot new Zelda merchandise, the Mario themepark and movie, and then some. Nintendo will never go broke. Not for a long while, at least.
 
Iori Fuyusaka

Iori Fuyusaka

Banned
Oct 26, 2017
2,901
Making a good game does not guarantee profitability. Some of these replies are naive or don't want to admit the truth.

You want to make a game profitable? You add microtransactions. Minimal investment for a huge payoff. It's why F2P games make so much money.
 
Secretofmateria

Secretofmateria

User requested ban
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
8,424
I think if we dont want most triple A games to
Be sold as services, raising the price by 10 or 20
Dollars in the united states is the only answer. New games, in the U.S. are still being sold at 60 dollars which due to inflation is way less than 60 dollars was 14 years ago
 

Deleted member 49535

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Nov 10, 2018
2,825
Make them shorter, especially RPGs. If the game is good and people like it, make a bunch of expansions and cosmetics.

Most people don't even finish the games they play anyway. It's wasted development cost.
 
-Amon-

-Amon-

Banned
Oct 28, 2017
572
I think the medium is far for being fully explored. There is still lot of room for original ideas that don't need astronomical budgets to be translated in games.

Having said that, procedural creation of maps, worlds, universes can be used. That approach permits small teams to tackle world building in a scale that is not possible to achieve in the traditional way.

In short, software houses should be smarter so they can avoid burdening the consumer with increased costs.
 
MattHeus

MattHeus

Member
Mar 2, 2019
449
Just make smaller games. AAA titles are trying to be too much, some games have no focus and are all over the place.

Most studios should commit to contained 8~20 hours experiences or contained multiplayer games, instead of trying to copy CDPR and R* in game scale.
 
Last edited:

Deleted member 16908

Oct 27, 2017
9,377
Make more games that look like Katamari Damacy and Wind Waker instead of investing insane amounts of cash and labor into graphics that will look outdated in a few years.
 
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