Usually director’s cut was content they cut in order to meet target runtimes - that changed when George Lucas started doing his Remastered Editions but even those were the same footage he had all along just with new FX. Letting directors shoot new content for these editions is a very new development.
So no, they made you pay for a whole second edition to access content they already had available up until it got so hard to fill DVDs and Blu-Rays with content that they started giving it away at the time of sale.
The point I described distinctly covered that this is not viable with intangibles - such as games you can buy through the Internet. Because, unlike a can of beans, there isn’t a price to produce option - there is a massive capital investment and then running fees.
Your entire model is predicated on being unable to distinguish between a game on Steam and a can of Coca Cola… and isn’t even accurate if you use the Coca Cola metaphor because they don’t operate with set costs and set profit margins either.
Well let’s see, some basic commercial factors - covered above - that you apparently ignored because you’re obsessed with this idea you can determine “true value” through nothing in particular.
The most fundamental factors in intangible sales are:
- Initial capital cost (ie how much it costs to produce)
- External fiscal support (sponsorship from a company)
- Customer base size (how many customers may purchase the product)
- Market size flexibility (how that number might be affected by marketing or other external factors)
- Customer price point (how much the majority of customers with fork out for the product)
So on any given product, you have those five factors which are unique to each and can wildly influence the price.
A skin may be expensive to make because it requires licensing costs to parties that own it, have relatively small customer base but that customer base may be devoted fans who are willing to pay a lot for it. (Hence why Train Simulator charging so much for obscure trains in the Czechia).
A map, or indeed, a whole game, may be sponsored by the US Military to the extent that it barely needs to sell a copy to “succeed” but the contract specifies it should attain “wide saturation” with additional money for distribution targets - so they can make a lot of money selling it for pittance.
So throwing “explain these two non-specific hypothetical items” is a pointless question that feeds into more attempting to create a magic formula that reduces the infinite complexities of the games industry down to an equation from eighth grade.
It’s currently the price of four Seven Deadly Sins DLC on Steam right now, and Mediatonic has basically a giant portfolio of games that are low development cost and reliable appeal, almost all on Web.
Fall Guys was undoubtbly their most expensive product because they had to engineer the network protocols for it from scratch, but it was also doubtlessly their most lucractive by all measures (including cost-per-unit-sold) because it led to them getting acquired by Epic Games.
Among Us is also a game with an epic cost-per-unit-sold measurement - which again in the era of online sales translates to: Successful.
Citation required since the alternative is: They’re trying to go broke.
That is known as very clumsily attempting to see what works or assuming what worked for x will work for y and z. They are all trying to work it out because currently the only ones that are doing it reliably are the ones that have market supremacy and models that been in place since 2004.
That’s the most Rainbow Six thing one can do given the entire basis of the IP was a cash grab by Tom Clancy to capitalize on his jingoism and the popularity of his novels. Then when he realized he didn’t need to do all that work he just licensed his name and gave them full rights to do whatever as long as the money kept coming in. Of course, he’s dead now.
Furthermore, if you’re an old fart like me - Rainbow Six has been dead since 2006 when the mission planning went out the window and it became Counterstrike but with different skins and names.
This is a very familiar situation for anyone who’s been in a comic shop that sells D&D items for any period of time since arguments over this kind of thing have been happening since at least 1985 when Unearthed Arcana was published.
Pretty sure stadiums have been selling season/annual tickets for particular sports/leagues since before either of us was born.
Actually it’s about the same level of margin since you still have to pay all the same people to do all the work, and by far some of the most expense with maps is the art assets (specifically updating them as graphics improve) and playtesting (particularly now if you have one problem spot you can expect there to be 100 YouTube videos about it before you have time to confirm if it’s a consistent problem)
The improved margin comes from more sales because they know the map has long lasting appeal and so x number of people will likely buy in if it is present - as opposed to completely unknown numbers if its a novel product. Hence why it’s important to understand how models work rather than just assume everything is a can of Coca Cola.
It’s been increasingly expensive to make the same content - see above with the improvements in expectations and risk involved with errors or misunderstandings or just outright malice. It’s been an issue lots of people working in games have been talking about as an issue for at least twenty years, and part of why the indie market has leaned heavily into doing retro games with modern sensibilities.
See above about companies with market supremacy, GTA V has been having massive spikes in sales because of the pandemic because it’s basically the most fun version of Second Life available: It has missions, sports minigames, social applications, etc. It’s also like the Sims where you can live out your wildest fantasies like having money to spend, and an inner city apartments.
This is known as manufactured discontent, and is a model that works for GTA V because it has:
- The social standing that not being involved in it can generate FOMO
- The social elements mean that all the same social pressures of real life apply
- The model allows for a constantly shifting marketplace, like real life
The most iconic exploiter of this system is Fortnite. I linked to this video above, but I can see nobody clicked it because there’s this real desire to believe the complexities of game development and the free market can be solved with an eighth grade math formula.
Now, an important element of this is that the product essentially needs market supremacy - such a massive of the market where they can generate FOMO simply by existing. That’s why GTA V and Overwatch spent nine figures on marketing (and presumably why Cyberpunk 2077 is now in a hurry to add multiplayer). To ensure massive saturation from day one.
A major factor in their maintaining market supremacy is keeping the competition down, or steamrolling them after looting them for ideas and keeping the money going to a few key publishers - in game development terms, this is known as a positive feedback loop.
I’ve seen people point out that many character archetypes from Overwatch are more or less lifted one-for-one from Dirty Bomb, a game which also went to much greater lengths to do diversity and inclusion properly but received much less praise due to it not having the marketing budget to make it topical.
This is of course, nothing new in the world of commerce - its been highlighted many times in novels, comics, television, movie and even quirky podcasts.
So when you accuse small studios not doing that, of doing that, you don’t hurt Rockstar or Blizzard - you hurt the small studio and help Rockstar and Blizzard by normalizing what they do and sabotaging their competition.
But, let’s briefly humour your “true value” theory.
Well what is the actual production cost of the car?
Is it the hours of creation time spent on making the model, the skin, the rigging, etc?
If so, does that include the time spent on making the basic car mechanics and effects (like glossy surfaces) in the game?
Does the development of the game count? What about the previous games and marketing that built up the GTA brand to the point GTA V could be released and people would be excited on a scale that they would buy it on opening day and then spend more money in game?
What about depreciation schedules on all the countless investments Rockstar has made ever since 1997… or even before that?
There’s no viable way to calculate your “true value” unless you have access to all the books and advanced education in accounting and economics.
Nobody uses it when weighing up if they think a DLC is worth the asking price or not, especially not the executives who set the price.
They usually don’t advertise when they go into the red - the games simply appear on the store front, fade away and are never spoken about. Largely the reason they don’t get investigated is, like Dirty Bomb, they don’t have the cultural currency to be worth reporting on. Even more of them get shut down before they are even reach the marketplace.
Nintendo posted a $456 million loss in 2014, largely attributed to the hardware sales etc because while they do, as a publicly listed company they are legally obligated to share the overall figures but keep the specific figures hidden to maintain market advantages. Telltale games was doing great until it wasn’t.
As mentioned above, IO Interactive’s figures make it very difficult to read which games made what purely because you have to factor in things like ongoing sales of previous games, loss of staff, etc. There is also the above mentioned issue of profit is not always profit.
If I start with seed money of a million dollars from an investor, and I spend $900,000.00 to make a game and $100,000.00 in other expenses, that game sells $1,400,000.00 I have made $500.000.00 “profit” by your “true value” model and am now in possession of $1,400,000.00. (However, that’s only for that moment, since every moment the studio continues on you’re losing money on salaries, licenses, rents, etc)
The investor is going to want a lot of their money back - in fact they’re going to want to receive back more than they invested. If they own 90% of the venture, and decide to cash out, that means they must choose between:
- Taking back $1,260,000.00 - making a quarter million dollar on their investment
- Risking it all on another venture and hoping that it goes better
If they decide to take the safe option - that leaves you with $140,000 - so if it took you three years to go through this entire venture from the start you worked for $46,667.00 a year to make a quarter million dollars for someone else (roughly an 8% rate of return, healthy but not the 15+% they look for)
This is why every AAA game now comes with deluxe versions, special sponsorships, merchandise, product placement, etc.
Hitman 3 made its money back also immediately, but they had:
- Playstation VR money
- Epic Games exclusive money
- Deluxe pack sales (which included merchandise for console players)
- Sales from Hitman 1 & Hitman 2 to provide cash flow during development and building of anticipation
- Twenty years of good will and branding - ie free marketing
And whenever “within a week” occurs now they mean “with pre-orders and first few days of sales” and that the majority of sales were pre-order (another practice people scream should not be allowed for… reasons).
Crackdown 3 never released it’s profit/loss information, and we can’t even infer it since Sumo Digital does a lot of freelancing for other companies (like IO Interactive) and they are a 100% owned subsidiary of Sumo Group - it almost certainly did lose a shitload of money though since 47 appears on that year’s “highlights” page of the annual report but Crackdown 3 is almost completely absent.
I’m seeing “Bundle” in there, so right there we’re completely departed from your claim. Further there is the issue that when the game came out was £55 on release, and you’ve set the bundle at £17 (in game currency fuckery aside) so even if this skin in the pack makes up 100% of the value that’s… still only 31%.
But that doesn’t hold up - the highest value by their rating system is Z-74u (Ultra) and the skin is Legendary (one of five items) with lower value items. The skin is the leader because it is the most distinct and had the most creative effort applied to, but is not the rarest, so the value is extremely murky (which is the point).
So your claim, right off the bat - is wrong.
That’s without even going into how the business models are not even faintly comparable. When I buy the Seven Deadly Sins pack I don’t get to run around on the deathmatch map in the gold suit to show off that I am more affluent than fourteen year olds who aren’t allowed to buy DLC, and the CoD bundle comes with zero Hitman escalations.
I just did. I feel this conversation would go better if you spent less time assuming all your theories are flawless and actually took some time to take on board what I said.
The burger analogy is completely unworkable and makes no sense in any way, it’s a shapeless horror made to try to force all models and economics to conform to a singular formula of extremely limited value to manufacturers and zero value to consumers.
That system that was such amazingly good value that the company offering it went bankrupt?
No it’s nothing like that. It’s very simply. For the movie theatre, it now costs so much to rent the right to show the movies that they can’t make money off them until at least half-way through the run. The local theatre ran Titanic for nine months, and for five of those nine months if you looked only that the ticket sales vs showing rights fees.
Dude the markup at movies is way more than 1.7x
See above how the quality and cost of production of movies skyrocketing is why the theatres are dependent upon advertising, novelty promotions and 3000% markup on popcorn to stay in business. This would be the same even if the studios owned the movie theatres, because the costs of the movie tickets only pays for the production of the movies - not the upkeep on the theatres, etc.
Games used to cost tens of thousands of dollars to make, now they the cost tens of millions to make and studios want to torque down the risk as far as they can and find as many revenue streams as they can in order to mitigate their risk and prolong their returns. This is venture capitalism 101 and applies to every industry.
Yes that’s exactly what your system means. They can either not make better profits (as you are demanding as IO Interactive) or change their products to get wider sales (which you are demanding they not do after Rainbow Six).
This is also Business 101: Rockstar concludes that the presence of the songs no longer generates enough revenue to account for the expenses, so they stop paying the licenses and remove the music. That’s how Rockstar got to be a billion dollar company and got all that money you’re saying they should spend on losing money instead.
It’s also part of why your “true value” thing doesn’t work - because licenses etc need to factor in how long you’ll need the things and third party assets can require renewal of assets or have sliding commissions (ie if you get over $ in sales, your rate goes up).
No, no, it’s in the trailer. You’ll be getting quirky, campy content packs based on the Seven Deadly Sins and it’ll include things like a pimping gold suit and cane. That’s more than I knew about the game going in when I spent much more.
See this is just outright fabrication and nonsense, like the burger analogy it is a desperate attempt to simply the complexities into a basic formula. To stretch the definition of loot box to this extent, you would need to add the following to “loot boxes”:
- All story based games
- All games that use procedural generation
- All games that have further content added later
- All games that have pre-order
- All streaming media subscriptions
- All variety boxes of confectionary
- All delivery services
This is why you should embrace complexity and learn how things work rather than try to understand everything through a singular equation.
Lootboxes are definitively a system which focuses on Whale Hunting, which seems to be what your weird burger analogy is supposed to be about before it falls apart. It literally hinges on the idea of a system where you can spend infinitely on a game without ever accessing all the content and that you have a system of slow diminishing returns so you can get the most money out of customers via exploiting brain chemistry.
The more they lean into exploiting brain chemistry the more money they make. Dirty Bomb (free-to-play) was a game that specifically worked to manage the issues that you mentioned and still had a lot of people saying it was terrible etc because … they didn’t want to pay for anything and weren’t sucked into the hedonic treadmill.
Overwatch charges you full AAA price to purchase then exploits social pressure, brain chemistry and limited time gimmicks to get people to spend millions on loot boxes.
Seven Deadly Sins DLC can’t do that because there’s only seven of the deadly sins, and there’s designated content for each. There’s no way for me to keep buying a few more packs to try to finally unlock the shiny gold coin so I can feel more like I’m in John Wick land, I just get it when I buy the package.
You did in fact say that. You just called a set content DLC a lootbox.
That is indeed the system for CoD and big multiplayer games like Fortnite, Overwatch, etc because the mix of social pressures allowing the manufacture of discontent through:
- Obvious consumerism: The thrill of showing off something that you can afford that others cannot, to broadcast your personal success to the world.
- Individuality: It’s not just about being the “Playboy Bunny McCree” guy who posts those two stamps everywhere and uses the cha-cha emote, it’s about carving out an identity so you can feel memorable and appreciated.
- Inclusivity: If it’s pride week and I want to show I support LGBT people, well I’m going to feel left out if I can’t have “Some people are gay” Tracer, if I’m at a Fortnite rave and the DJ tells me to the hopscotch emote, but I don’t have it and everyone around me does… going to make me feel left out… and like I need to buy all new emotes as soon as they come out.
The reason these kind of factors are important is that literally none of them apply to the situations you are saying are exactly the same.
These kind of oversimplifications and trying to demand people change their thinking to be fit within a simplified equation are not only harmful to conversation, and yourself (nothing creates social isolation quite like yelling “no, you’re wrong! I said so!” at people) but also to society in general since they open opportunities for exploitation.
Overwatch and Fortnite are two of the worst offenders in terms of predatory business models, but they get a free pass by lots of game communities because “it’s only cosmetics” and so doesn’t factor into their feared “pay to win” nightmare by effecting their K/D ratio.
Train Simulator gets raised regularly on the “absurd DLC” lists even though it’s actually probably the best use of the system possible and succeeds because it recognizes its market and caters to them.
People buy into Bitcoin and NFT, contributing to the approaching heat death of our planet because they buy into simplified ideas of value and think “proof of work” guarantees that it is a more robust product than a more conventional database.
This thread is full of people accusing IO Interactive of using exploitative models that it does not have the intrastructure or approach, and tons of other games have suffered because they’ve tried to implement ethical monetization schemes to be bombarded with people accusing them of being CoD/Overwatch/etc.
It’s not good for anyone. Life is more complicated than eighth grade math led you to believe.