The games industry has a lot of problems right now. Chief among them might be that, instead of looking for good, reliable horses, publishers are all trying to wrangle unicorns. The problem with unicorns, though, is that they're rare.
In tech, a "unicorn" is a private company that is valued at $1 billion or more. I'm using the more general : “a person or thing that is rare and highly valued, or is a hypothetical ideal.”
Can You Actually Beat The Big Players At Their Own Game?
Take, for example, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Suicide Squad: Kill th🥀e Justice League. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Warner Bros. Games hoped that the game would be a breakout live-service success that players would return to for years to come, like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Destiny 2, Fortnite, or 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:World of Warcraft. Suicide Squad spent nearly a decade in development, and the longer developer 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Rocksteady worked on it and the more money Warner Bros. pumped in, the more unicorn-y it needed to be to become a real succ♛ess.
Suicide Squad couldn't just be a good game that fans picked up and played until they finished the campaign. It needed to take over their lives. A game like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is selling something closer to a new religion than a movie ticket; it needs to convert players away from the familiar games they know they love in favor of something new. And when conversion comes at 70 bucks a pop, the game needs to be excellent to make that exchange worthwhile.
Gaming Loves A Money Pit
Suicide Squad needed to clear hurdle after hurdle after hurdle just to break even. When a game at this scale has been in development for this long, it likely needs to make hundreds of millions of dollars just to recoup its production budget. Add in the money required to make and distribute physical copies and the huge budget needed to effectively market the game to a wide audience, and🦄 you’re looking at a game that likely needs to make in the neighborhood of a billion dollars before it can be🌠 a true success. If a game like this does well, it becomes a money-printing machine for years. But it’s much more likely to come in under expectations, and Suicide Squad certainly did.
This is the same problem the film industry very publicly faced last year as would-be blockbusters The Flash, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Marvels, Ant-Man & Th♏e Wasp: Quantumania, and more failed to connect at the box office despite gargantuan budgets.
These are big, risky bets and triple-A publishers are increasingly taking these bets at the exclusion of all others. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Microsoft just 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:shut down developer Tango Gameworks, which had recently delivered a hit in a different model with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hi-Fi Rush, a game with a smaller sc🦂ale, smaller budget, great reviews, and sওolid sales. This is the reliable horse, and it’s exactly the kind of game publishers should be investing in. It’s the kind of game that takes less time and money to develop, but has the potential to recoup its cost and then some, but doesn’t cause its publisher financial heartache if it fails.
The pursuit of endless growth is unsustainable and, ꧒when you realize how rare a game like Fortnite or Destiny 2 is, obviously foolish. Sure, spending a hundred million dollars might find you the goose that lays the golden egg. But it’s far more likely that it will result in a costly failure. Game publishers need to give up on unicorns, and invest in their stable iꦐnstead.
Nothing Can Scratch A New Gamer’s♑ Itch For Another Baldur’s Gate 3
Baldur's Gate 3 is so good it might actually be a bad place to start wit꧒h RPGs.
