Like doing Resogun 2, Jak & Daxter Precursor Legacy 2 or Days Gone 2. All first games were highly successful and never got another sequel. This is what Nintendo has been doing for decades. The formula works? Well, improve it, not too much, keep the name and what works and milk it.
Not a AAA company but the one I was working at was occupied on mobile games, gambling on Candy Crash's and Gardenscape's success. Many of the employees were gamers and passionate artists. All of our games were adjusted to mimic those two. The CEO was meddling with the game design, never investing in art. These had negative consequences on our ganes. He wanted to magically land the next successful Candy Crash or Gardenscapes clone. He sucked our motivation and soul out of us. COVID gave him some good bonus and some company profits which he invested on a partner that appeared to be a mock company more than anything else. Likely with under the table money and tax evasion tactics. He destroyed the company and trickled down all the costs on us.
GTA is obviously at the top of the pile, but the games that have generated the most dollars have been live service games. The reason why all of the AAA companies were shifting towards live service was because the metrics were showing that's where growth was. The problem is that by the time the larger studios were on the live service train, that genre was essentially saturated, the players have either found the live service games they like, or have found that they don't like live service games. It might be true that a lot of publishers thought they could easily have a successful live service game, but chasing trends has been a consistent part of the history of video games. Find a successful game from history. Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., DooM... There have been games that have tried to clone their gameplay and their success. Even after Mario's success, when Sega figured out they needed a mascot and a platformer and came up with Sonic, there were a bunch of platformers with attitude trying to clone the success of Sonic.
Cost is, in many ways, risk. You risk less with a project that costs less. Take a look at the late Rodger Corman's New World Pictures, a movie studio famous for low budgets. Corman made a string of hits and misses, but the misses weren't going to bankrupt the studio, because the budgets were so low that any of his hits could sustain the studios and the misses. One of the last movies New World made was the 1989 Punisher film starring Dolph Lundgren. It cost $9 million and earned $30M at the box office. It's probably one of the most expensive New World movies. 1989 also saw the release of the Tim Burton Batman film, with it's $48M budget. Based on this example, Corman could have made 5 super hero movies with Batman's budget, and would probably have enough left over to make a 6th movie out of the leftover millions and reusing footage from the aforementioned superhero movies. Only 2 of these movies would have to be as successful as The Punisher to have made money on all 6.
Maybe. But BG3 was in early access for nearly 3 years, so it was being sold and thus funded for that time. And since Larian's previous game was released about 3 years before BG3's early access, it was in early access (and thus accumulating sales) for half of it's development. Funding your game during development this way mitigates risk.
Holy fuck! What happened?
70% of games used to fail to make their money back. The successes paid for them. However, those failures didn't sink the companies because the losses were managable. If every game costs $2-5 million, you can cope with the failures with your rare $billion generators. If they all cost $100 million because they are all wanting to be megagenerators, you'll sink.
Yep. And they want new IP now too. What people want is good games! Badly executed new IP is no better than well executed samey sequels.
That was an interesting one. It looked set to defer cost over iterations, but it turns out people didn't care to finish the game. Which then leads on to the reality that most games go unfinished. Massively so. Players play a part of the game and then stop. At least 50%of the invest is a waste of time!
So it's simple. Their GAAS strategy failed. Is that really a surprise? Where is their latest Rayman game BTW?
Yes!! This!
Yeah, it's a GAAS title. That's why everyone was focusing on that model so much.
Ubisoft just really needs a hit. It isn't just Xdefiant, but Skull and Bones isn't expected to break even either. And with Star Wars Outlaws having a muted consumer response, things aren't looking good for them this year. I do wonder if they will get a bump because of revenue from COD streaming rights when it launches, but they are down almost 75% from 5 years ago. It's not a good trend.
Does it count if it's not operated as such and is just a long lived online game? I don't know the model for the Division 2, but I think GaaS has to involve ongoing monetisation to count as that's where the big profits come from. I think it's more just an online shooter. Or can you spend silly money on cosmetics?
They need to make them then! Skull and Bones is uber janky, but they presented it as the best thing ever. Quadruple A!!
People can buy season passes and cosmetic stuff. But there has been no new real content for 4 years.