The cheeseburgers was just a product I chose. It’s about the inflation versus cost. Nobody is arguing to make a profit - that’s fair. It’s about making price gouging inflation and how the margin is created through not sales but price inflation. And adding in systems out of greed rather to be in the green.
Referencing my analogy - 100,000 people could buy a $1 cheeseburger because they see value in it, not a big lost if the product is bad, a fan of the cheeseburger or anything in between. That is still 100,000 individual minds choosing to pay for that product. A lot of people to get onboard with that decision. Now if you price that burger at $1000, you only need to find just 100 people with the same mentality as the text in italic.
That’s not true. Games that use these schemes are earning billions in NET profit. If they weren’t making so much money, they would be an argument for using these methods but because people are happy to pay upwards of 120x the amount, companies are getting billions in net profits.
GTAV gets anything between 150 - 250 million Net from digital MTXs. 1 billion a year. This game sells you a T20 supercar for £30. 8 years prior, that same £30 gave you 2 full expansions for GTA IV consisting of tons of vehicles, a full additional campaign, weapons, the lot. Now it gets you a single unmodded car. GTA V cost 500 million to make and earned 1 billion in 3 days alone in sales too - already a massive profit.
CoD are approx 1.4 billion net on Q4 (Acti investors docs were quite hazy so this I can’t fully confirm until end of Q1) in MTX on Cold War. The whole game had gained 3 billion net as of end of 2020. Cold War cost anything between 20 to 30 million to make, and earned 678 million in 6 weeks from just sales - already a massive profit just in sales.
Pick any game you want with the same scheme. MTXs are pure profit, nothing to do with getting afloat.
The cost to make an escalation is X. We know it’s more than nothing but IO themselves valued that cost at nothing for 5 years. Now they are valuing it at something clearly a ton are not agreeing with but here’s the part - the inflation caters for the quantity of sales. If just 1 person pays for this (which is entirely their freedom to do so) IO have made a bigger ROI % YoY. Sounds good in terms of us fans IO getting more money but they have the right to do what they like with that money so they are under no obligation to invest that back into the product and the playerbase. Which is what every other game is doing. Making a shell platform and adding content packs for minimum effort maximum profit, at inflated prices, put a tiny bit into the mix for the next content pack, take the rest, rinse repeat.
This means if this is highly successful, it can open doorways into more predatory practices as we have seen in the past.
Yet now we have full paid AAA games using F2P systems, Macrotransactions and paid DLC expansions despite being in the very green Day 1. These schemes purposely inflate the pricing of content when they believe there is enough people who will pay in at that price - everyone else are acceptable losses because it’s a lot more than before.
The same reason CoD got rid of their Season Passes at $50. If they charge you in one sum, you’re locked into the purchase - you get everything no if or buts, they can’t milk more money out of you. By cutting it up into pieces, it forces you to having to buy each individual item separately at higher prices. It’s like taking away a multipack of drinks and only selling single cans that end up costing more than when you bought them as a pack.