>Or maybe I'm missing something - it's been a while since I played those type of games.

The primary reason companies do not follow the tried and true method of game design is that they can't extract money in the form of microtransactions or server rent if they provide the full game (including server).

But if you have a cheat fest server, players will leave and not buy any hats and other accessories.

Also, as part of the server software it could include the marketplace, which would sit on the game developers servers, so all transactions would go via the game developer and maybe they could give some commission to the person hosting the game.

> players will leave and not buy any hats and other accessories.

They might go buy another game though... A healthy community built around a self-hosted server tends to hold people for long periods of time.

I guess that very much depends on the game, but the game I make would be very uninteresting if you hosted your own server, it doesn't lend itself to that 'pick up and go' style of play like counterstrike does.

It's more like Destiny, World of Warcraft or Diablo in that there are RPG elements, a grind for loot and the possibility to meet other players.

Minecraft is one of the most popular games and servers are self hosted (aside from realms, which was added later and is not used by most people)

Minecraft also grew organically over time; was not intended for consoles and has the benefit of a slow churn towards maturity for a very long time.

Minecraft as a project over the years easily cost more than 20x to make than The Division, I'm glad it's successful, but I don't know if it's really apples/apples.

What leads you to the conclusion minecraft has cost 20x more.

It's been under some form of heavily active development since 18 November 2011. (though it was in development by Notch since 2009 and he quit his job and lived on the revenues at that point)

At that time there were 25 employees, all living in Stockholm Sweden, the cost of a developer there in 2011 is roughly 60-75k SEK/mo (lets say 60).

(25x(60x12))x9 = 15M SEK in Salaries.

Not including: marketing (usually more than half the total cost of making a game), build servers, distribution servers.

To put that into context: Final Fantasy IX is on the list of most expensive games ever made and cost 40M EUR.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...

The output of your computation can't even be the right order of magnitude. (That's just 1.5M EUR).

Massive seems to take three years per game, and according to Wikipedia has 650 employees. It's pretty hard to see how you get to 20x from there.

Although it might cost more than most games over time, Notch wasn't initially rich when he started developing it, right? V1 was pretty frugally created.

(Genuinely curious)

I'd love to hear an insider's opinion on: Why aren't more games developed like Minecraft? Bootstrapped, slowly crafted over years rather than months, soft launched, minimal marketing, iterated on, etc.? Why is "pump out and hype an AAA game as inexpensively as possible" the only option Serious Game Companies™ go with?

There are but that's survivorship bias.

Most Indies (early access on Steam) either never come out of early access or come out relatively Luke-warm.

a game like csgo basically makes all of its revenue through selling weapon/player skins. if you run a private server, you can just give people skins for free. if they really wanted, they could probably patch this out, but it would make the modding community furious. csgo has actually taken a pretty fair approach here. you can still run your own server if you want, but the official servers are decent enough that most players don't bother.