That doesn't mean the individual games or studios were profitable.

https://www.polygon.com/2014/2/21/5431332/what-irrational-ga...

> Earlier this month, Irrational co-founder Ken Levine announced that less than a year after the release of BioShock Infinite, the studio would be "winding down," which meant that everyone but Levine and 15 others were being laid off.

I mean that whether or not the studio closes is at the parent companies whims.

According to Wikipedia, Bioshock Infinite sold 11 million copies. If your development is so costly that 11 million sales, vastly higher than most games sell, isn’t a success then maybe you should go out of business. That’s not a price point problem but a budgeting problem with unrealistic expectations.

If you look at the top selling games, the top 50 ever bottom out at 20 million sales so they were half way to being on the top 50. If your game has to be in or close to the top fifty selling games of all time in order to be profitable then you’ve planned something very wrong.

Isn't the other possibility, though, that the game was just too cheap at $60? And only launch, mind you—I do think another issue here is just how quickly even high-demand games get marked down in price. (This is not entirely in the manufacturer's control—but Nintendo somehow always manages to maintain the prices of their games. Nintendo is doing something smart which no one else is doing...)

I don't know about you, but I like big-budget games! I don't think Bioshock Infinite would have been as good if they had to pair back the art team that constructed that gorgeous floating city, or lowered the amount of experimental iterations which made it possible to get the gameplay feel just right!

Do you think games are piced at $60 and marketed down because publishers are being generous?? Those price points are set exactly because they are expected to extract the most profits.

> I don't know about you, but I like big-budget games!

I like some big budget games, but most of what's been released by the big publishers (EA, Activision, Ubisoft) has been, lets say, lackluster. Those are the games with the biggest budgets and quite frankly, they tend to be all flash and little substance, gameplay-wise.