Generally, for big profit, you need to build something good, but the reverse is not true. And you can still make small profit with crap.
I know "boycotts" don't work in the gaming industry but i can honestly say i haven't bought an EA product since.
That has been slightly easier by them only churning out yearly sporting games filled with micro transactions mind.
Isn't it great when founders get a pay day but does that kind of thing really benefit everybody else? Just in general it doesn't seem that allowing most mergers is a particularly good thing for the American public, benefiting mostly just very large corporations who get to offload risk on to startups and their investors and reward only a lucky few (though skill is important, who succeeds and gets a good exit has a lot to do with luck)
unlikely stuff does happen but not as much as likely stuff. Generalising from anecdotes and cherry picking data remains ill advised.
While EA was busy destroying the SimCity brand with unadulterated capitalist greed, Cities: Skylines was created with public funding from the Finnish government.
No VCs wanted to invest in such a niche company. They were only able to get off the ground thanks to money from Finland’s public startup funding and arts grants.
Capitalism on its own isn’t always enough to ensure that successful products get built. Sometimes it takes public funding to salvage a good idea that capitalism managed to burn down.
Government bureaucracy and inefficient spending never burned down good ideas? Never wasted untold billions on failed projects?
> the entire industry up until this point has been going about it wrong?
but it sometimes goes about it wrong.
> Capitalism on its own isn’t __always enough__ to ensure that successful products get built.
You are building up a strawman and attacking it with very hostile language. I would also disagree with your assumption that governments are inefficient, as there are good examples of efficient governments. Governments can get it right too, and the parent comment certainly isn't suggesting that governments are always right.
Every criticism you have levied: "burn[ing] down good ideas", "wasted untold billions on failed projects", "short sighted"-ness also have examples in the private sector and even with public companies.
EA is not an isolated company afflicted with capitalism. When you say a companies failures are due to capitalist greed, that means something. You are blaming the fundamental economic principles that the majority of publishers (and western businesses) operate on. Words like greed imply there is an inherent evil or 'sin' in capitalism that corrupts, and EA has somehow become its victim.
There is absolutely no assumption's about the inefficiency of bureaucracy and government.
EA destroyed a valuable brand by managerial greed. That’s a fact. Another company got funded by public means when capitalist institutions didn’t want to give them the time of day, and is now a successful business. That’s another fact.
I didn’t say anything about an inherent evil or sin. If you believe capitalism always executes perfectly and is beyond criticism, that’s your ideological position. You may be projecting this expectation of ideology onto others.
You mention capitalisms failures and destruction of ideas while public funding saved the day. Pointing out that a single government grant does not make a game industry or save ideas destroyed by capitalism is not projecting ideology.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35041202
It seems pretty clear that this game was destroyed by EA management's poor decisions. They forced the game to require an active online connection primarily as an anti-piracy move, but then underfunded the development of the server-side functionality, so the servers were down for most buyers. For strategic reasons, they wanted to tie SimCity into EA's Origin game distribution platform, but this was just a hindrance to players.
Why did management make these decisions? To maximize shareholder value and increase their quarterly profits. EA as a company is a good example of the kind of short-term thinking that capitalism can encourage.
It's good to have a counterbalance. It can come in many forms. Tax-funded public instruments are one, but another important source of funding that's not distributed by capitalist principles are the various private foundations. And most of those were of course founded on wealth created by capitalism. So I'm not at all opposed to private wealth and market-driven resource allocation — I just don't think it should be the only way, or some kind of received truth that's above criticism.
How about they incompetently implemented anti-piracy measures and paid for it with consumer backlash?
...And where is the government in all this by the way? Anti-piracy laws seem to be grossly ineffective as it is so widespread. Companies have to protect their own work as government sits by idle.
CiM 2 is a really good game, and very beautiful (which I guess is how they got the idea to build C:S). The focus is on transportation, and it does a much better job of simulating it than C:S (no despawning for starts). It has a few bugs and performance issues which I guess will never be fixed now, but worth playing if you like games that are a bit more constrained.
I would argue it’s actually unusual on HN to hear such an origin story for a successful business. Everybody has heard a hundred versions of the VC-funded twenty-something boy genius and also the bootstrapped hustler… But the story where your seed funding comes from government grants in a small European country doesn’t align with that kind of hero founder narratives.
Personally I got started in the software business with a Finnish government loan too, and I’m grateful for it. So I wanted to highlight that this actually happens and leads to products that people want.
Another one is called Paralives: https://www.polygon.com/23433566/sims-5-project-rene-paraliv...
And I don't mean in the way No Man's Sky did!
I think they're not enamored of their reputation for crap shoveling and are making a concerted effort to deliver more value with their overhauls and that's why I've never really viewed them the same as skin-pushers like Roblox, CS:GO, The Sims or Fortnite.
If we’re talking about games developed by Parodox itself I really can’t imagine something like this. Core mechanics in most grand strategy games have usually been changed to a significant degree and while they are technically playable without DLCs the changes were most often made to better integrate the new content. Which overall left the base game in a largely crippled state.
Skylines is a lot better in this regard than something like Stellaris though.
I found https://store.steampowered.com/app/1538960/Crusader_Kings_II... to be an extremely good deal especially because I never tend to play these games continuously for significant periods of time. Obviously they are not offering this for newer games since it would usually lead to people spending 10s of dollars instead of 100s for the same amount of content .
They pull in >$40k/mo in Patreon funding, and have a team of >10.
Website: https://www.paralives.com/ Their Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/alexmasse
Unaffiliated, just a massive Sims fan :)
That would be Notch, who made Minecraft
So you use revenue as a measuremeant of success, which is very reasonable.
> (hint: they don't want always-online DRM-filled games that nickle and dime you with microtransactions (well, most people anyway, there are always gacha/gambling-type whale gamers))
Then you said this. You know in terms of revenue, microtransaction is the most successful model, right? Mobile gaming is now bigger than PC gaming + console gaming. And they're basically all microtransactions. $300 million sounds a lot but it's just 2~3 months of Genshin. If revenue is a sign of what players "want", then the only logical conclusion is a lot people "want" microtransactions, they just don't admit it like people want BigMac but say they want to eat healthy.
I think it's a strong no-true-scotsman fallacy right here. You believe players don't want microtransactions, because you don't think those casual players who play Candy Crush, Clash of Clans or Genshin are "true players".
My issue with your comment that I have attempted to frame in that pithy one-liner is that microtransactions are often sold through a manipulative sales window, in some cases games are designed around them to make the micro-transactions more appealing (e.g. games that throttle your progress unless you spend).
In addition, using revenue as a measure of popularity with micro-transactions is problematic because they are designed to effectively segment the market. This means they're not necessarily a solid indicator of what an average/median user might want because sometimes much of that revenue is a product of relatively few users (aka "whales").
Making something unique can make more revenue than replicating other successful model with hight competition.
This reminds me of the same thing that happened with Stardew Valley, the creator missed the old Harvest Moon games, didn't find a suitable substitute, and just build the entirety of the game from scratch, teaching himself art and music composition too. He's made over $300 million in revenue so far and might be the first solo game dev (or even regular software dev) to hit $1 billion in the course of the game's existence.
It just goes to show that the dominant players are not always dominant forever, and that common YC startup advice of understanding what exactly users want (hint: they don't want always-online DRM-filled games that nickle and dime you with microtransactions (well, most people anyway, there are always gacha/gambling-type whale gamers)) and serving them well is still correct.