Re:Layoffs at EA Today
by ryguytilidie on Thursday April 25, 2013 @04:44PM
(#5609734)
You mean like making Minecraft insanely popular? Or Kerbal Space Program the game of the year in many magazines? Or DayZ being the game of the year in most other magazines? Theres only so much we can blame the consumer for companies producing shit.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
You can't make AAA games with the money those games are making.
Really? How many people have bought Minecraft? More than 10 million (on PC alone) [1]. Assume everyone paid the beta price of €14.95 [2] and we get €150 million! That sounds like triple-A money to me.
Okay, that could be wildly inaccurate if everyone buys it cheap through deals like Steam. 75% off and similar.
Wikipedia says the Notch estimated €25M in purchases a few months after the beta [3]. By the end of the beta that was 4 million purchases which has now risen to 10 million. As far as I can tell, that doesn't include any figures from Apple, Google, or Microsoft.
[1] https://minecraft.net/ [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20110114022633/http://www.minecra... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minecraft#Commercial
Minecraft is a fluke. It cannot be imitated.
I'd rather play a fun non-"AAA" game than a boring "AAA" game.
Obviously. Everyone would.
But I do not want AAA games to not exist. They can do things that indie games cannot. It’s as simple as that.