Comment on #StopPayingGames
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day agoAcquisitions cost money.
And that drives up costs, which cuts into profit.
Call of Duty had a bad release this past year.
Did the developers get paid for their labor?
none of those things are a measure of how profitable Blizzard games are
Revenue - Cost = Profit
This is Business 101.
But plenty of businesses operate at a loss, when they can generate surplus cash through investment. You don’t need to generate profit to pay wages. In some cases (the AI companies being a great modern example) you can pay incredibly generous salaries without ever turning a profit.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Not forever. The profits need to outweigh the losses, and the rest comes down to averages. That’s how all of this works.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
If you’re waiting forever to collect your paycheck, you’ve already been rooked.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Are you willfully misunderstanding at this point? Those wages come from averages and projections based on past results of how much money previous games make. If they continually don’t make money, their jobs disappear, because the work they’re doing no longer justifies how much it costs to pay them to do it.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Again, I’m going to point you to the AI industry, which has never posted a profit but which still pays some of the highest salaries in the industry.
You’re also fully neglecting the concept of the Loss Leader which exists to onboard people to a system despite losing money on its face.
Not even discussing the hobbyist developers (originating whole genres of gameplay purely out of personal passions), the notion that games will go away or that studios must be profitable isn’t reflective of how games are developed in reality.