GTA 5’s story DLC was scrapped because GTA Online was a ‘cash cow’, cinematics editor claims
GTA 5’s story DLC was scrapped because GTA Online was a ‘cash cow’, cinematics editor claims
“It was hard to make an argument that a standalone DLC would out-compete that”…
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Seems silly to me. Just cuz online made money doesn't mean your hard work on story dlc wouldn't also make money. Plenty of people like me never play online and would have happily paid for more story
You're not thinking corporate enough.
With a simple NPV calc it's obvious why the dlc is a complete waste of time. I mean we could easily afford to hire another team that will quickly provide positive cashflow, but then the producers are going to wonder if consumers are spending less on x because of y, and x is what we used to project future revenue numbers to our board. If we don't reach the x projection and I get canned then I'll always regret having tried y. I mean sure y superceded all expectations, and made millions, but it also had like 800k in overhead. We should probably just lay of 300 developers who are willing to work 60 hour weeks for 40 hours of pay and decrease the level of qa/QC time on x so we can get started on x2 and push into prod, nevermind the bugs. Also I'll need you to work Sat because the system keeps throwing exception errors
Making content for online is way less work and makes more money in the longrun. You don't get whales spending thousands of dollars on a single player DLC.
Sure, but there's only so much you can release for online. You don't want big content dumps, you want a steady stream, so you could surely have some devs working on a story DLC or two while pumping out that steam of stuff for online.
Hire an online content team to complement your creative SP team, and then you get the best of both.
The online players are just that much more profitable that they don't want to risk them.
If even a small percentage of people who stop playing online to play the single player DLC feel satisfied and don't go back to online then they lose money over all.
Do you remember the time you were supposed to buy mobile apps, by paying a one time fee. How many apps are you able to buy now? Most switched to SaaS service because they realised this is a cash cow. I don't want to be a bad prophet but I think the game industry as a whole is also going slowly that direction.