2y ago

'You won’t find our games on a subscription service' says the founder of Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian, after Ubisoft forecasts a future of players 'not owning' games

www.pcgamer.com

"Subscription models will always end up being cost/benefit analysis exercises intended to maximise profit."

9 comments

"If buying isn't owning then piracy isn't stealing."
-Wayne Gretzky
- Of course it isn't stealing -- it's copyright infringement.
- lol this isn't about buying, though.
  It's about them pushing their stupid rental service. It's never pretending to be a purchase.
Subscription models will always end up being cost/benefit analysis exercises intended to maximise profit.
Anything with a price tag is that, tho, unless you're either content to not make a profit or you don't mind gouging people.
- Not in the rare cases when the company is owned by someone who cares about the product, who resists investor pressures. To some extent Larian, Valve and Nintendo manage it so far.
  Decline through endless profit chasing only seems inevitable because profiteering investors are so thoroughly present in nearly every company.
  
  Even when you care about a product, at the end of the day you still have to put a price tag on it, and you'll still have to give fair shares to all the people who worked on it, while saving up as much as you can to invest in more well cared products... without making it so expensive that not enough customers will buy it.
  Caring about the product, investing on it and producing something that is actually good and that people place in high value (so they are willing to pay more for it) is not incompatible with maximizing profit. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Larian is profitting quite a bit from all the good publicity (imho, well deserved) they are getting for not having gone down the road of predatory monetization tactics.
  Probably they would not have been as successful if they had. So I'd argue they are maximizing profits in the best way an independent game studio can.
  Choosing to not participate in Subscription services at the moment is likely also in their best interest, profit-wise. Particularly at this point and with this momentum they are having.
Unfortunately it inevitable. If a publicly traded company exists, it will have to extract more and more and more until this kind of rent-seeking model happens. And if a company is private, it will eventually go public. And even if you truly believe in a company's owner to not sell out, eventually they will die and the company will go public or get sold. Eventually, money always wins.

9 comments