“Subscription models will always end up being cost/benefit analysis exercises intended to maximise profit.”
“If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.”
-Wayne Gretzky
Of course it isn’t stealing – it’s copyright infringement.
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.Caring about the product is not incompatible with making profit, but it is incompatible with maximizing profit, because then your design priorities must shift to emphasize functionality and entertainment to cutting costs and expanding monetization opportunities.
It’s easy to see in gacha games. Even the best of them have to have to obstruct fun to make money, from the way they limit gameplay options so that people will gamble for them to the way that they gate progression behind repetitive daily grind so that people will keep coming back out of habit and FOMO.
Even beyond the monetization itself, great games require a willingness to take time experimenting and polishing, time which would seem like wasted wages to more money oriented companies. Sometimes it pays off, like Larian, but sometimes it doesn’t, like the old Clover Studio.
I’m not sure nintendo is a good example, see super mario 3d all stars.
They also straight up refuse to discount anything meaningfully ever. And actively harass anyone streaming gameplay of their games without their permission, and are extremely litigious about emulation that’s clearly established as perfectly legal, among a bunch of other shit.
Nintendo accosting influencers who stream games is in this legal grey are. The people Vice gaming spoke about how their legal department cautioned streaming games. They said at the time there is no case law that covers this issue. And it is not known who how the courts would rule.
And as far as legally playing their old games in the modern era, your options are to find an old physical copy or subscribe to a subscription service. There is no option to buy games individually. Even back when they did that, your purchases never carried over to their next console. They’re awful.
That’s why “to some extent”. Nintendo does some unsavory moves, but I’m not sure the point of it is profiteering, especially when it comes to taking things out of sale.
But you can’t deny that they put out games of consistent quality, and not overly monetized.
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.
