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Is it possible for a true RPG game to have acceptable sales?

madbringer

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mondblut said:
denizsi said:
Sometimes I can not believe the stupidity of big shot executives. So they are selling dumbed down AAA shit by millions. Well, they could also make a niche title or two and sell maybe upto a 100K more with minimum expenses. Money is money and as long as the profit should far outweigh the cost, but nooo, they are just too stupid.

You cannot into modern business. Profits don't matter shit, all that's important is capitalization. And a mere announcement of the next big AAA POS drives your stock price up better than a thousand of titles that actually turn up profit.

Not quite. That's a price bubble. Ultimately, shares are just mini-purchases of a company. It's not a lot different to buying and selling your way out of a partnership, except that you can't be chased after for the company's outstanding debt, and in return you pay company tax on top of whatever personal income you take out of it.

If you want a good example of what happens when share prices keep going up but profit doesn't materialise, take a look at the dot com bubble a decade back. Share prices don't actually keep the company afloat. If the company makes enough profit to pay its costs then it survices. If it doesn't, the company dissolves no matter the share price - which is why you had high-price companies dissolving each market bust.

Most of the time, the relevance of shares is simply to the company's shareholders. So yes, the company cares a lot about the shareprice, and profit CAN be secondary. But that's mainly because profit can be raised or lowered by the amount of reinvestment the company makes. The company can spend nothing, declare a great profit and pay it out as a dividend, but ultimately that's just returning the capital to the shareholders that they've already put into the company - you're just giving them their own money back. If you want that shareprice to be maintainable, you need a healthy balance sheet in the traditional sense. Any discrepency between share performance and balance sheet is temporary and usually due to inadequate information being available to the market - once it's clear that the healthy profit isn't going to materialise, the bubble bursts.

The only reason why the shareprice of the day is at all relevant to the workings of the company (as opposed to its shareholders) is because it goes towards determining the company's asset value. Which in turn affects how much the company can borrow, the likelihood of creditors foreclosing (if things are really dire), and, more practically, the interest rate at which the company can borrow. Given that all companies work off a hefty debt burden (if they didn't they'd be inadequately investing - called a 'lazy balance sheet' - and would be overtaken by competitors), those factors are actually quite important - especially the last one. Interest rates are essentially part of their ongoing business costs - it's the cost of obtaining money, where that money can then be used for developing products. If the company's share price drops, then they need to pay higher interest for the same amount of debt, hence it's like having an increase in their costs.

But that just means that profit+investment AND share price need to be looked after.
 

mondblut

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Azrael the cat said:
If you want a good example of what happens when share prices keep going up but profit doesn't materialise, take a look at the dot com bubble a decade back.

Isn't it what routinely happens to this or that major gaming company yearly? All while the market keeps growing and so supposedly should their sales?

It's all about credits and share prices now. And if at one point a company finds itself indebted more than it could possibly ever repay, so what, you just file for bankrupcy, sell out your IPs to Lotsa Jewish Surnames, LLC and jump to a CEO chair in next company to keep doing the same.

Don't forget that shareholders *are* the company. And these days, nobody enters a business to make a honest lifetime out of its profits and leave it to their kids - no, you only start up or buy a part of a business in order to sell it later on for more. That's why continual "growth" (i.e. increase of company value) is all-important while actual profits don't mean shit, you just have to sell your part before the bubble bursts (and burst it will).
 

Achilles

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Mastermind said:
The decline in the types of games we like to play (particularly SP RPGS) came with the advent of fast, cheap internet, which is why I believe the masses of developers who blame piracy.

In my opinion, this is not the case. I think it's more plausible to attribute the decline of the single-player RPG to the rising cost of making and marketing a big-budget game and the multi-platform design. The emphasis on multiplayer could be considered as a way to fight PC piracy, but it's not a PC-only thing. Most console games rely heavily on multiplayer and the most popular games have very short/very poor single player, almost as if it's an afterthought. Besides, how many single player RPGs are released in general? Very few I imagine, even on platforms that don't have a big piracy problem.

tl;dr: Lazy developers, greedy publishers and stupid gamers prefer multiplayer regardless of platform.

Mastermind said:
Until the, console software sales are beating the living crap out of the PC, which is pretty much the main reason why developers favor consoles: it's more profitable.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/200 ... al_sales/1

Bro, that info is a) outdated, b) only for USA and c) only for retail games. Here's something more recent, straight from the mouth of EA:

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/05/07/ea-pc-becoming-biggest-platform-digital-distribution-profits-d/

Here's what Intel has to say about the subject at hand:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2010/04/19/hear-that-knocking-sound-its-pc-gaming/

And finally, a little somehting from our supreme overlords:

http://www.gamesthirst.com/2010/03/...well-with-260-million-pc-gamers-in-the-world/

:pcmasterrace:
 

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