https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/gta-5-now-profitable-ent...
Minecraft is number 1. I'm surprised GTA V beats Tetris though, pretty wild.
https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_vid...
Or you do something like most MMO's and do a subscription. I would (generally) rather pay an honest subscription then have free players be subsidized by MTX.
What's the difference between paying $10/month and buying a $20 skin every 2 months?
But I also very very rarely buy skins. I used to play a lot of Overwatch and spent $0 on skins and loot boxes. I've played countless matches in League of Legends (There used to be a way to see how many matches you've played, but I can't find it), and spent ~$50 in skins.
If either of them were a monthly charge, both would have received $0 from me.
I don't believe it's the team. Blizzard has a track record of abandoning perfectly good games (although I'll grant Overwatch was uniquely difficult to monetize).
SC2 is a great game, too. They even dabbled in paid story DLC with Nova's mission pack, which was cool, but then they fell back to only developing co-op commanders for people to grind co-op content with instead of making more cool story DLC. And they've even stopped making co-op commanders now (people probably got tired of grinding through the same handful of scenarios).
Diablo 3 had one (desperately needed) expansion and one class DLC, but since then have cycled through a carousel of "seasonal" content, with only cosmetics and some mechanical adjustments, no new gear.
Basically, they have these games that absolutely could be platforms for more ("healthy") things to sell and at the same time prolong the lifetime of their games, but for whatever reason they don't sustain investment in them. My hypothesis is it's because Hearthstone is better from a strict ROI perspective, but I don't know that for sure.
> I don't know how you maintain a game like Fortnite (or GTAIV) with just a $60 one time purchase.
Games like Hollow Knight or Minecraft that are one-time-purchases sustained further development through market saturation. Every free DLC increased the value proposition for people who hadn't purchased yet. In traditional marketing, you'd sell your game for X, realizing there's an audience out there that will only buy at X-10 (or whatever), so after you sell at X for a while you apply a discount to reach that audience too. What Minecraft and Hollow Knight have done is sort of the inverse of that (in addition to traditional discounts, at least in the case of Hollow Knight): increasing the value for the price so if the base game at $20 is a questionable deal, the base game + free DLC at $20 draws in people who were on the fence before. Even though the DLC is free, the company still makes money on it.
That said, those games don't incur server costs for the company. Once server costs get involved, people want higher ROI to offset them.
What's unique about Hollow Knight or Minecraft is that they are either 2D, or low detail enough where they can be reasonably maintained by a small team.
A game like GTA or Overwatch could have voice actors, motion cap, animation teams, detailed 3D models, maintained servers, in-game events; the list goes on, it's not just server costs. My point is, it's unreasonable to think that something like that can be maintained by a $20 DLC, and worst still DLC is only enjoyed by a small portion of the player base.
That's a low bar to compare to. Pay to win is simply not a game anymore. It's just paid gratification.
Source: https://venturebeat.com/2021/11/03/take-twos-bookings-grow-3...
The dark exaggerated story might somehow create a world where it is ok to, I don't know, shoot your way through that casino for robbing the vault or whatever, yet at the same time completely fail to construct a similar excuse for all the things the player character does to non-story NPCs. In the crude worlds of earlier GTA that was limited to the radical things like carjacking and all that pedestrian killing, but those were so crass that they defined that dark world. With increased fidelity however, it extends to a very long tail of bad behavior like blocking the bike lane with the getaway car. And for those subtle things, the excuse of "dark, humorous, twisted" just doesn't work out. It might, if the subtle things were the focus of the game (e.g. in a port of the mechanisms of untitled goose game from annoying waterfowl to annoying socker mom suv) but in a GTA they cannot be more than backdrop.