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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9598424" data-attributes="member: 18">I'm well aware, but I already mentioned that:You're talking about the very rarest and most outlying successes, which were very, very rare, and those games were often actually cheaper to develop than less-successful games of the same era.The vast majority of games sold 5x to 50x fewer copies than a game today might. Like, on the PS2, a full-price game that was pretty successful might sell 100k copies. In the modern day, it's probably cross-platform (because that's insanely easier to do thanks to changes to both engines and consoles themselves - the PS2 and PS3 had nearly unique architecture), and may well say sell "only" 1m copies.Maybe the PS2 game only cost $1m to develop (which is unlikely, note - most PS2 games cost a fair bit more to develop), and the modern game cost $40m, but which made more profit? The PS2 game was selling physical copies at, say, $50. With physical, 30% of the revenue (or a bit less) gets back to the publisher/developer (lets assume they're the same thing to make this simple), so 50 x 0.3 = $15 per copy, so that's $1.5m total, so you made a profit of $500k. Not great but the right direct. With the modern game, it costs $70, but most or all of your sales will be digital, which means you get 70% of the revenue. 70 x 0.7 = 49. $49 per copy selling 1m copies = $49m. So you made $9m profit.You can sell "Well as a percentage/ROI that's lower!!!" and sure, but it's a lot more actual money. The per-dollar ROI on non-hit game is probably lower today than in the PS2 era, but the actual money being made is more.As for "whales are paying X", well, sure, but not for most games - the vast majority of games sold don't have the options you're suggesting. You're mixing together typical single-player games and the most extreme rip-off/gacha multiplayer-only games.</blockquote>

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