Ok so I kinda feel obligated to say a piece on game dev companies and money and new games and free updates. One of my professors and friends at college is the owner of the studio Graphite Lab (they have mostly done development for companies like Hasbro and such, but are also responsible for Hive Jump on Steam). We have actually talked extensively on the subject of games, studios, and the release of free content. While the "best of both worlds" model can be achieved, in which the studio releases new games every few years or so, along with regular (mostly free) updates for their existing games (see: Blizzard), it kinda requires the company to hit it big first. Otherwise, the studio WILL lose money.
The reason behind this is that there is a pretty common misconception of how much money it actually costs to make a fully fleshed out game. In addition to paying the devs/employees (the bigger the game, the more devs there are), paying the bills, buying very expensive equipment and software, paying for licensing, outsourcing work (i.e. music, voice acting)... all of this for several YEARS on average often leads to a single large scale game costing upwards of millions of dollars. Not to mention that many, if not most, game studios are located in places with a higher cost of living, which means that they pay more for their space and their employees' salaries.
Enter the consumer. They expect to be charged no more than $60 for a copy of the game. These days, some people want $40 to be the new norm. Now factor in that the release platform takes a percentage of the revenue, and in almost all cases, so does the company who sells the engine the game was built in. Money must also be spent on advertising as well if the game is going to sell. Thus, if the studio wants to make any sort of decent profit, they have a few options.
- Sell a ton of copies because the game is JUST that good or has been hyped beyond belief.
- Charge for microtransactions.
- Charge 20-30% of the original game's cost for DLC that did not cost 20-30% of the game's dev cost to create.
- As soon as one game is released, kick it under the rug and make a new one, living off of the original game's short-term profitability to fund the new game.
Ideally, the best option is the first one, with maybe optional small microtransactions that are clearly defined. This is exactly what Blizzard did with Overwatch. People have little complaint with how Overwatch handles events, new content, and optional transactions. But Blizzard is a terribly popular game studio with tons of money, so it's much easier for them to pursue a model like that and succeed. For a smaller company, it's much harder, and thus we see a lot of these development issues come forth. Is it always money? Of course not. Obviously, Hello Games would have been much better off had they not made empty promises but instead said they would try to add that stuff later as FREE updates.
This does not excuse franchises like CoD. Obviously Activision is another huge studio, and honestly I don't believe they have any excuse to do what they've been doing these past several years. People appreciate fewer, quality releases over many shoddy ones - just look at how timeless Skyrim is. It's pretty old by now, but it's still heavily played (yeah, I know, mods help lol).
Anyway, TL;DR. Small companies have it harder - much harder - when trying to release triple A level games due to financial issues that happen behind the scenes that most consumers don't know about/think about. So what we think a company "should have done" just isn't viable financially, even if it hurts reputation of the company in the long run. Is it an excuse to release bad content? No. Instead I think smaller companies should set their sights on smaller goals, unless they have massive backing.
