• Death@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    11 months ago

    game prices don’t completely cover the cost of development and definitely don’t cover server operation costs every month.

    Nope. while it might be true for small independent game developers it’s totally false for big company, like MS just a fifth of the profit they paid to shareholders is enough to run good server for like five years

    Games from big companies, except the games that went flop, or F2P games, or the game that purposefully sell at low price in order to sell other forms of microtransactions, then most games are profitable

    they don’t have to rely on monthly subscription to be profitable but the problem for them is “the profit is not high enough” and that’s why they do this

    • gmtom@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      11 months ago

      just a fifth of the profit they paid to shareholders is enough to run good server for like five years

      Xbox doesn’t make nearly that much profit compared to MS as a whole. And the cost of building and running a low latency, graphically powerfull data centre in every major region is actually massive.

      Then consider that the subscription not only pays for the data centre but also pays the game devs themselves, then you’ll see they’re not actually money grubbing super villains for this.