I think No Man’s Sky is also in the same boat.
I mean games which keep releasing further content over long periods without charging extra for it. Surely the amount of new sales eventually dwindles considerably. Is the cost of new content once you have the core game this low or…?
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The vast majority of these “timeless” games seem to come from smaller devs. Minecraft started out indie before being bought out, Terraria is still indie, NMS is a small team etc. They work on those games because they want to, and it makes them enough money to stay satisfied. Games from publicly traded companies are held at gunpoint by their shareholders, so if they don’t keep the money machine printing and they don’t make it print faster and faster, they will face consequences.
I love how you put it. I think the particular consequences of not making money quickly enough is pulling the plug in projects. Investors want money, not games.
NMS is a good example of creating a situation where people don’t WANT to pirate your game. People will buy it to play with friends and it’s generally a good deal. Compare that to Paradox games, who monetize everything, which I’m convinced are mostly played through piracy.
Only reason I bought CK3 was because of the Steam Workshop. Otherwise I’d be playing pirated.
Is Paradox really a good example? Their games usually have a stupid long life with deep discounts on the base game, and multiplayer allows you to play DLC that the host bought. I feel like with them, there’s a “buy it on sale” or “don’t buy most DLC” mentality instead of a “pirate it” mentality, but correct me if I’m wrong.
Most paradox games I’ve seen have an unlocked you can find online that just enables all the DLC.
Sea of Thieves has microtransactions.
No Man’s Sky was wildly successful at launch, making the devs a ton of money. I guess they felt bad about not delivering on their promises, so they used that money to fund further development.
Also paired with that for NMS is the fact the studio is like 35 people.
NMS also gets that gamepass money so they always have money coming in regardless of how many units are actually selling
By using ships.
Duh
It floats because of the ships’ buoyancy.
Yes, I’ll see myself out.
I bought no man sky at some point because I felt it had enough value to warrant the price so adding things do translate into sales. You just have to balance the investments into the game and how much extra sales you can get.
Terraria is also a good example. They have kept their game relevant for so long that they are actually getting brand new customers just trough birthrates. Everytime they release stuff people talk about the game and people that were too young to buy it at release suddenly buys it.
They have kept their game relevant for so long that they are actually getting brand new customers just trough birthrates.
Can confirm. My nephew is 9, younger than Terraria itself, and has recently become obsessed with the game.
Path of exile is another example. Many many years of new content, base game is free. You can buy increased stash size, which, while difficult, isn’t necessary, but massive QOL. You can also buy cosmetics.
Someone like me likes to support them for the hours I play, so when they release new context every 3-4 months and new leagues start, I usually buy something from them.
I’ve bought three versions of NMS over the years due to platform changes and at one point a snapped disc.
Hello Games also has other titles and they’re a small dev team. They’re an example of what game companies could do if they wanted to, rather than strangling the player base with microtransactions.
No Man’s Sky is a mystery to me. I don’t see how they can exist for so many years pumping out free content for a game that, did admittedly well financially when it launched, but can’t be making enough fresh sales to pay the ongoing bills.
even with the rocky launch, nms made a pile of cash at launch from all the early hype. then they released on additional platforms over time since, spurring additional sales on those.
I’m honestly surprised they cared enough to fix it. Same with Cyberpunk. I’m more use to seeing games like Halo Infinite being a armor shop with a half-ass branded mini game to milk the fans.
That’s the downside on if a major publisher agrees to publish your game. Typically the big ones will exert control over the game development; NMS is mostly indie so they can do what they want.
If it was up to some bigwig at EAVISIONUBI CORP. the game probably would have been dropped after it failed. CD PROJEKT RED also self-published, so it was entirely up to them on fixing Cyberpunk or not.
No Mans Sky still to this day sells pretty good. Sure, they don’t sell a million copies every week but Hello Games is pretty small and they can comfortably keep pumping out content even if they only sell, say, 15k per month. And given how NMS is still talked about so frequently, how they launched for the Switch recently (my second copy btw) and how well received the VR was, I think that number is pretty reasonable.
