This is self explanatory; to all who do not support the idea of ownership, there shall be no more funding, regardless of their game’s quality.
Advice:
buy from GOG, avoid single player games which require internet connection or 3 party launchers.
Repost from reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/StopKillingGames/comments/1ugzirg/stoppayinggames/
Blizzard has been churning out flops for over a decade
What? They haven’t been flopping either critically or commercially. Even Overwatch 2 and Diablo Immortal, with vocal dissatisfaction from players, still made tons of money.
Microsoft reported an initial $570 million operating loss from the acquisition in one quarter alone, citing acquisition-related expenses and costs associated with restructuring.
Meanwhile, Blizzard experienced a decline of up to 63 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs) across various titles, suffering when releases like Call of Duty failed to meet aggressive sales expectations.
They’re certainly still generating revenue but the studio hasn’t been profitable in some time.
You are mixing units and data at this point. Acquisitions cost money. Blizzard and Call of Duty come in the same purchase. Call of Duty had a bad release this past year. And none of those things are a measure of how profitable Blizzard games are.
And that drives up costs, which cuts into profit.
Did the developers get paid for their labor?
Revenue - Cost = Profit
This is Business 101.
But plenty of businesses operate at a loss, when they can generate surplus cash through investment. You don’t need to generate profit to pay wages. In some cases (the AI companies being a great modern example) you can pay incredibly generous salaries while running enormous losses.
Not forever. The profits need to outweigh the losses, and the rest comes down to averages. That’s how all of this works.
If you’re waiting forever to collect your paycheck, you’ve already been rooked.
Are you willfully misunderstanding at this point? Those wages come from averages and projections based on past results of how much money previous games make. If they continually don’t make money, their jobs disappear, because the work they’re doing no longer justifies how much it costs to pay them to do it.
Again, I’m going to point you to the AI industry, which has never posted a profit but which still pays some of the highest salaries in the industry.
You’re also fully neglecting the concept of the Loss Leader which exists to onboard people to a system despite losing money on a given product.
Not even discussing the hobbyist developers (originating whole genres of gameplay purely out of personal passions), the notion that games will go away or that studios must be profitable isn’t reflective of how games are developed in reality.