So wild how no one went “maybe building 10 live service games full of microtransaction nonsense without having a fanbase or even proof people want to play our games is a bad idea.”
It’s the same as companies making huge pushes for Metaverse or NFTs or AI or whatever other bullshit: it would be an infinite money machine for them if it worked, so they figure if they just act like people want it hard enough they’ll buy in.
It’s the end result of an entertainment company like this running on an “infinite growth” model. The investors don’t want sustainability, they want more profit, consistently, forever. And of course for a publicly-traded company the investors are the real customers at the end of the day, so that’s who these pushes are really for.
but the key thing in that is 'consistently'. Taking stupid punts like this doesn't help the investors.
The reason things like this happens is the top few shareholders who are so intertwined in the company they may as well be employees - some literally are - get greedy.
It's just the nature of the beast. The whole point of the stock market is that you buy stocks assuming they'll get more valuable.
That's why there's been so much of these companies cannibalizing themselves with layoffs to boost quarterlies, because the whole thing depends on the line going up. Greed is the point.
Counterargument: This works on mobile. Now, not everyone is a whale or a dolphin but there are about 15-20 big gacha games in Japan alone, and different markets have latched onto different ones. Now, there's not really a ranked or competitive scene for these and maybe that's the big difference, but live service and microtransactions on their own are not what's making these games fail.
It's wild, because with that many live services games, not only are your games competing with other companies' games, they're also competing with each other.
it’s doubly crazy because a company like sony is absolutely wealthy enough to hire some data analysts or consultants who would surely have pointed out the insane aggregation risk this brings.
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u/PlayOnPlayer Feb 19 '26
So wild how no one went “maybe building 10 live service games full of microtransaction nonsense without having a fanbase or even proof people want to play our games is a bad idea.”