Daniel AhmadVerified account

To put it simply. Game prices have stayed at $60 for over a decade whilst the cost of video game dev and marketing has grown significantly.

What this means is that a game that was successful selling 1-2m in 2007 now needs to sell multiple times more to be profitable in 2017.

What this means is that it’s very hard for AAA pubs to make a profit from unit sales alone. That’s why we’ve seen a switch to service games

That's because single player games rely purely on unit sales most of the time, where as service games are driven by engagement.

That’s also why single player games have added on multiplayer / open world elements / DLC etc... to encourage long term engagement.

Anyway, the simple fact is that most games would struggle to break even without add on content being implemented in the game.

First we saw DLC. It took some time but now DLC is accepted as a way to expand the amount of content in a game for a set price.

Then we saw season passes and map packs. For some games this works, for others it split the user base which wasn’t seen as good.

So with these methods publishers were able to bump up the amount people would spend on a game from $60 to maybe $80 or $90 or so.

Loot boxes is another monetisation models. It can actually work so that devs can put out free content updates and loot boxes help fund it.

And that means that gamers are now spending loads more than your standard $60 on a single game each year. Some spend hundreds.

What we’ve seen (see my last tweet about Activision) is that gamers are spending loads on add on content each year. That’s a fact.

What’s also a fact is that AAA game publishers require some sort of additional monetisation to remain profitable on each game they put out.

So those last two tweets are facts and aren’t really up for debate. What is up for debate is how that monetisation is implemented.

If consumers want game publishers to change their approach to monetisation then there is nothing wrong with letting them know that.

But right now AAA pubs don’t need to change anything because the amount being earned from MTX is outweighing the complaints. END

One final point is that not all instances of add on content are 'bad'. Some implementations certainly may go too far. I'm not doubting that