Joseph Ridgeson
WarRavens
Capital Punishment.
3217
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Posted - 2015.02.07 21:02:00 -
[1] - Quote
I am putting my guess into "getting DUST 514 to make any kind of money", "development cost", and "maintenance cost." Let's start with the two latter ones because they are the easiest to talk about without getting a tad to theoretical.
Running DUST 514 costs money in regards to keeping the hamsters running, paying people to kick the hamsters when they stop running, and paying people whose job is to come to the forums with some bit of information. Development cost is obviously just paying the coders who are typing in those features.
The first is obvious as well but you can go a little tinfoil but not overly. You can clearly look at it as "well, CCP wants to make money and more, aggressive options to monetize the game makes money." This is blunt and is pretty much true. But we can go deeper. CCP took a hell of a beating with making DUST 514. If they can say "hey look, the game made money!" it can be a success even if the way it made money was milking us like obese cattle. The reason for this might be to make Legion look like a less risky project than it is.
CEOPyrex went with "investors and shareholders have the real say in a company" in regards to CCP. It could, maybe possibly potentially, be the case that "moving forward on a remake/port to the PC of a PS3 game that cost the company 18 million dollars" is simply out of the question. If DUST can be seen to have made a profit, Legion can be less of a risky thing.
"As you can see by the chart, DUST 514 made revenue with each iteration of new monetization options. That was with a community of 20,000 active accounts. With Legion being on the PC and potentially the PS4 at a later time, we expect that number to rise to well over 100,000 based on the trends in 'market extrapolation methodics slope trends' and active EVE accounts that would migrate over to Legion. We could even make that migration more enticing by implementing benefits between EVE and Legion, thereby ensuring or surpassing that number."
But that isn't the crappy thing. The crappy thing is that *if* Legion comes out, you can be damn sure it is going to have the same aggressive monetization beyond just boosters, respecs, and cosmetic skins. The money milking genie is out of the bottle; no amount of "but you promised that these measures were temporary" and "this is treating us like brainless cattle!" will make it go away. Even if Legion is just DUST 514 on the PC/PS4, that genie is officially too gorged to fit back into from whence it came.
"This is B.S! This is B.S! I paid money! Cash money, dollars money, cash money!"
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