The numbers denial game

[Don]

I've noticed that in every game where success is likely tied to the number of players playing, you'll always see a game that appears to be on the decline and then someone's going to decide to make an informal but generally ironclad attempt to analyze the situation. Usually such methods will reveal a surprisingly loss of the playing population and invariably you'll have the company post that this is all lies and the numbers that they can't show you tells you otherwise. It doesn't matter if you have something very solid like say a WoW Census mod (passively does a /who filtered by level/class to compile list of name of every player) or if you got data from Steam's concurrent player chart on a game that's predominently on Steam. Even if you're in a game that is 10 years old and have no business to be growing you'll never hear anyone acknowledge that the numbers are at best stable. Now I know you don't want to sound like your game is in a position of weakness, but who do these guys think they're fooling? Would it really be bad to acknowledge that not every game is always going to just keep on grow but that you can still make a decent product after suffering some losses? There's a common theme of development budget seems to be out of control in gaming. Could it be because nobody is even willing to say 'hey guys we're not doing as well as last year maybe it's time to change things?' During the sub-prime bubble, one of the guy went to one of the company selling the tricky financial stuff and was shown how everything's going to be okay if housing increase by only 10%. When the guy asked what if housing does not increase or even decrease, and was told that the model doesn't account for 0% or negative growth to the industry. I wonder if gaming industry is like this too? Could the games fail so spectucularly because it's not PR but that the developers really believe they're always going to succeed and make millions even when there's no data can possibly back up this assumption?

[Replay]

[Don]

I think the scene from Matrix Neo was told that "No one's ever tried something like this" when they're going to storm the military complex to get Morpheus out also applies to the gaming industry too.

[Julius Seeker]

In short, there'll definitely be pressure to incorporate features and content that will generate interest and up engagement rates. Ultimately this will increase the potential for revenue increase no matter how that is achieved. The other option is to move forward with new projects to beef up revenue.

It's really a matter of cost vs reward, is the profit enough to push $15M in dev resources each year to maintain, or would it be more profitable to drop the maintenance down to sub-2M and ride it out as long as possible? When it comes to license products, there's often huge limitations in how far devs can push things, unless it is some open ended thing like Kardashian. Otherwise, the limitations are thematic and mechanical, you can't shove content into a game when it doesn't fit.

The ultimate goldmine game is Clash of Clans, very little content, but an insanely well executed gameplay loop that keeps players engaged and spending. It's both low maintenance and high engagement - and no need for huge content injections like in a lot of other games, particularky PC based MMO's.

[Don]

I believe Blizzard quoted the maintenance cost for WoW is $50 million a year which includes the staff for the hardware but not the development team. That's a very small amount of money compared to what WoW makes, and it is a really, really big game in terms of content scope and physical hardware size. Now if you add the cost of the development team's salary it might change things but those guys aren't just there for maintenance either so if you're not making money out of your development team that's your own problem.