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originally posted in: The Dark Below
10/30/2014 7:36:31 PM
2
Well said, Deej. I don't know if you are in the software business but you seem to understand it very well, and you recognize Bungie's desire (and need) to make Destiny profitable. The business reality is that the talent it takes to create a game like this ain't cheap. That huge budget some keep throwing out there sounds like a lot of money but it doesn't go as far as you'd think. The salary for a Sr. Game Developer is about $97K per year average in the US, not including the cost of benefits. Throw those in and you're talking $120K per year easy. So for every 10 developers, that's 1.2M per year just in employee compensation. Attracting and retaining programming talent is very important, and what attracts and retains them is money. If they want to develop this thing for 10 years, they want their developers around for at least that long, so they are likely paying something well north of the $97k. The infrastructure is expensive too; the servers that all Destiny players login to have to be purchased, maintained, managed and upgraded assuming they own them. Even if they lease cloud space from Amazon or whoever, it's still a hit on the bottom line. At a price point of $60 bucks a copy for the game, they probably aren't even close to covering the operating costs right now. The investors who are floating the difference between their revenue and their current operating costs are patient, but not infinitely so. They'll expect that some time well before the 10 years of development are up that they'll be in the black because if not, Destiny will get the hook, before the 10 years is up, trust me. These investors and their lawyers, the executives at Sony and Microsoft and their lawyers, even the executives at Bungie and their lawyers, may not even play the games they invest in, produce, and sign the contracts for. These are the people ultimately driving the decisions, and they are not about to mix business with pleasure. They understand that the future of this game, which they equate to their return on investment and nothing more, depends on aggressive development of new content. It will come, but it's not going to be free. It's not going to be terribly fast either. Consider that we're not really talking about one game here, there are 4 of them. Granted, there is some overlap in the development area, but downstream from the code development they may as well be completely different games because each media set for the 4 platforms they support has to go through development unique to the platform, QA, packaging and distribution. And then there are those pesky contracts that Deej mentioned. You think the battles between factions at the Ishtar Commons are fierce, they are nothing compared to the battles between Sony's and Microsoft's lawyers when they argue content release dates. And like us, Bungie has to run into the middle of all of that and try to win against both sides. Are a lot of people going to bail on Destiny and chase the next shinny object? Yeah, probably. Are those of us who stick around and invest in the DLC going to see continuous improvement and enjoy a gaming experience second to none for a decade (eventually)? Definitely.
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