Bioware veteran and a former long-time producer on the Dragon Age series, Mark Darrah, reckons the struggling video game industry could borrow a thing or two from the way movies make money.
In a recent video posted to his own channel, Darrah compared the way both industries go to market. Movies normally make the bulk of their revenue in theatres when people purchase tickets, but they also extend their commercial life by hitting ancillary markets like DVD sales, digital pay-per-view, or streaming services. Not to mention the product placement that sometimes makes their road to profitability a bit easier.
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Games on the other hand don’t have it so clean. Unless you’re dealing with free-to-play titles, games are sold once and can then try to elongate the time in which they make money through microtransactions and expansions.
Darrah argues there’s a difference between a movie and a game hitting subscription services because Netflix, let’s say, usually pays a one-time fee to secure a movie it doesn’t already own, while game services pay developers based on engagement. But as far as I could tell, Xbox Game Pass, at least, does offer a fixed fee to devs in order to secure games for a period of time – so that’s a stream of revenue not too different from how movies operate.
So, what else should games be borrowing? “Product placement is a really small part of video games right now, compared to movies and television,” Darrah says, pointing to how some movies almost break even this way. “Maybe it could be a larger part of development. Maybe there are relationships there that could be formed.”
“I think that the over reliance on microtransactions is overemphasizing certain genres and preventing other genres from flourishing. So is it worth a think? I think that it is. Do I have a great model? I don’t. Not yet. But it’s something the industry should be considering because everything can’t be a live service as we’ve, I hope, proven quite definitively over the last year and a half. And if our monetization is coming primarily from live services, we run the risk of ending up in a world where there are no AAA games that aren’t live services,” he concludes.
“It’s a really compelling place to be left in”: Dragon Age fans aren’t giving up on the RPG – they’re expanding it
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