Two things. First, in absolute terms any subset of a set of hundreds of millions of people that can be described as “the vast majority” is still a massive amount of people.

It’s not a question of rights, it’s a question of presumed privileges. Certainly an individual has the right to make a polite request of another individual, just as surely as that other individual has the right to refuse.

Exactly - people absolutely think that they should be granted social “bonuses” when they spend more money on something.

You can be an entitled douche without sounding mean. That’s what came across to me.

I explained why it’s a bad look right after what you quoted.

It speaks volumes.

That’s basically what they’re doing, just a difference of degrees. That’s what they mean when they say that they will “implement a write-down of work-in-progress for titles under development.”

“Please stop dunking on this company, it’s an entire continent that dehumanizes people in this way <3"

It could also be that there were multiple rounds of revisions that burnt through available cash. I have never known a situation where a licensee would flat-out refuse to do any changes, but I have seen many situations where a licensor was incredibly particular.

It’s always a balancing act, and from the complete remarks it seems like there was a substantial amount of playtesting and feedback. People say a lot when they’re speaking, but they say more when they’re doing. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that plenty of people who “wanted” a more hardcore version of the…

Oh absolutely. That’s why I mentioned that there’s a range where it’s most useful and, exactly as you say, the returns are much fuzzier than other costs.

It’s not ridiculous, though. Given a good product and a smart marketing team, there is a range where a dollar spent on marketing will provide much better returns than a dollar spent anywhere else. Given a strong release that is a new IP, or from a new team, in order to make a dent in an oversaturated market they will…

Yeah, but the cost of manufacturing and packaging was added on top of that. Still wasn’t huge, and, realistically, it could be a line item under the marketing budget along with any additional store displays or position on the shelves.

You’re wrong. Cost was around $3.50 to $4 per disc. Data transfer for 50GB will cost around $3. Google can help you find the actual information, if you care to look.

Physical production cost about $3.50 to $4 per copy. Retailers got 30%. At scale the costs of data transfer for a typical game will be more than $3, not counting data storage. Granted, that cost is absorbed by the platform, not the publisher, but that is the cost. You’re wrong on literally every point. This is all…

Sure, you’re paying the cut to the platform or retail store and you’re not paying for product manufacturing... which wound up being around $4 per game. Which is a cost, but not so much that dropping it would make overall costs “significantly less,” to use the original comment’s phrasing.

What? I said that shipping and production costs of physical objects are fire and forget. I’m not talking about retailers. Retailers make their own choice about what to stock, where, for how long, whatever.

Sure, but if they’re selling directly then they’re on the hook for all of the platform costs, including suck costs like all of the initial planning, development, customer acquisition... I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to what that would be calculated to cost per individual sale.

This is very similar to my take on the AI voiceover question. It will clearly enable interactive experiences that are simply not possible right now and that cannot be done with a human.

How do people think the internet works? “No additional overhead/infrastructure”? There’s a ton of overhead costs, ongoing costs, infrastructure costs, etc... with digital content. Amazon - by far the biggest cloud provider - isn’t doing this out of the kindness of their cold, dead heart.