kabal-zero Wrote:
Seriously, this is a good thing. Let's break it down:
COST FOR DEVELOPER TO MAKE:
R&D - Lots, I don't know what it is typically, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say thousands, maybe even tens of thousands.
(I'm gonna play devil's advocate and assume that NRS already has all the equipment to design/render/mocap(/develop) the game, which they probably did not. e.g. new Unreal Engine)
Advertising: Thousands
Employee Salaries: Thousands (Once again, maybe even tens of thousands.)
Manufacturing: Thousands
Shipping from manufacturer to distributor, distributor to store: Thousands (Plus cost of fuel, which has made transit just that much more expensive.)
And to top it all off I'm sure they're not making money showing up to PAX and the like.
COST TO YOU (NEW): ~$60
Now let's just assume enough people bought the game to make all that even out or actually make a profit. They still have to charge to keep servers running, to have employees to maintain the servers, etc. and that is an ongoing cost, not a one-time thing. Having people who did not contribute money to the developer (but are still benefiting from using the server resources) by buying used pay a one-time $10 fee for the ongoing cost of keeping the online, online, is fine by me.
On the employee salaries, you're vastly underestimating the costs. It's going to cost NRS tens of thousands of dollars to pay EACH employee. I can imagine some being as low as $30,000, while Boon is perhaps getting a six figure pay, and some royalties for his sales (if he still has stake in his intellectual property, which I imagine he does). Now, I believe in an interview the company was mentioned at being around 100 people. Now, for MK to balance this out, ignoring all costs but employees, we take these 100 people, and assume...$50,000 each on average? (the bigger earners raising up the amount)
So, $50,000 times 100 is $5,000,000. Now, for each copy to sale at $60 (ignoring special editions, yet also ignoring that they don't get the full $60 as profit), they would have to sell over 83,000 new copies solely to break even on employee salary, not counting past investments (game development costs, new tech, etc), and online maintenance (running and fixing servers, any free additions).
Obviously, a company has to pay more than just salaries, and the company needs to make a decent profit to justified continued work, so let's say we quadruple that result to cover all fees we may have underestimated, and to get some decent profit. Then, it needs to sell 332,000 copies to reach that. Of course, I think I'm underestimating how big some of the top pay is, and the amount of time, and money sank in (We should factor in that it's a longer development than one year. 2.5 years times $5,000,000 is $12,500,000, which comes down to over 208,000 copies needed to support that 2.5 years of salaries. Quadrupling that to represent the previous guess comes to 832,000 copies. A reasonable assumption.
They will likely pass this value, but not as much as they would due to used copies. While not everyone who buys used will buy new, the game will drop in price, to a range some people would warrant buying. But, people who buy used aren't going to rebuy new, so those are sales lost, not something WBIE wants. So, with this method of money gaining, for every six used copies that have the owners buy a pass, it's one game sales. So, assuming some won't care about online that much, and others will not buy new even if there was an option, they can regain, what, maybe a fourth of lost sales (facting that they're getting more of than the exact 1/6th due to people who'd never buy new getting the passes, but others not caring enough preventing that number from growing too big).
These are just what ifs, with no real facts (outside of the reasonability in pay ranges).
In the end, you don't need to read this post really, just remember it's WBIE's idea to enforce this to all WB games, not NRS, and don't punish them for what the bosses demand.
