Companies always protect assets over employees in an economic downturn, because assets never lose their value.
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Fortnite mainly
Micro transactions. For some reason Iâll never understand, lots of gamers like to buy âskinsâ and stuff like that.
That is what I thought too.
Hmm. That sounds very cold! It was cold here in the UK last night, reached 0c last night. And I thought we had cold weather!
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Wow. That is amazing. Could I ask what part you were working on?
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Yes correct, it has seen quite a big downturn in players though nearly 3M players.
Its aimed squarely at children when it comes to Fortnite though.
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I have it on good authority from people who have worked there that the C-suite are actual a**holes who do not hide how much they disdain the employees.
And Unreal engine. Also, theyâre trying to launch an alternative to Apple/Google/Xbox/Steam for delivering games. They have many irons in the fire.
Fortnite has three versions. One of them - the original game - which is Zombie mode - costs like $20. When Pub-G got popular, the developers looked at their multiplayer engine and said, âWe can pivot to that.â So they did. And the game completely changed.
IMO, the zombie survival game is MUCH more fun. (Thatâs where all the wall-building in Fortnite came from.) I recommend trying it out.
They push FOMO with game passes. They use microtransactions for loot boxes. People like skins for the same reason they like all those other things: itâs a way to compete and compare with your friends. Skins in particular are a way to show your own individuality in a game. Especially in a game where you can be your heroes, like Spiderman.
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Yes, absolutely. I didnât express myself well when I said I didnât understand it. I meant I donât relate to it.
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This may be true for Fortnite. But for many games, especially phone games, itâs a misconception that the majority of money comes from all those players. A lot of phone games in particular are whatâs known as âwhale gamesâ. These are games like RAID: Shadow Legends that target lots of people to have a large player base, but make their money through microtransactions to âwhalesâ - really rich people who pay to win. Whales want to play popular games, and to them, disposable income is measured in millions. They are Saudi Princes, or children of Russian Oligarchs. They have big money. They want to be seen at the top of the scores, and paying for that privilege is ok with them. They want to see themselves at the top of the leaderboards.
Whale games rise and fall on whether or not their whales are hooked and playing. When the whales go, the game disappears. The company pivots, making a new game and hooking their whales again.
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Isnât it interesting that the video games industry is much more profitable than the film, TV or music industries, and yet all we hear (from publishers in particular) are sob stories about how piracy is destroying the medium and having to modernize their work force? Actually, âinterestingâ may not be the best word there 
To me, itâs a sign that something isnât sustainable in the business, and to my knowledge, it never has been. It often seems to be this way in creative jobs - the further one is in the idea-direction (opposite production and retail), the more risk you have, and the less money you make. For instance, publishing an album - the artist puts in most of the work, and stakes their career on it, the studio and producer get a fee, the publisher gets royalties, and finally a store would take at least half the price as profit, with almost no risk of having to drop below the profit margin.
Iâd love to know more about how smaller indie companies are getting along, though Iâm sure itâs no walk in the park either 
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Regarding piracy, there is plenty of crying coming from the tv, film industry and especially the music industry.
The music industry is #1 in take down notices on YouTube.
True, sometimes itâs like another game inside a game. People love collecting cool and rare skins. Also, thereâs another type of player who builds their teams in FIFA. Collecting players and upgrading them. Itâs a cool thing tbh.
This skin in Counter Strike 2 is worth around 2 million dollarsâŚ
And this shameful AK skin is worth around $30,000â$1 millionâŚ
(I can make a better skin with my mouse and BlenderâŚMan! This is just a thin-film interference material! )
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While most of your info is correct, thereâs a flaw here. Most whales are not rich, theyâre addicts. While some whales spend a lot because they have a ton of disposable income, there are others who dump large parts of their income into microtransactions, and struggle to make ends meet.
Hereâs a PC Gaming article about one such person: Meet the guy who spent $3,200 on Hearthstone packs in one night | PC Gamer
Hereâs a Reddit post from a microtransaction addict asking how to stop: https://www.reddit.com/r/shoppingaddiction/comments/1ig1rm7/i_keep_spending_whatever_money_is_available/
And hereâs a research paper on the subject of overspending on games: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306460325002515
While some of these âwhalesâ might be rich, the data suggests the majority are just regular people overspending on games.
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Many games target addicts. But there are also games that specifically target very wealthy clients. Your examples of addicts are not what Iâm talking about. Thereâs actually a specific example I can see in my mind, but I cannot remember the name (and Google searches have turned up empty).
Addition is a very serious problem. Microtransactions do in fact target addicts. So do treadmills. The most famous of which is WoWâs treadmill. What they do is hook you in the first 30 seconds, then the following minute, then the following 2 minutes after that, spreading out the endorphin hits a little longer each time, until youâre hooked on the game after an hour. These two approaches, along with loot boxes, are all proven to be very addictive.
Again, what Iâm referring to is games that literally live and die by whether or not wealthy players are playing them. As sad as it is, all the addicts who suffer are incidental to the life of the game. When the whales go, the game goes.
Unfortunately, most of my knowledge of this comes from insiders, not news articles. The companies that exploit this are typically from China or India, or other countries where there are fewer regulations.
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If you donât have data to back up what youâre saying, then Iâm sorry but it doesnât hold much weight to me if I have data that shows otherwise. I believe you when you say that some developers target wealthy people and make most of their money from them, though I doubt Raid: Shadow Legends is a good example of this, and thatâs the game you mentioned by name.
Iâve heard this idea spread before, even among other developers, but again, no data to back it up. And on the other hand, Iâve heard stories of developers who assumed they had a rich player, only to find out that player was burning most of their salary on the game. Unless the devs are running polls or surveys, thereâs not really any way for them to know how wealthy their players are.
Anyone can look rich if theyâre spending their life savings on a game, or spending money that isnât theirs, or have taken out a loan to fund their addiction. And that last one isnât a joke; some casinos contain machines that grant loans. For microtransactions this is built-in to the experience as you can use a credit card to pay for them.
I get where youâre coming from. To paraphrase Josh Strife Hayes, â10 rich people competing over who can spend the most money is more profitable than 1,000 monthly subscriptionsâ. But when you dig into the data, you find these ârich whalesâ tend to really be spending addicts and gambling addicts; not genuinely wealthy people.
The anecdote is entirely personal, but I used to have two friends I was supporting financially who was stuck in this kind of spending cycle. They were constantly in some state of financial distress, needing me to pay for food and public transport. I spent over ÂŁ6,000 trying to keep them afloat, and help them break out of whatever financial rut was causing these issues. Turned out that they were in this predicament because much of their regular income went to games, and then theyâd not have enough money for food, so theyâd call me for help. One of them was on benefits and essentially homeless, yet she still spent ÂŁ100+ a month on mobile game microtransactions.
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What we can say with certainty, is that game companies are companies, and as such exist to generate profits for their share-holders. This is most true of publishers, but letâs not kid ourselves - being a professional game developer is essentially the business of fostering and monetizing game addiction.
I say that as a former employee of said industry. Admittedly, developers are often forced by a publisher to agree to shady monetization models, but the games are developed around these âschemesâ, for lack of a better term. Free-to-play, subscription-based, episodic releases, in-game purchases, online-only - all of these things were invented to drain money from users.
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Both things can be true, and IMO, are true. There are gaming studios that focus on âwhalesâ. @dragonforge-dev couldnât find the specific example that came to mind, but I did just a little bit of digging, and found papers that go back to the Zynga days of the 2010s, with related and more general papers on human behaviour with regard to Pareto economics, casinos, and power laws.
Bluntly, your personal experience and interaction with people who have suffered is preventing you from seeing that you are arguing toward the same point. Itâs awful that people who cannot afford to âwinâ these games are sucked in by them. The goal isnât to drain the poor of their meager means, but to take advantage of the ultra rich. If whales didnât exist, that kind âbusiness planâ isnât nearly as lucrative, if at all.
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Minecraft is probably the worst as far as infinite addons, never ending loops, skins, maps, etc.
that all cost some expensive scam/fake currency.
I actually dislike minecraft for that main reason.
*Speaking as a person who previously was what one would call a slight âminecraft addictââ
Seriously a dangerous thing, good for the companies, bad for the consumers.
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Thatâs fine. Thatâs a you issue, not a me issue.
Iâm sad to hear about that. Addiction of any kind is very serious and it can take years, or even decades for someone to fall far enough to get treatment. I actually made a song about the pain of trying to help family with addiction. Itâs painful to watch.