Palworld faces the difficult choice of whether to become a live-service game or stay buy-to-play, PocketPair’s CEO says - eviltoast
    • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Didn’t they make 10-100s millions of dollars on this? Pays a lot of salaries while you make new paid content.

      EDIT : They made at least 12 million sales on steam, and had 7 million players on Xbox, which may be Gamepass, but still makes them money.

      So at $30, that’s 66million from steam minus 30% for steams cut, so they banked 44 million at least.

      They can pay 440 devs 100k for at least a year. I assume their team is a bit smaller than that, so they likely have years of runway. Linkedin lists size as between 50-200 in japan, so that likely means they are making $50-70k, and there are likely more than 100 devs. I would guess they have a 4 year runway from Steam sales, and maybe 1-2 year from Gamepass.

      They got some time to think.

      • dodos@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        According to their careers page, they have about 60 employees. And, knowing japanese game dev salaries, a lot of those devs (excluding senior devs) probably make around 30-50k a year depending on seniority unless it’s a unicorn company.

        • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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          2 months ago

          Yeah…that changes the numbers. More like 10-20 years to do just about anything.

          Somehow the urgency just drains right out of this for me.

      • Grass@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        no line must go up, only up, up now and up tomorrow and the days after too. fire all the devs too, paying them makes line go down.

    • Psychodelic@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Anyone know if The Finals counts as a “live service” game? It’s free to play and I think it’s fantastic - both the game and the fact it’s free.

      I just don’t play games enough to justify the huge asking prices anymore. The last games I paid for were COD MW2 and Cyberpunk and I doubt I’ll ever drop $70+ for a game again, especially when there’s games like splitgate and whatnot that are free (not that I ever tried the new one. lol)

      • Chozo@fedia.io
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        2 months ago

        I would definitely classify The Finals as a live service. The way I see it, any game that is designed to be “never-ending”, and have a constant stream of new content (free or paid) would fall under this category of game.

        I wouldn’t say it’s a requirement for all live service games, but I’d also say that anything that uses “seasonal” content models would also be considered a live service.