Using google translate its basically the same money point others have been making.

It's already been mentioned, but most game publishers want as much revenue as possible for as little effort as required.

Minimum effort, maximum gain. It's capitalism 101, at least here in the US. Because everything revolves around the stock market here, and gaming has become so mainstream over the past 20 years, gaming companies now revolve around the stock market as well.

Think back to the late 2000's when every online game was a WoW clone besides Call of Doody and Battlefield. It was all about money back then, too, it just failed.

These companies chase paper so much, you'd think it were a life or death situation instead of just greed. I'd like to get into it more and discuss the social implications, but that isn't allowed on the forums.

Suffice it to say, some people took Michael Douglas' quote from Wall Street literally when he said rather infamously in the movie, "Greed is good."

Respectfully,
-Cym

Games as a service are all about keeping you paying for something you don't get to keep.

Add on top if they are mobile games, they have much lower processing work and thus are much simpler games, maybe on par with Gameboy games with high end PS1 graphics.

It's much easier to push a 50Mb game that has a free-to-play/Pay-to-win model and make much more than games that are well crafted.

And selling you stuff through the game is always a win in their book.

I also has to do with the reality of the market and developers maximizing revenue by extending the lifetime of the product.

In general, any new creative product has some risk with the producer being unsure if the product will take off. Of all the game of the years and amazing AAA games, there are thousands of other games that likely had similar care put in but just didnt take off because the market wasnt right. Even if you make a sequel to a game (thereby having a guaranteed fan base) there is still no guarantee that a sequel will be successful.

The games-as-a-service model (GTA online, fortnite, etc) has shown to be immensely popular and also a money printing machine. GTA online makes apparently close to half a bil per year and fortnite 5.1 bil in 2021. Why bother crafting a new game which requires research, building new assets from scratch, testing, and storyworld building with a big risk of not succeeding when you can do much less work with a higher guaranteed payout by just adding a new update to your online world. This is more evident in the mobile gaming industry which makes more money than PC+console combined even though the games are of far lower quality. Online/gaas models basically allow producers to maximize more profit from their already successful IPs.

Although this is good for producers, I do think this is overall a bane to the gaming industry though. The people who can produce these games tend to be the big developers (blizzard with WoW, Epic with Fortnite, Rockstar with GTO) so that leaves less money for the little guy. There is also going to be a lack of new IPs and new ideas as a result imo because people seem to want to stick with the familiar. Im honestly surprised that the top trending games on youtube are still Minecraft, GTO, and battle royale shooters even though they are so old and newer games have come out (GoT Directors cut).

Not my cup of coffee. Luckily there are still plenty of offline games where I can easily spent tons of hours. If I would have spare time :)

Can you explain EA then? They don’t listen to anyone, they don’t even make any attempt to, if anything they stick their fingers up to anyone who doesn’t agree, and what happens, truck loads of cash through the door every day. Simply put people are stupid, and follow a crowd. Unless a major crowd makes a dent in their fotunes, they won’t even acknowledge an issue. And it’s not even big companies, GOG do the same, not even acknowledged any issues, and yet profits grow. CDPR release cyberpunk, and still make money etc.
I think most would be suprised what can be gleaned. Obviously what is being played, how long, at what times, with who, locations, adverts clicked, loot boxes/microtransaction, and as well, chat transcripts, linked Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/twitch platforms, which then links in other vast databases. Then link in any in app purchases to bank accounts and you are well away.
In terms of buyers, anyone really, advertisers, criminals, marketeers, other games companies, insurance companies (who doesn’t want to know about users off work, bad lifestyles etc.). Data is worth more than gold.

Yes, this was actually the point I was hoping came out in the thread.

Online gaming is about data... not games.

The amount of biometric data and psych profiles (let alone tracking, purchase behaviors, etc.) you can extract from games, phone apps, and web pages is amazing...

... and then there's mass behavioral manipulation that's quite devious (by "bad actors") as well. Would anything happen if gamers found out they were actually -- in a number of cases -- being experimented on?

if you already knew the 'answer' then why ask the question? And no, it is not just because of one thing.

Why indeed?