Dude, you are smoking some good stuff. This isnt some tiny indie dev studio publishing their first game. This is a AAA title with a budget of an estimated 250MM from the legendary studio BUNGIE. These numbers are an absolute ****show for that. This past weekend was supposed to be THE slam for them and they couldn't put up anything numbers wise. Bungie already pushed critics to not post their reviews until they release an endgame zone, trying to stave off the death knell they know is coming.
From pure statistics:
~500k steam sales from tracker
Lets give them a huge benefit of the doubt and make consoles 1MM sales.
1.5MM Copies sold after all the hype has died weeks after launch and sustain numbers are dropping
$40 base game
$60 delux
Lets say a 90/10 split as base game copies always vastly outnumber delux.
1,350,000 x $40 = 54,000,0000
135,000 x $60 = 9,000,000
$63,000,000 - the 30% platform/store cut = $44,100,000 in sales revenue. Now take uncle sams cut from on top of that.
You are not even to 1/5th of your estimated spend yet in revenue before taxes! Microtransactions aint making up a $200MM+ shortfall just to break even from a revenue standpoint, this aint GTA5 and most players will never buy a skin or other cosmetic for real money. Now you are also blowing more money on dev work trying to patch in missing content and ongoing server costs piling more onto the top just to break even. If they are lucky, they might offset server costs overtime with microtransactions which requires players to keep buying while playing. Tiny and shrinking concurrent player base mean less and less microtransactions.
From pure statistics:
~500k steam sales from tracker
Lets give them a huge benefit of the doubt and make consoles 1MM sales.
1.5MM Copies sold after all the hype has died weeks after launch and sustain numbers are dropping
$40 base game
$60 delux
Lets say a 90/10 split as base game copies always vastly outnumber delux.
1,350,000 x $40 = 54,000,0000
135,000 x $60 = 9,000,000
$63,000,000 - the 30% platform/store cut = $44,100,000 in sales revenue. Now take uncle sams cut from on top of that.
You are not even to 1/5th of your estimated spend yet in revenue before taxes! Microtransactions aint making up a $200MM+ shortfall just to break even from a revenue standpoint, this aint GTA5 and most players will never buy a skin or other cosmetic for real money. Now you are also blowing more money on dev work trying to patch in missing content and ongoing server costs piling more onto the top just to break even. If they are lucky, they might offset server costs overtime with microtransactions which requires players to keep buying while playing. Tiny and shrinking concurrent player base mean less and less microtransactions.