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Is there an indie games bubble?
(roadmapmag.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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You're forgetting The Sims, a veritable cash cow for EA, where every tiny add-on costs $15+.
But otherwise, I agree.
They're pivoting to free to play, so that series may have waned as well. I'm sure it's still profitable, but you don't switch to free to play, especially for what is ostensibly a single player game that doesn't rely on player counts, if everything is going well.
Oof. If that's true, I feel bad for all the folks who have invested so much time into the series.
I don't think you need to. The series is turning to something else entirely, with a completely different focus. I already think any previous episode is more fun than 4.
The folks who loved the old games probably won't think 5 is a free replacement for these. They'll just think, it's okay, I'm going to spend a dozen hours trying to make the old one kinda run.
Free to play with microtransactions is just the way to go for games that can be monetized in that manner. The lower barrier to entry means far more downloads and the piecemeal monetization means that players will frequently end up paying more than $60 alongside the larger player base.
Compared to the business they used to with the Sims, free to play makes it much, much harder to break even. You're hoping to monetize more off of a smaller percentage of your players. 95% of people will never pay in a free to play game, and the Sims games would sell over 10 million units each, handily, plus expansions. But I know that plenty of people would pirate the expansions, so EA probably sees that as a threat that they need to lock behind an internet connection in a server-based game, and they'll likely destroy the series' profitability in the process.