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this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
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But why? Did they actually think it was going to cost more money to keep the servers running than it would bring in? What's the opposite of the sunk cost fallacy?
Matchmaking took upwards of 10 minutes. Maybe they could capture a core audience but all that waiting would alienate even more people. Increasing the wait time even more. They could have invested more money and re-release it, but how much money would it take to overhaul the game. And there is no guarantee, that a 2.0 would be played more. So giving it up is probably the best solution, not burning even more money. Keep in mind, it costed about 400 million $ to make.
I was keeping in mind that they put that much money in, surely all that money has made something playable that would make some money, whereas throwing it all away makes nothing at all, right?
These companies really need to learn the private server model. How is your game ever going to get up enough players to be popular when you're financially incentivized to bail as soon as possible? Put up some public servers for players to hop on, put out a private server, and let people do their own thing. You can still monetize DLCs or even go the route TF2 went and release paid items and loot crates.
People are still playing TF2 and still spending money in the item shop. They definitely wouldn't be if Valve had bailed on it entirely the first time they had a slump in their playerbase.
That's kinda a weird take, since the private server model was the only model until 10 years ago or so. Companies definitely know it. It's just not financially efficient comparing to benefiting from economies of scale with hosting. Plus you don't lose a ton of money or piss of players if you over or under estimate how popular the game will be.
Had they gone with private servers here, they would have lost even more money than they already have. The problem here is they spent too much money on a game no one wanted to play, chasing a fad that ended before it launched.
How exactly are you presuming to accurately estimate future sales that don't exist yet? They increased their cost of operation substantially by relying solely on servers they themselves host, and tie the future viability of their product to hosting those servers. That means there's a clock on how long it makes sense to make the game available to the public.
If they allowed for private servers, that small initial batch of players could potentially grow. Especially if they build in the extensibility of allowing players to mod the game. As it stands, the game now won't make them any more money, and creating the opportunity for it to ever make them money had a continuous cost. There would be no incentive to shut down access to the game itself if it didn't carry a cost to the company.
If they happened to be one of the few successful games in their genre, then sure, hosting their own servers exclusively is a potential means of revenue. But if they're not? It makes much more sense to leave the thing out there for people to fool around with. You never know when one streamer with a following might pick up a game and decide they like it. Can't happen if it doesn't exist though.
Oh shit, I'm sorry. I misunderstood what you were saying, I thought you were referring to them purchasing and running their own physical server hardware as opposed to running their servers off of a cloud platform.
An opportunity cost is the opposite of a sunk cost apparently: https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/46042/what-is-the-opposite-of-a-sunk-cost-a-sunk-gain