You’re conflating a number of points.
First – evangelists aren’t recognized for good sport design sense or enterprise sense. They’re recognized for his or her deep religion and love for the article of their beliefs, a lot in order that it drives them to evangelise. They have an inclination to take a position primarily based on their very own emotions and projecting these values onto the participant base at giant, quite than gathering knowledge and drawing conclusions from that. Trusting their judgement on selections in fields they aren’t expert in primarily based on their emotions quite than collected knowledge is unwise.
Second – all video games are sinking ships. The speed at which they sink is determined by a couple of key components: the advertising and marketing spend to draw new and lapsed gamers, and a gentle stream of latest content material to maintain the brand new, returning, and present gamers. However each sport is sinking as a result of their gamers develop and alter over time. Some end faculty and get jobs, some begin households, some stop to play different video games, some drift aside from their pal teams and cease enjoying. Each sport’s days are numbered. For this reason publishers maintain pushing new ones – they should keep afloat, and all of their present breadwinners are all sinking at numerous charges of decay. Which means that publishers are at all times looking out for a brand new large winner to maintain issues going.
Third – We all know that not all video games can be profitable. This has at all times been the case. A few of us are sufficiently old to recollect the time period “shovelware” as a very good instance of this. The present way of life sport established order is much more sustainable than the previous days, the place a nasty launch meant instant layoffs and studio closures had been far more commonplace.
The large takeaway right here is that large failures are horrible for everyone concerned, however a single large success can maintain an organization for an extended, very long time – for much longer than within the previous days. Small successes don’t earn as a lot or final so long as large ones, which is why publishers are betting large. As Charlie Munger stated, “Present me the motivation and I’ll present you the end result”. The present scenario incentivizes long-term way of life video games, which is why we maintain constructing them.
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