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Comment by qbasic_forever | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why game developers should be publically traded companies. You have a creative vision, you raise or borrow money to build it, you build a game, you sell it to pay off your loans and fund your next creative vision--it should be that simple.

The last thing you want is the public to start having control and financial interest in your creative vision. That gives us bullshit like loot boxes, NFTs, etc.

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AAA games are more like hollywood blockbusters than games from the old days. Massive budgets, lots of risk, etc

Requires a different corporate structure

Hyper real AAA games maybe, but some of the biggest and most money making games like Minecraft were private creations of a person or small team. Minecraft by all accounts has gotten much worse and less popular after Microsoft bought it--people still prefer the old java version vs. newer Microsoft developed editions.

AAA is generally a budgetary designation. Minecraft was built as an indie game, then bought by a massive studio. It doesn't become AAA because of who owns it.

Minecraft is the exception that proves the rule. There have been perhaps 5 indie games in the last 10 years that made it big money wise.

I'm not sure how much money they made, but off the top of my head, Factorio, Stardew Valley, and Terraria were all indie dev games that became hugely popular. And I suspect that most indie titles with any popularity make money for their creators, even if they aren't minting billionaires the way Minecraft did.

Yes, well, the fact is that only a teeny tiny fraction of indie games gets even the remote possibility of a glimmer of a hope of achieving something even closely resembling any kind of popularity. The vast majority of game releases on Steam just sell maybe a few 100 copies. That's it. These games just don't get seen. The market is too flooded with releases for any conceivable storefront to display that catalog fairly.

Minecraft was like 10 years old when it was purchased. It’a remarkable it’s still actively played at all. Most games would have died off and had a sequel released in that time.

I don't know if that's true from a business perspective. I suspect that twice as many people (ie customers) use Minecraft across all the platform ports now than did before the acquisition, despite what the oldtimers have to say about Bedrock Edition.

The China edition launched in 2017. It has 500 million users as of Oct 2021. It's based on Bedrock Edition, not Java. This is 100% a Microsoft scaling thing.

>That gives us bullshit like loot boxes, NFTs, etc.

Valve pioneered all 3 in games, and they're still private :shrugs:

Why is it different from any other business? Profit motive is often at odds with product vision for pretty much everything.

It's not. This just hit home for homie over here.

I mean...this generalizes to a huge problem with our country's corporate culture over the last several decades.

While there have always been people primarily motivated by profit, it at least feels like, in previous times, there was always the sense that the purpose of a business was to provide a product or service, and the profit was their reward for doing that well.

More recently, it feels much more like the purpose of a business is to make as much money as humanly possible, and whatever product or service they provide is just a necessary evil to make that happen.

Personally, I believe this can, as you suggest, be laid at the feet of Wall Street, and the insatiable drive for more profit, more growth, faster growth, more more more. How we get rid of it...is a harder problem.

That applies to most products I can think of. I suppose the simple answer is that if you want to go mainstream with _anything_ B2C, you need to invest a ridiculous amount of money into marketing. To get that kind of money to play with, I don't think there's much of an alternative to the stock market and VCs, is there? There's a few exceptions I can think of, but not many.

As much as I enjoy indie games, I do think they've contributed heavily to the incredibly oversaturated market we see right now. It's downright impossible to find actually good mobile games for example without investing hours of research.

That model works until you have one mediocre or poor selling game, then you’re out of business. The security added by investors providing money beyond the immediate 1-2 game horizon gets you out of this cycle a bit. Of course it brings other problems with it related to game quality and decision making processes designed to satisfy shareholders instead of the audience, all of which is to say there are significant trade offs with either choice.

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