First, this is not a defense of 343, especially since there is valid criticism to progression, the shop, and customization.
So someone on another post pointed out that development for this game was $500 million and honestly that sounds about right (or possibly even low). That got to me thinking, how much does this game cost. If we were to say 10 million copies were to be sold on PC platforms such as Steam, the developers would need to make $50 on each sale.
Going to average out some of those platforms and give an assumption that Microsoft would still want a standard producer percentage of sales, which leaves 343 at about 25% of the sales. So to BREAK EVEN, they would need to sell 10 million copies at $200… that is never going to happen, and would not be enough to cover the future development of Infinite and any support for MCC (let alone enough to keep the servers running for years).
Thankfully, 343 did not go full predator on us by preying on gambling addictions, skinner boxes, and pay to win. It does mean they need to coax those who are willing to spend their money to support the game so that those who can’t are able to play.
I think it would have helped a bit of the store was bigger, There are a lot of things we know exists from the bots and think leaks show that a lot of them will later appear in the store. They should have put them all out at once so that people could pick and choose where to throw $10, then later expand on it so that some people will throw another $10 at it for something cool.
I think there are definitely improvements that can be made to the monetisation but overall I don’t think it’s that bad. The fact we get a weekly item and event items is decent enough for me. Free games usually have pretty weak offerings outside the default.
Everyone praising Apex but you have to play a bunch just to unlock all the heroes to play as and that does have gameplay advantages. Every free game can be seen as “predatory” if you have poor mental health.
I wish games would signpost or flag players with excessive spending habits. Realistically this is no different than to a gambling addict or a shopping addict the person needs help, but how much is on the shop’s responsibility to stop them being bad with their money.
The scheme is hardly predatory to a stabilised individual.
I think Game Pass is the ultimate goal. It’s not how much they are making in sales, it’s how long they can use it as a lure for Game Pass. Everything else is just an added bonus for them.
3 months of GamePass is just about a full game cost. They are technically making 4x the amount of money a year by hooking them into Game Pass.
MS is still funding 343i, so there are probably some deals that cover any losses 343i will incur behind the scenes we are never going to know about. If it’s the standard that’s seen in other companies, 343 gets a set yearly budget by MS.
Of course, they will never open the books to show us what those deals are, so all we can do is speculate.
That will probably help with costs, but suspect they still need to heavily rely on their store seeing as a good chunk of player base is not on game pass. Most PC players I know are going through Steam, which if they don’t buy campaign, not getting much from them, except for the store.
Yeah thats the problem with all this, they hold all the stats and unless we have all the stats and the full breakdown of how MS Studio’s funds their individual entities, it’s all speculation.
Edit: I would love to know the inner workings of those deals though.
So there’s a couple of things you need to understand.
Free to play games don’t rely on making all that money back on the first day or week. It’s an investment. Instead of getting $60 up front they get $100-300 out of a player over the course of a few years. $500+ out of dedicated players. In the long run the F2P model is infinitely more profitable than the retail $60. So the goal should not be to squeeze $20 per armor set or color out of a player.
Infinite’s budget only ended up being so large because of the extremely long development cycle. It was very troubled with multiple leadership changes and scrapping and starting over multiple times (allegedly). This is why we have so little content at launch despite being in development for 6 years. This was a misstep on the part of Microsoft and 343 and is not the responsibility of the customer to foot the bill.
Games like CoD and Apex have more reasonable microtransactions and have pulled in billions. This makes the pricing seem greedy, because it is not needed to recoup development costs.
Other games at least offer some free rewards to entice the player into staying around and spending money eventually. I’ve logged 27 hours on this game. I’ve unlocked two free cosmetics. The gold visor and the Yoroi armor core. I feel as though my time, support, and investment into their game is not being respected.
Another thing to keep in mind is that Halo is a vehicle to sell game pass subscriptions. Something to think about.
Will say, they need to make adjustments for sure. Thankfully, they haven’t pulled out some of the truly dark predatory methods.
They just currently have a big whole to fill and want to sustain MCC and Infinite for a long time, so they are trying to make some money before the inevitable slow drip of income.
If the budget is indeed $500m, Microsoft should easily be able to make that back and move into profitability over the course of the planned 10 years of support, without the current predatory microtransactions. The campaign should easily sell 8m+ copies lifetime considering how strong pre-orders have been, with at least 3-4m of those sales being at the full price of $60, which is $180-240m in revenue just from the full price sales. Late life sales will range between $15 and $50 mostly, with an average of probably $30, so that is another $120m or more in revenue on late life campaign sales. Then there are the people who will sub to Gamepass to play Halo Campaign, paying at least $10 a month for as long as they are subbed.
Then we have the profits from the F2P multiplayer. We will see a significant number of people buying either 1000 credits for $10 or 3200 credits for $27 each season in order to buy the battlepass. Let’s say that 2m people buy just the first season battlepass at an average of $15, that is another $30m in revenue just on the first season. Later seasons will probably have less players than the first, and less battlepass sales as a result, but they will still be bringing in a significant amount of battlepass revenue each 3 month season after the first 6 month season.
Taking all of that into account, there is no justification for there to be $1000+ worth of additional microtransactions in the shop in just the first season. No justification for store microtransaction costs to range between 600 and 2000 credits each. No justification for there to be no in-game Avenue to earn credits. As things stand they will make back their entire development budget plus some pretty substantial profits on just the first season.
They need to lower store microtransactions pricing by around 40-50%, and make credits earnable in-game at a fairly slow pace, in order to encourage store microtransactions purchases without making spending real money feel forced. They will still make a tidy profit over the course of the game even with lower pricing and in-game credit earning.
A lot of people keeping making the point about the multiplayer being free so Microsoft has to make some money somewhere, that’s quite right, however it’s worth keeping in mind that the multiplayer has always been part of the full retail price of the game, in this instance Microsoft are getting sales from people buying Halo Infinite as well as making money from the microtransactions.
It’s important to keep in mind that Microsoft have multiple revenue streams here.
The cost of the game
Microtransactions
Merchandise
Gamepass
The Halo games made over $5 billion by 2016.
Halo 4 surpassed $220 million within it’s first 24 hours on the market.
Halo: Reach made more than $200 million in it’s first 24 hours in just two markets. In the US alone it’s launch eclipsed EVERY entertainment launch in the US that year including Iron Man 2 and Toy Story 3.
When you look at the success of the Halo franchise I don’t think you can make the argument that the only way for Microsoft to possibly be able to turn a profit is by selling things like armour colours for around $5 each.
I don’t think anyone minds Microsoft making a profit but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking they are going to struggle to break even, they could afford to lower the price of their microtransactions and/or give those microtransactions more value (like armour colours working on different armour cores).
Those numbers don’t fully help. That is revenue not profit. Big corporations spend just about that much just to run.
I agree we need to be able to earn credits and have more reasonable free customizations. However, $20 for an armor is unfortunately becoming reasonably priced.
AAA games are starting to get closer to the intersection where they can’t afford to make games at the price they want to sell. These are high end luxury products that they are trying to sell cheap. So some companies have to cut out content, and some get Microsoft to foot the bill to cover some of the loss.
From your own numbers, Halo 4 and Halo: Reach combined in their first 24 hours was still less than the cost to make Infinite. That’s two games and still not as much.
Corporations are not entitled to profits because their project was poorly managed and went over budget. Especially when there is zero reason for a game this barren to have cost that much.
This is so on the money! (Excuse the pun)
Three playlists, basically no free rewards, three btb maps, 7 arena maps… That’s all we get for this 500 million dollar budget and 6 years of dev time?
All that and they want to sell us white for $20.
This is why people are annoyed more than anything.