Why are the seasons in MCC better, even tho they are for free.
MCC: 0$ for no fillers and 100 Tiers, better challenges to unlock season points
Halo Infinite: 10$ for a BP full of Challenge Swaps and Exp Booster, yoink challenges
???
I dunno, the point acquisition system kinda reeks in MCC
MCC was a full priced title that got YEARS of fixes and reworks before it was considered a solid product. Given that much of MCC is comprised of literal ports of older games, an argument could be made that $60 was a steep asking price at launch, but they built in a ton of value (outside of simple nostalgia) over time.
While I agree there are lessons from MCC that 343 should have applied to Infinite, people are comparing a full priced release after years of fixes and content additions to a free MP suite in its second week of pre-release.
2 Likes
343 already earned like 10-20$ for the BP, and i dont know how much $ people already spent on cosmetics.
They will also earn the 60$ off the campaign, so money should be no problem at all.
But i agree that it isnt a finished product and that they need time tho.
Well that’s all relative. “Doing well” to us may not be "Doing well to 343i, MS or anyone else investing in the project. With the reported dev budget of 500mil they’d have to sell roughly 8.4 million copies of the campaign to simply break even, and thats not considering persistent costs as the title is intended to be a 10 year project.
Halo Infinite (as it stands) allows people who don’t want to opt in to the pass or buy campaign to play entirely for free. To posit a scenario, let’s say they only move 3 million units of the campaign this holiday, the bulk of people waiting to buy until coop drops (a likely scenario, albeit with different #'s). That’s 180mil stacked against a 500mil development budget in nearly two quarters after release, easily a financial failure unless pass and microtransactions revenue covers the 320mil gap.
I’m not a fan of FTP in the least, but unfortunately it’s proven a reliable method of revenue in the face of people refusing to pay anything more than $60 for a game.
My big “ask” of this game (regarding the pass) is that they remove the extra push for microtransactions that the current challenge/swap system encourages, and as a part of that (in coming seasons) replace all these swaps and boosts with actual cosmetics.
But its not my and your problem that they are 500m in debt., tho.
They want to sell a good game where players buy things for $, then change your business plan.
Maybe it was a mistake for them that they went this deep into debt.
Which has been a point of contention about AAA gaming for some time. There have been articles and industry opinion pieces for the better part of a decade regarding the AAA development model being unsustainable at $60 a pop because the budgets keep growing bigger. The other end of the issue is that the budgets keep growing bigger because the same people that don’t want to shell out over $60 for a game keep demanding more of said game. The irony being that the last 3-4 years has shown that those same people that balk at anything over $60 will spend more than double that on microtransactions.
It may come to a point where AAA gaming implodes, and that may need to happen to teach both sides (publishers and gamers) a lesson. Given that it’s such a massive machine though, I find that unlikely anytime soon.