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by nostrademons
2656 days ago
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For some numbers - Diablo 3 was one of the best-selling AAA titles with 12 million copies sold in its first year, about 30 million within the first 3 years. The entire Civilization franchise has sold about 40 million copies - Civ 5 & 6 each sold about 8 million copies. At $50/copy, that's about $200M per game, ranging up to about $1.5B for a bestseller over multiple years. By comparison, Wargaming (a mid-level F2P publisher of World of Tanks, World of Warships, and World of Warplanes) made about $600M in 2015. Fortnite (a bestselling F2P phenomena) made $2.4B in 2018. Pokemon Go (also a huge fad, but one now passe) made about $795M in 2018, and roughly $2B since launch. The playerbase for these F2P games is more than an order of magnitude bigger than traditional AAA titles, so even though a large percentage players never pay, they still pull in roughly 2-4x what the traditional business model does. (This is also what's driving the sky-high valuations of Twitch and Discord - all these players use related services even if they don't pay for the game itself. It's also interesting to compare this to movies - games are now comparable to or even exceeding blockbuster movies in revenue potential.) |
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This is nothing new, but it's still shocking -- at least for those like me that still remember the days of the ZX Spectrum, where blockbuster hits were programmed in bedrooms