I excel at justifying bad purchases!
Yeah. Just like micro transactions in game development, tipping is a system of payment, that if it would disappear would have to be replaced by another form of renumeration. At least the way it is practised in the US.
ED will want money for their products. They have elected the system they have, for a reason. At least I think so. It could be coincidence.
When I google revenue for ED and TFC I get around 0.6 M USD for each. When I google Gajin (Warthunder, etc. Russia based and about the same size as ED) I find almost 100 M USD.
I know the numbers for ED can’t be correct or they would’ve folded by now. But why can’t I find their revenue numbers, but others so easily?
And, I’m not defending them. I’m trying to understand them. Perhaps failing at doing so.
How can EA generate more money?
Say that they start developing their products behind closed doors and only release them when they are finished.
I would think that they would sell more or less the same number of products?
The difference is that with EA they collect the payment earlier.
The question is, how do they change the system they have?
And to what? Subscription? Go back to making confined study sims?
I think it would have to be at a major crossroads. DCS 3.0, perhaps. Everything is treated as a new start and all the modules are new and must be bought.
But how will they finance this? Do they set funds aside for future development? Or are they depending on continous sales to stay afloat? I don’t know. I just don’t think they can change the EA and continous Module development and sales system very easily.
Do we need to change this system? The way I read most people in here is that all we want is shorter and more predictable EA development cycles.
This would depend on their ability to delegate tasks and predict the work flow. It seems that they are a bit bottle necked in certain departments to do this with the required efficiency. At least when judging by their inability to set releasedates. That’s of course not unheard of in the software industry.
Unfortunately we know very little about what’s going on behind the doors at ED. That makes it hard to see how they could improve.