From a marketing standpoint. If you have a great game, people will come even without advertisement. One good example is Warframe. For quite some time, they have been spending little-to-none in marketing and the number of players increased drastically still. Completely unnecessary(meaning, not at all needed to obtain anything in the game by just regular grinding) in-game purchases keeps them alive and they steadily release new content that keeps players coming back for more. If they follow a similar path, minus maybe the long grinds for items and story-related content, then the player base of NMS will grow naturally.
(I hope no one cringes at “in-game purchases” as its one of the few, if not only, way to keep a game alive" specially an indy game)
Have admired that developers approach to the free to play model for a long time now.
What surprised me even more was when I learned they were bought by a company that was in the poultry business for a long time who decided to see what all this video game fuss was about and were more or less allowed to continue business as usual.
If it were one of the big AAA juggernaut publishers receiving ownership it would be dead and buried by now
In game purchases are okay when done right, if the paid content outweighs the free content or act in any way like an old school cheat code might have done (more space bucks! Instant ammo refills! Just give up your real human money! Oh boy!) then it’s disastrous. Warframe is a good example of this done right.
I wondered if HG would introduce paid content as a way to fund further development, but it seems with the launch on a new digital platform and the xbox, they figured out the future funding issues without even having to humor the idea of paid content for another while.
Not universally true. There are plenty of great games that failed commercially, though the internet is aleviating things somewhat nowadays. But NMS is in the public conciousnes. Maybe not in a very desirable way, but having even a negative reputation is still more helpful than having none at all, because it can be swung. And I think for exactly that swinging process it will be very helpful if HG doesn’t promise anything and instead just delivers.
I am still wondering that, actually. From my ballpark estimates they should have made enough money in the 2016 sale to keep going at their current size for at least five years (two of which are now over), but they won’t want to get themselves into another financial empass (they had two release-or-die scenarios now in their rather short history. Three would make a tradition, and I think nobody wants to make a tradition of that). So I expected them to keep updating the game for free for anywhere between 2 and 4 years.
So at some point they’ll have to either start paid DLC, or call NMS done and start on another game. The Xbox might add another year, and if the game suddenly picks up in popularity some more sales might trickle in, but developing the same game for over a decade without additional revenue just doesn’t seem sustainable.
The trouble is that they created a game with infinite potential, but I doubt they’ll be working on it infinitaly…
I’m not sure what that has to do with anything. Weren’t most of the games produced by other companies? If you’re bringing something to your game system, you might want to talk about it. It was one of the most talked about games two years ago and now two years later their bringing it to their system. Just a thought you might want to tell people why it’s now worthy for XBOX. Or maybe that’s why Microsoft and XBOX are on the downswing.
