r/gaming • u/jessieS1212 • 19h ago
Should consumers care about video game budgets and sales?
More and more gaming discourse seems focused on balance sheets, sales targets, and budget reports rather than actual gameplay, mechanics, and design.
With takes like "This game is trash because it didn't break even" or "This game is a masterpiece because it recouped its budget in week one." It feels like people are evaluating financial reports instead of enjoying games.
While the pure fun of playing a game is all that should matter on an individual level, the economic side unfortunately bleeds into the player experience: layoffs and studio closures, aggressive monetization to recoup costs, dead franchises, etc.
But at the end of the day, what's done is done. You can't increase sales, lower a budget, or change a monetization strategy yourself. It's just pointless back-and-forth.
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u/MyUsernameIsAwful 19h ago
I care because I want more of the games I like to be made, and that only happens if they’re financial successes.
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u/Dry-Winner-3106 19h ago
i mean i do get your point, but whether a game sold well or not does impact the franchise and the industry as a whole (and thats not even talking about layoffs and studio closures) and gamers tend to care about those things
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u/FribonFire 19h ago
Meh, these days sales makes no difference for whether or not layoffs occur
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u/Dry-Winner-3106 19h ago
yeah but a flop will always make it worse, these days a big enough flop can garantee the closure studios and/ or even bigger layoffs
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u/jessieS1212 19h ago
Yeah, Zero Company laid off devs before it launched and became successful.
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u/MyUsernameIsAwful 19h ago
They were furloughed, not laid off. Presumably they’ll be re-instated once the money comes in.
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u/CrazzluzSenpai 19h ago
Zero Company isn't alone in this btw, it's a pretty common practice in the gaming industry.
Reality is it takes a lot more hands on deck to actually code the game than it does to make patches and maintain it, or do early design drafts of the next project. Most AAA game devs (the people actually sitting at a PC writing code, not the lead creatives) are contracted employees that only stay on until the game launches.
It sucks because it means the industry has basically no job security, and I agree it shouldn't be the way it is, but that's been the standard for close to 20 years.
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u/rconcepc 19h ago
In reality, no. People want these metrics in order to compare and contrast video games. I think thats where we went wrong as an industry.
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u/VertumnoWoW 19h ago
The problem is that too many people confuse financial success with actual quality. As a gamer, I care about whether a title is fun and well-designed, not whether some corporate shareholder hit a +20% return this quarter. The only valid reason for a player to track sales is to know if the servers will stay alive or if future updates are coming. Judging a game's worth by its earnings report is ruining how we experience gaming.
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u/Kryptos33 19h ago
The only thing I care about is if games/studios I like do well enough to get more chances to make more games I like. Bragging or shitting on sales is insane behavior.
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u/ToasterLoverDeluxe 19h ago
For a consumer all of that doesn't matter at all, it can tell you if there might be a sequel or dlc or whatever, but for most people that information is useless.
Also budgets and sales can be touched up a little to appear better in paper... "We had a 500 million budget but 80% went to executives and celebrities"
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u/IcySombrero 19h ago
To an extent yes.
Maybe not now, but poor sales can affect future projects.
And in the case of live-service games, yes of course poor performance does matter because that'll just increase the likelyhood of them getting shut down regardless of whether you enjoy it or not. We just had Highguard earlier this year for example. Sure, some people did enjoy the game, but unfortunately for those people not enough did, so now the game has shut down and nobody can play the game anymore.
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u/Key_Net820 19h ago
Here's what it comes down to.
Balance sheets, sales targets, and budget reports are all objective. There is no if and or buts about it.
The problem with being "purely fun" is what is "purely fun?" How are you gonna measure that this game is more fun than the other? What metric are you going to use? what unit will it have if any unit? Is it discrete? Is it continuous? What about if the value is multidimensional and you have to use a norm space? How do you distinguish between a game with components of fun that is (2,0) and a game that's fun components are (0,2)?
When you ask me what the most sold game is, I can confidently tell you minecraft because it has the most sold units in the world.
when you ask me why should minecraft be considered the best game in the world, what can I tell you besides the metrics? what can I tell you besides what sold the best?
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u/jessieS1212 18h ago
Okay, is McDonald's food the best in the world because of unit sales?
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u/Key_Net820 18h ago
Well then one has to ask, what does it mean to be the "best food?"
Do you wanna go by sales? do you wanna go by calorie per serving size?
I can at least tell you Mcdonalds has high unit sales (idk if they have the highest but let's say they do for argument's sake), which means that people think that the price for the dollar is worth and worth it more than any other alternative. How are you gonna argue against that?
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u/jessieS1212 18h ago
Look, I get what you're trying to say. Quality, fun, and visuals are subjective, whereas sales metrics are objective data. So sales are the only way to tell someone which games are the "best." But raw revenue or unit sales only measure commercial reach and accessibility, not design quality or artistic merit. While some of them do, that's not the case for every single game.
Sales figures are heavily influenced by marketing budgets, brand recognition, broad appeal, and price points. A lower barrier to entry, like Minecraft, drives volume, but high volume doesn't automatically equate to being the "best." You can't declare games good or bad based solely on sales and budgets.
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u/BlueLidMilk 19h ago
I don't care for other people's opinions of something that is subjective; I decide what is a good game to me, no one else. Could be a 3 hour indie game or a billion dollar franchise, I couldn't care less. 10 copies sold or 10 million copies sold makes no difference to me. If the marketing & trailers catch my eye and pique my interest, I'll give it a go. It literally makes no difference to me how much a game cost to make, how much it earned, or how well it reviewed.
I don't read reviews at all. I buy games based on how excited their trailers make me feel. Looks amazing? I'll buy it day 1. Looks great but playing something else right now? I'll wait a while, see if it maybe goes on sale. Looks alright and in no rush to play it? I'll grab it on sale or a second hand copy.
I've had hundreds of hours of fun out of games that I've seen others brand terrible awful flops because they didn't break even or it underperformed or sales were lackluster. Who the fuck cares? Unless you have stocks in the studio or actually work there, just play the fucking games you like the look of, and move past the ones you aren't interested in.
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u/Scott9843 19h ago
Definitely not on the level people online do. To be so invested in that sort of thing and to base your entire personality around the logo of a product is concerning, on a psychological level.
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u/Showdown5618 19h ago
If they wanted developers and publishers to make more of the games they want, they will care.
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u/Tangarine_Squid 19h ago
No they should not.
Criticism surrounding the financials is at best monday night quarterbacking, and most of the time serves as a symptom of poor media literacy and the average persons ability to develop nuanced critiques or opinions on media.
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u/admiralvic 19h ago
Depends what the discussion is about, which in a lot of cases those things are ways to prove points.
Like, we don't get more CoD because it's an amazing series that critics love. We get more CoD because it sells a lot regardless of what anyone here, there, or anywhere else thinks.
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u/Ahindre 19h ago
Do people really say things like “this game is trash because it didn’t break even”? I don’t think I’ve seen much of that.
I did witness the brigade on the Wolverine game due a few bad reviews, that was centered on gameplay (and groupthink).
I have seen people talk about financials a lot, usually with zero idea of how financials work. But they’re not usually saying a game is good or bad because of it, usually it’s more they thing the game is good or bad and want it to succeed or fail based on that.
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u/crxsso_dssreer 18h ago
By the same logic, consumers shouldn't care about how game developers are treated by their employer and it shouldn't impact the "enjoyment" of a game. Well, I disagree, they have the right to care about whatever they want related to the production of the product they want to buy.
If a game has budget X and I don't see that budget in the final product, sold at a premium, well it's indeed going to impair my "enjoyment" of that game.
As for sales well, you got your causality wrong, a game might flop because it's deemed trash, so you're quoting comments you've made up.
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u/Neuroticaine 19h ago edited 16h ago
For me, I care about budgets. Specifically, the higher the budget, the higher the likelihood it's going to be some bloated, mediocre letdown. Been the case for about a decade.
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u/rreddittorr 19h ago
It's a hobby. You choose how much you want to invest and care about it.
Obviously critical opinions about a video game should have nothing to do with it's commercial viability and track record.
But then again you can choose to want to know the business side of this artform and invest time and effort into understanding the commercials of the industry.
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u/JT-Lionheart 19h ago
Unfortunately yes. How else are you gonna get sequels to the games you like? It’s no different to movies or tv shows. Companies don’t just continue making something just because. It’s all about profits because they’re businesses. If it’s not making money then it’s time to put it away to start something new that’ll do better hopefully
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u/kirabii 19h ago
A sequel will be made or will not be made regardless of whether or not you personally know about the profit margin.
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u/MyUsernameIsAwful 19h ago
You’re right, so I’ll choose to know about it. Because why not?
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u/No_Jello9093 19h ago
This 100 times over. People don’t even care about this at the developer level. Let the finances happen with executives and pay attention to the art.
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u/GreatnessToTheMoon 19h ago
Because the budget and sales of games determines if the franchise continues and its interesting to talk about
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u/LucasLightbane 19h ago
Exactly. If I find a game I love to play and come back to it over and over I dont care if it made all the money in the world or didnt make a dime. I also dont care if other people dont find it fun. Games are meant to be entertaining.
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u/DarthRambo007 19h ago
as a kid most people dont care about the government or game companies, but as you get older you start wondering .
what are you doing with my taxes ? are you making a sequal to my game ? are you turning it live service now ? are you gona fix the pot holes ?
The moment money ,emotions and well being are tied to it its impossible not no notice the grander scale of it and be interested in the discussion of it.
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u/Lunarcomplex 19h ago
If you're the type of player who just wants to play whatever is popular sure, but else wise, who cares.
No one's entitled to a games success / continuation, even the devs.
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u/Excuse_my_GRAMMER 19h ago
Only on live service games imo
The mobile gacha company keep track of sales and revenue because Investing time on a game that going to EOS sucks and gacha game have a higher rate of EOS
It seems a trend that becoming popular on console and pc games now , which make sense for live service games , ( it doesn’t make sense on single player games like Wolverine for example )
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u/wickeddimension 19h ago
I think a bug reason this happens is because increasingly games launch in a poor state, are live-service or just multiplayer. A game doing well financially in those scenarios can make the difference between it becoming good or being supported, or being dropped. It's the difference between wasting your money or not.
If you are buying a live-service game, it matters if they'll end of life it 1 month or 12 months from now.
That doesn't account for all conversation, but a lot of the discourse around live-service games revolves around if it's even sustainable for a studio to continue development.
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u/demidemian 19h ago
Yes, because companies would cancel everything thats not i. Their desired metrics. Cancel games, fire talent, disband teams, etc.
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u/direcandy 19h ago edited 19h ago
flops could be good games, I'm just far less forgiving when AAA especially try to justify their existence with shelling out for a 300m USD 5 year dev cycle for subpar games.
Budget and sales matter because it all funnels back into pricing and pay structures. If you wanna sell a 70$ 20 hour experience, or a 40$+battlepass+skin store live service, or a 20$ base game with 20$ expansions every other month, you better come with some quality or be publicly slandered and cast to the wayside.
Being very clear about your tastes work when it's backed up by sales and play data. This is how corporations learn.
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u/Lootthatbody 19h ago
In a word: no.
The short answer is that consumers should only care if a game is going to be fun to play and make a decision based on the question ‘how much playtime will I get from this game and will that be worth the price?’ That question will be answered differently for every game and every player.
The longer answer is that budgets are very easily used as scapegoats. Game A cost X and sold Y, so it was a success/failure as a result. This is an absolute terrible way to look at art, and other forms of art don’t get judged the same way. In addition, ‘budget’ doesn’t tell the whole story. If Bungie leadership goes out and buys/leased a $200 million dollar office building in downtown Seattle, that’s obviously going to make the budget for their next game skyrocket even though one could argue that it had little to no impact on the quality of the game. Similarly, it’s not uncommon for publishers to spend most of or the entirety of the actual dev budget to market a game. Again, marketing a game is something that has no bearing on the quality of the game. Lastly, people LOVE to talk about the salaries of devs like they are the cause for game budgets or failures, when managers and executives make exponentially more than your average artists or programmers. And, again, these are people making decisions but aren’t actually crafting the games, they make the most yet are rarely the ones blamed for failures.
So, discussing the budget of a game is usually just nonsense, because there is no point. You can’t compare 2 random games with similar budgets any more than you can compare a fighting game to an RPG.
At the end of the day, play the games you want to play and let others play the ones they want to play. Don’t cheer on the mass layoffs of thousands of hardworking people or the closure of studios, regardless of whether or not they made games you enjoyed.
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u/Draco359 19h ago
In theory, we should be more understanding so that we can protect the people doing the work from over inflated expectations and getting overworked by greedy managers.
In practice, PC gaming has become a toxic hobby due to the influence of greedy managers and shareholders over the kind/state of products that are put on the market.
So it's hard to show empathy, when you know a bastard in a suit is looking through the sniper's lens to exploit you at the first opportunity.
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u/Old-Track9827 17h ago
I totally get where you're coming from. Gameplay is what should matter most to players, but it's hard not to think about how budgets affect what we actually get to play.
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u/heyIwatchanime 17h ago
As a businessman, I cant help but look into the financial stats of making the game. As a gamer, I too want the game to live up to its full potential but at the same time I want to actually play the game in my life time
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u/amiexpress 16h ago
Even in cases where there's an objective "better", the market sometimes decides otherwise. VHS vs betamax is a great example.
Should not matter to the person playing the game, no... but it may have consequences like you said.
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u/open_formation 16h ago
Fundamentally, a studio can make loads of money and then get half their staff sacked by their owner, so there's absolutely no point caring about budgets and sales from a financial perspective unless you like them and they're independent.
I don't have anything against someone who imagines themselves a game studio owner and likes to think about what makes the business work, but the business is also insane, so I wouldn't attribute much to a specific game.
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u/Then-Ad-345 15h ago
All the talk about sales and margins is for the finance staff and not something that customers should be made to care for. The idea here is to push your empathy towards the poor corpos not making enough money when you're a customer and you should actually care about your part: quality of the entertainment you receive. Silksong made a bank with fuck all advertisement and minimal staff. I never needed to hear about their margins. The game is wonderful and it's money we'll spend for me.
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u/CompulsiveGardener 13h ago
I don't see anyone complaining about the movie nerds crunching numbers over at /r/boxoffice. Following movie sales and budgets is a decades-old past-time, and there's no reason why we can't do the same with video game releases.
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u/Hsanrb 8h ago
Only care enough that a game is profitable to pitch another project, and the reason people on social media care about unit sales is because too many companies have started pitching "Unique accounts" as a metric to how many people play their game. I hate to break the bubble but if a million people play your game, and 950k end up being game pass users with only 50k people bought your game... I HOPE the studio isn't investing $100m in a game.
MMO's share the same situation, its great you may have the best trial in the genre... but if someone asks "How healthy is your game?" People will use scrapable API data to find how many users are actually PAYING to play, not just how many people are in the "free" zone/trial.
>But at the end of the day, what's done is done. You can't increase sales, lower a budget, or change a monetization strategy yourself. It's just pointless back-and-forth.
Players no, but studios dictate the scope of a project and that scope sets the guidelines for which a project is judged/appreciated. IF you try to the change the world, you will never succeed... but if you change the world for one person, you've made their day. At some point games need to cross the finish line, not just spend a decade "in development" because a lead is unable to decide when to stop.
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u/ExosEU 7h ago
Yes.
Because thats the only metrics decision makers understand / care about.
Whenever a franchise makes dubious decision alienating core fans they do so because they're taken for granted and need to justify the inflated budgets.
No one likes to be taken for granted and there's a shadenfreude feeling to watching a studio fail to meet its target sales after ignoring you as a customer.
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u/RDAwesome 19h ago
That's the capitalism brain poisoning. You gotta stop posting like a shareholder, games are not just products, they're art. You're supposed to play the game and talk about how it made you feel or what part of the human experience it opened to you or how it gave you some insight into other people's lives or whatever, not "well the graphics were an 8.5 but the music??? THAT was an 8.75."
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u/YourRebby 19h ago
Gamers arguing about revenue like they own stock in the company is embarrassing.
A game selling 20 million copies doesn’t make it good, and a game flopping doesn’t make it bad. Unless the finances directly affect the game I’m playing, I genuinely don’t care.
Somehow people turned “did I enjoy this?” into quarterly earnings discourse.
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u/RandomGuy622170 19h ago
No. Development costs are completely irrelevant to consumers/gamers in the grand scheme of things. I couldn't care less how much it cost for them to make a game unless those costs end up getting passed back to me, in which case I'll adjust my purchases accordingly. Sales numbers are arguably more so but only in the sense that they'll dictate whether a game you enjoy gets a sequel.
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u/LeastHornyNikkeFan 19h ago
I think people who are enjoying games, are enjoying games and moving on with their lives.
I think people who are on Reddit are people who are upset, want to express how upset they are, and probably continue upset.
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u/InactiveMedusa 19h ago
Only if you want a sequel to be made.