To build things you also need a lot of people with education, know how and experience. You cant just bring low-wage workforce and expect to compete with China.
Let alone that to provide same quality of living to average chinese worker as they have in China their salary in US will have to grow 5-6 times.
This just doesnt work. The days when the same line producing cars can be turned into production of tanks has long been gone.
Basically the same manufacruting line cant be even used to build cars on different platform than intended.
Example: a lot of car manufacturers have left Russia in 2022 and most of capacity used for cars is just stay rotting. Even used facilities are only utilized for semi-knocked down assembly.
This is basically almost public information: 25% cut on earnings between $10 million and $50 million.
Yet most likely very big share of sales is well below $10 let alone $15 due to sales and regional pricing.
So yeah I doubt numbers anywhere close to those adverised.
> Generally, the Steam cut is considered “fair” for Indy devs. The benefits of steam (discoverability, massive audience) generate more sales. My Indy dev friends are not upset about the steam cut at all.
Steam no longer provide any discoverability on its own unless you either bring your own community ftom outside or spend $10,000-100,000 on marketing to gain wishlists.
If you're small 2-10 people indie gamedev studio and have external funding Valve will earn more from your game than you.
This. As game developer this is a huge problem since outside of top 1% industry is shit poor and platforms squeeze it badly.
Unfortunely needs of game developers and customers are not exactly align. Valve is good steward of their outsized market share when it's comes to gamers interests.
Epic Games tried to shake market with "gamers dont matter" policy (no reviews, no community, worse services) and low fees and failed miserably.
As game developer I'd love to see platform fee of 10%, but as gamer I dont want to buy my games and give power to Tencent, Microsoft or Google.
I could only dream that customer-first platform not owned by VC / PE money like GOG could compete with Steam. Unfortunately unlikely to happen.
IMO Cyberpunk is fundamentally not the game their marketing promissed. They marketed it as actually non-linear RPG and beyond very beginning of the game they just could't deliver on it.
After tons of patches and DLCs its just became a very very good game. Just not what was promissed.
Yet those niche nolife hardcore fans is exactly what makes or breaks games. If 10,000 unhappy hardcore fans will go around pouring shit on your game and company then you likely never get 1,000,000 players who could've potentially liked it.
Nolife hardcore fans will also be the the first to buy your game, review it and tell everyone if they did not liked it.
CDPR got huge amount of trust after Witcher 3 and they mostly had to start over after CP2077 release.
EA can survive if 4/10 of their games flops completely, but company like CDPR will likely just end there.
Pre orders are _for that game_ so they count as success for that game, and also may people were still buying it bugs and all. I reckon without Witcher 3 cash flow they’d have survived still anyway, it may not have even been as big a factor as you think.
Valve started to invest in Linux and open source 10 years before releasing Steam Deck. They started hiring OSS developers back in 2012 and Deck released in 2022:
Let alone that to provide same quality of living to average chinese worker as they have in China their salary in US will have to grow 5-6 times.
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