It's like selling your product at Costco instead of Walmart. Costco will rent you the space to sell it for a certain amount of time and you are gambling on the fact that you'll make more revenue than the rental cost you, Walmart buys your product and sells it for more. Hell, Walmart even pays for exclusive products as well so the example truly fits. It doesn't prevent companies from selling other products at Costco, but it gives them a guaranteed income from one source.

[–] dragonfucker@lemmy.nz -3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oh, so only indie games should be exclusives, then. Not games like Control 2.

[–] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The analogy I used makes more sense with indie games because I'm talking about having a job (small scale), but the same logic applies to companies.

A company like Lockheed Martin will do R&D to come up with new engines and hope to recoup their cost by selling the technology later on, they'll also sign governmental contracts with guaranteed payments as the project moves forward. You need a mix of both.

[–] dragonfucker@lemmy.nz -3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If a company makes bad games, they should go out of business and their developers should work for better companies.

Remedy doesn't need to worry about that, because they make good games.

[–] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's the thing though, you can make an excellent game and never recoup your cost just because you didn't get the luck of the draw.

Do you know how many games released on Steam this year? 18k. How many did you hear about? How many were successful? How many were good but didn't get the coverage they needed? Hell, sometimes you have indie games that will suddenly become successful years down the road. It's. Just. Gambling.

Even for a well established company, sometimes one in the hand is worth two in the bush.

We see big studios that made successful games going bankrupt every year, don't you think a studio like that would have loved to have an income guarantee so they could finish their next project instead of closing their doors?

[–] dragonfucker@lemmy.nz -2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If they want to be guaranteed to be able to operate, they should join the communist movement. Monopolistic capitalist business practices aren't the way to go. If we're having a capitalist market, it had better be a free market, which is to say one with sufficient consumer protections so that customers can make free choices about who to give their money to for a certain product.

[–] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oh so a free market where companies can decide to sign exclusivity contracts isn't ok but a free market where everything is released on the platform that you like is ok.

Sufficient consumer protection would see Valve being broken apart as a preventive measures because they're in a position where they can sway the market any way they want and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Funny how you guys never talk about their monopolistic position in the market, right?