You’re conflating a number of points.
First – evangelists will not be identified for good sport design sense or enterprise sense. They’re identified for his or her deep religion and love for the thing of their beliefs, a lot in order that it drives them to evangelise. They have a tendency to take a position based mostly on their very own emotions and projecting these values onto the participant base at massive, moderately than gathering information and drawing conclusions from that. Trusting their judgement on choices in fields they aren’t expert in based mostly on their emotions moderately than collected information is unwise.
Second – all video games are sinking ships. The speed at which they sink will depend on a number of key parts: the advertising spend to draw new and lapsed gamers, and a gradual stream of latest content material to maintain the brand new, returning, and present gamers. However each sport is sinking as a result of their gamers develop and alter over time. Some end faculty and get jobs, some begin households, some stop to play different video games, some drift other than their buddy teams and cease taking part in. Each sport’s days are numbered. Because of this publishers maintain pushing new ones – they should keep afloat, and all of their present breadwinners are all sinking at varied charges of decay. Which means publishers are all the time looking out for a brand new large winner to maintain issues going.
Third – We all know that not all video games might be profitable. This has all the time been the case. A few of us are sufficiently old to recollect the time period “shovelware” as a very good instance of this. The present way of life sport establishment is much more sustainable than the outdated days, the place a nasty launch meant fast layoffs and studio closures had been way more commonplace.
The massive takeaway right here is that large failures are horrible for everyone concerned, however a single large success can maintain an organization for a protracted, very long time – for much longer than within the outdated days. Small successes don’t earn as a lot or final so long as large ones, which is why publishers are betting large. As Charlie Munger mentioned, “Present me the inducement and I’ll present you the result”. The present scenario incentivizes long-term way of life video games, which is why we maintain constructing them.
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