Vidya Games Thread

[CalciumAnimal]

The best of steam page linked earlier was for 2024 profits. While we don't know the exact order of most to least on that list, Destiny 2 was in the "Platinum" category, meaning it grossed more than any game in the gold category through Steam.

Let's take a game released in 2024, in the gold category, and see if there's any reports on how many it sold. Enshrouded fits this criteria, released 1/24/24, in gold category, and has reports on how many copies it sold.

By the end of 2024, it hit over 3 million copies sold with a price of $30. Sales*price puts that at $90 million for 2024, and they were still beat by Destiny 2 in revenue through Steam for 2024.

If the Steam best of 2024 was lifetime revenue there would definitely be other live service games in plat above Enshrouded, or even push it down into silver.

The other games in plat make sense. ER had it's DLC release, Palworld and Helldivers hit massive popularity early in the year.


Elden Ring is reported to have sold 30 million copies to current day, it has 763k steam reviews, and had an all time player peak of 952k. Black Myth Wukong is reported to have sold 25 million copies, it has 866k steam reviews, and had an all time player peak of 2.4m. Comparing it the stats of a game that did undeniably well makes the 25 mil sales figures of JUST copies of the game believable. You are reading a lot into them mentioning merch sales are also going good, thinking that is included in the games sales figures they are touting.

Live service games that reach any level of success make money hand over fist. Why do you think companies keep trying to launch their own success? Sure a lot bomb, but if the ones still alive were losing money, they'd be shutdown, like all of the bombed games did.

Didin't helldivers have that massive exodus that cratered it because of whichever company fucking with accounts? i know it recovered to a degree but still worth mentioning. Same with Palworld over the lawsuit (because people are stupid) that said i was not aware of the tiering system if that's true then that's good enough to convince me.

As for why company's do thing.

Why do companies do anything half the time they self sabotage just to keep us guessing. (yes I'm still mad about hi fi rush)

 

[UberSoldat]

Came across this documentary for Abuse from a no-name channel. Pretty cool stuff, I hope he makes more.

 

[RestlessRain]

Didin't helldivers have that massive exodus that cratered it because of whichever company fucking with accounts? i know it recovered to a degree but still worth mentioning. Same with Palworld over the lawsuit (because people are stupid) that said i was not aware of the tiering system if that's true then that's good enough to convince me.

As for why company's do thing.

Why do companies do anything half the time they self sabotage just to keep us guessing. (yes I'm still mad about hi fi rush)

Palworld sold 15m copies in it's first month, and has sold 32m copies since launch. Palworld's usage stats looks like that of any other successful single-player RPG - lots of hype at release, people got what they wanted out of it with different amounts of playtime, and then left to play other games once they were done (and they occasionally come back when a major new update releases). if the lawsuit has done anything, it's made more people want to purchase the game.

I'm not seeing any evidence of an exodus of players for Palworld.

 

[Punished Anime Discusser]

No that's what I did to estimate how much Destiny 2 made THIS YEAR. about 3 Mil though i fully admit that number is all but made up from nothing but guesstimating.

AS for Wukong that's 25Milion total sold I'm trying to figure out how much they made this year which is where my number came from. If i had to estimate their total profits including merch sales and shit like that then yeah it's nearly a billion or more. Which is another reason i find BMW suspect all the reports on it i can find are seemingly including the toys and other shitty merch as part of the games sales?

Alright you rock chewing homonculus, let's do math.

Destiny 2 Stats, Leaderboards & More! - Destiny Tracker

Destiny 2 Stats! Check your profile and weapon statistics. View the top Destiny 2 players on our leaderboards and how you perform by comparison.

destinytracker.com

This is Destiny Tracker.
Destiny.
Tracker.
It tracks Destiny.
It pulls data straight from the game's API, and uses unique accounts accessing the API to put out a number of unique daily logins across all platforms.

335.2k players booted up the game yesterday and played at least one PVP match
416.7k players booted up the game and played at least one PVE activity
Now, I assume the site doesn't account for people who played both a PVP and PVE match, and counts them in both.
As PVP is significantly less popular than PVE, let's say I take a third of the PVP player count to assume that as "people who only did some PVP before logging off", and add them to the PVE player count.

111.7k PVP-onlys
416.7k PVE players
528.4k total, let's say
Let's pretend the people playing only bought the most recent expansion with seasons, never bought any microtransactions, and they all bought it on sale, and let's shave $10 off so we can pretend there's any kind of science to this and account for purely f2p players.
So $70 flat. Price of a AAA game today.

528.4k x 70 = 39.9something million
40 million, not accounting for fresh people buying old expansions, microtransactions, and assuming every copy was sold on sale, during a basically dead period in the game where there's only filler content before the next expansion.

OK, well, very bad numbers, no good at all, it's all over for Bungie this time.

Dante53's R6: Siege Match History - Destiny Tracker

Rainbow Six Siege Stats! Check your profile and match history. View the top Rainbow Six players on our leaderboards and how you perform by comparison.

web.archive.org

Wayback machine to a week after the latest expansion came out.

Using the same bullshit that means nothing, we come out to about.
1.964 million unique daily players
It's a week after release, there's no fucking sale (for the sake of integrity, that is, CD keys were already 20% off before release)
but muh f2ps so $10 off
$90
1 964 000 x $90 = 176 760 000

No bueno, it's still all over, that's why they only announced 4 new Destiny expansions for the next couple years.

Microtransactions Made Up 58% of PC Game Revenue in 2024, Research Shows

It's not your imagination: Microtransactions are the primary driver for PC games to make money due to the popularity of Fortnite, Roblox and Call of Duty.

www.cnet.com

A cnet article, about microtransactions.
In 2024 Microtransactions made up 58% of PC revenue and 32% of console revenue.

This literally means nothing and I'm slamming two unrelated numbers together, and this means nothing because it's not like whales are limited to spending less money a year than the base cost of the game, especially considering a single skin pack in Destiny 2 is like $16-$25 and I see them all the time, but the median of those two numbers is 45%.

So let's say that's another
79 542 000
in microtransactions, even though we both know it's way more cause people are retarded and will spend $20 extra on a Stars War skin, per character, for three characters

$256 302 000
Theoretical whatever the fuck, 20% store cut for this made up number and it's around 205 million, I don't give a fuck anymore.

a year for a game that doesn't need to be built from the ground up, doesn't pay a cut to an outside studio for using their engine, doesn't need a AAAA marketing push every year, isn't working on AAAA fidelity standards, and is focused on putting out smaller releases of extremely replayable content.

For the purposes keeping Destiny and probably Marathon running and updated, that is infinite money.

You know who wishes they could make a theoretical (still a massive lowball, probably in the ballpark of 350 million after the stores take their cut, if not more) $256 million dollars a year pushing relatively low development cost but long player retention time content?

Almost any gacha game that isn't run by MiHoyo.

Go out with honor. I failed math in high school.

 

[CalciumAnimal]

Alright you rock chewing homonculus, let's do math.

Destiny 2 Stats, Leaderboards & More! - Destiny Tracker

Destiny 2 Stats! Check your profile and weapon statistics. View the top Destiny 2 players on our leaderboards and how you perform by comparison.

destinytracker.com

This is Destiny Tracker.
Destiny.
Tracker.
It tracks Destiny.
It pulls data straight from the game's API, and uses unique accounts accessing the API to put out a number of unique daily logins across all platforms.
View attachment 98859
335.2k players booted up the game yesterday and played at least one PVP match
416.7k players booted up the game and played at least one PVE activity
Now, I assume the site doesn't account for people who played both a PVP and PVE match, and counts them in both.
As PVP is significantly less popular than PVE, let's say I take a third of the PVP player count to assume that as "people who only did some PVP before logging off", and add them to the PVE player count.

111.7k PVP-onlys
416.7k PVE players
528.4k total, let's say
Let's pretend the people playing only bought the most recent expansion with seasons, never bought any microtransactions, and they all bought it on sale, and let's shave $10 off so we can pretend there's any kind of science to this and account for purely f2p players.
So $70 flat. Price of a AAA game today.

528.4k x 70 = 39.9something million
40 million, not accounting for fresh people buying old expansions, microtransactions, and assuming every copy was sold on sale, during a basically dead period in the game where there's only filler content before the next expansion.

OK, well, very bad numbers, no good at all, it's all over for Bungie this time.

Dante53's R6: Siege Match History - Destiny Tracker

Rainbow Six Siege Stats! Check your profile and match history. View the top Rainbow Six players on our leaderboards and how you perform by comparison.

web.archive.org

View attachment 98860
Wayback machine to a week after the latest expansion came out.

Using the same bullshit that means nothing, we come out to about.
1.964 million unique daily players
It's a week after release, there's no fucking sale (for the sake of integrity, that is, CD keys were already 20% off before release)
but muh f2ps so $10 off
$90
1 964 000 x $90 = 176 760 000

No bueno, it's still all over, that's why they only announced 4 new Destiny expansions for the next couple years.

Microtransactions Made Up 58% of PC Game Revenue in 2024, Research Shows

It's not your imagination: Microtransactions are the primary driver for PC games to make money due to the popularity of Fortnite, Roblox and Call of Duty.

www.cnet.com

A cnet article, about microtransactions.
In 2024 Microtransactions made up 58% of PC revenue and 32% of console revenue.

This literally means nothing and I'm slamming two unrelated numbers together, and this means nothing because it's not like whales are limited to spending less money a year than the base cost of the game, especially considering a single skin pack in Destiny 2 is like $16-$25 and I see them all the time, but the median of those two numbers is 45%.

So let's say that's another
79 542 000
in microtransactions, even though we both know it's way more cause people are retarded and will spend $20 extra on a Stars War skin, per character, for three characters

$256 302 000
Theoretical whatever the fuck, 20% store cut for this made up number and it's around 205 million, I don't give a fuck anymore.

a year for a game that doesn't need to be built from the ground up, doesn't pay a cut to an outside studio for using their engine, doesn't need a AAAA marketing push every year, isn't working on AAAA fidelity standards, and is focused on putting out smaller releases of extremely replayable content.

For the purposes keeping Destiny and probably Marathon running and updated, that is infinite money.

You know who wishes they could make a theoretical (still a massive lowball, probably in the ballpark of 350 million after the stores take their cut, if not more) $256 million dollars a year pushing relatively low development cost but long player retention time content?

Almost any gacha game that isn't run by MiHoyo.

Go out with honor. I failed math in high school.

where's my PowerPoint PDF!

 

[God's Strongest Dragoon]

If the Steam best of 2024 was lifetime revenue there would definitely be other live service games in plat above Enshrouded, or even push it down into silver.

The other games in plat make sense. ER had it's DLC release, Palworld and Helldivers hit massive popularity early in the year.

A good example is that Cyberpunk 2077 is in Gold tier for 2024 while Phantom Liberty released in 2023. Meanwhile Space Marine 2 is in Platinum. If this chart was lifetime, there is no way Space Marine 2 would ever be on a higher tier than Cyberpunk 2077. Space Marine 2 did well but it has nothing on the money printing Cyberpunk 2077 did, especially with the Phantom Liberty expansion to further pump up its numbers.

 

[Speech To Text]

I think they'd be better off making all of the D2 content cheaper or rolling it into one $30-ish purchase, and making the new player experience faster, and not terrible. Cause they'd lose a lot of the more hardcore players if everyone had to lose all of their stuff and characters they've spent years and years playing.

While they aren't currently fixing the new player experience, Bungie did bundle everything prior to the current expansion into one purchase called the legacy collection. They tend to do tons of sales on the old stuff too including making that collection around $30 a few weeks ago.

Nobody will convince me Destiny is a real game with real fans and not an elaborate prank played on FPS and MMO Yamanbacattle

As the resident Destiny 2 addict I'll say the game basically survives off how good the gunplay feels and the PVE content.

 

[PleaseCheckYourReceipts]

With live service games, you can normally assume at least $45USD per activated user, per year. (At least I think that's the number I'd seen floating around for an industry estimate in general.) And that's for F2P games, which is why they always want volume and have those Whale Packages they sell. Destiny is in a weird space, because they're probably selling 5 million copies of the expansion each cycle (around 200mil in revenue before costs) as well as some multiple on top per User via the store. With their playerbase being relatively tied to the expansion cycle, my assumption is that they make about double per user from in-game sales as the expansion price, per year.

It puts their yearly returns between 400 and 600 million USD. Not bad, frankly, but it's likely their costs that are killing them. When acquired by Sony, they apparently had nearly 3x the staff as the entirety of Valve. Or, more pertinently, well over 2x the staff as Digital Extremes, Warframe's developer and their chief competition. And DE has an entire second game closer to real release than Bungie.

I think there's a reason so many of the Sony Live Service games have been trying to follow the Bungie/Overwatch model for buy in. You get the absolutely baseline of paid-for cost, then you get to double dip with in-game payments that stack up. But you have to sell the game, first, to make that work.