And certainly, the benefits Days Gone receives by having a massively expanded player base are limited by the game's lack of paid DLC or further monetization offerings.īut that's because Days Gone, like much of Sony's lineup, is a relic of a bygone era in the industry.
DAYS GONE JUST DOING MY JOB FULL
Granted, a full price day one purchase would have helped the game more than a player downloading it when it was added to PS Plus.
DAYS GONE JUST DOING MY JOB PLUS
It wouldn't have put it in there, or even made free games a part of PS Plus in the first place, if it didn't. Garvin may not see the value in Days Gone being downloaded and played through PS Plus, but you can bet Sony does. That's why Roblox's first day of public trading put its valuation at $38 billion even though it has likewise been around for 17 years losing money literally the entire time. That's partly why Unity's IPO valued it at $13.7 billion even though the company had lost money every single quarter of its existence dating all the way back to 2004. It's a lot easier to get money next quarter from a customer you see every day than it is to get it from a customer who already paid you $60 for a game they played once and bounced off of. If they have enough people using their products and positive momentum in growing that base, they don't even sweat minor details like profitability. It's not just sales that companies will downplay in favor of engagement. "It's a lot easier to get money next quarter from a customer you see every day than it is to get it from a customer who already paid you $60 for a game they played once and bounced off of" Activision stopped reporting World of Warcraft the following month, saying it was pushing to a "year-round engagement model" that put more emphasis on those metrics than sales figures.Īnd while it's easy to see those moves as companies not wanting to be transparent with numbers that were on the decline at the time, there's a convincing argument in a games-as-a-service world that they're right, and they have generally been consistent with emphasizing engagement since then, even when it dips. It's been six years since Microsoft stopped reporting console sales figures, explaining that engagement metrics were a more effective way to measure the company's performance. You don't have to look very far to figure out that engagement is the defining metric of the era, sometimes even moreso than the numbers we would normally associate with success. I can't tell you how many times I've seen gamers say, 'Yeah, I got that on sale, I got it through PS Plus, or whatever.'" - Days Gone director John Garvin, speaking with David Jaffe on the latter's Gabbin + Games YouTube show, when asked whether the game being added as one of the monthly giveaways for PlayStation Plus subscribers resulted in an engagement spike.įor the record, Garvin was right about the reactions his comment would get, whether it was for the illogic (How is a person supposed to love a game before they buy and play it?), the sense of entitlement, or the derision aimed at people who maybe can't afford to buy every AAA game they're interested in at full price or simply weren't won over by pre-launch marketing.īut I'm not including it here for those reasons so much as to emphasize how out of step this view is with the industry today. If you love a game, buy it at fucking full price. QUOTE | "I do have an opinion on something that your audience might find of interest, and it might piss some of them off. Here's the quote you might have seen thrown around. I know the column is " This Week in Business," but let's start with something that technically happened last week, even if the Discourse around it didn't really kick up until a few days ago after it was covered by VGC.
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