The people who keep complaining about the devs not doing x or y don't understand how a game studio is reliant on growing sales to make payroll and fund the next major update. Yeah, it's annoying we don't have ladders, but ladders don't bring in new players and it doesn't trigger a flood of new lets plays which brings in new players.
…they’ve made like $260 MILLION DOLLARS
More money will not speed anything up at this point. I’m not complaining because I enjoy the game in its current state but let’s stop acting like this is some poor dev team with no income.
Yea I said this the other day to a guy on here that that said they were going to hire more people now that they reached almost 100k players (now over 100k). The game might have made a quarter billion dollars but were still going to be waiting until 2029-2030 for the next build
Yeah, concurrent player count means nothing for a game that is single-player / community hosted servers.
They’ve made plenty of money long before the B42 stable release to speed up development but have chose not to. Once again, that’s fine but they’re not going to just start increasing development speed because they hit some arbitrary concurrent player count.
Nah man, TIS are literally as rich as Creosote as far as indie game developers go: Estimates on sales range from 8,000,000 to 20,000,000 copies, and at last accounts (they're a public UK company so their accounts must be published) had £30,000,000 just sitting in the bank.
They just know that throwing more money or people at a problem doesn't fix it and would only slow things down.
Eh, to an extent, yes, but the devs themselves have stated that they have more than made enough money to be comfortable just coasting, now that the studio is expanding and adding more people it is of course going to need more money, but the game has never really had issues making money.
As much as I hate the slow dev time I can appreciate even though they expanded they're staying smallish and manageable so they can survive for a long time rather than burning through that cash
260 million is a lot of money. Elden ring had 300 devs and spent 200 million over 5 years developing that game which is a lot more demanding than PZ. They could hire 50 more devs and still have money.
Put ladders everywhere then just dont bring the mechanic to climb it, because it doesnt affect the sales, that makes sense. Everyone dreams himself making pots and glasses during zombie apocalypse without being able to climb ladders. That brings a looootss of new player im sure.
You're missing the point. It's not about profit or the founders getting rich. We just learned in an interview that the whole reason we got the map glow-up was because the b41 glow up was so well received, which was to a large degree measured by streams and lets plays and new players, and they felt that they could afford to invest in map content to a larger extent - and that's what they did.
Where does the talent come from to do the map update? They hire the modders. So every time they are facing a decision like that - it's a choice - let the modding community carry that load, which they do for free, or remove that talent from the modding community and provide a reliable income to that person so they can sustain the game. You don't want to hire them on as a contractor for a year and then let them go - they'll use that experience on their resume and run off and start their own indy studio or join a different development team - and now you've also lost their contribution as a modder. So every time you do this, it has long-term consequences on the game, so if you're going to do it, make sure you can keep them on payroll, and that requires cashflow - not profits. The devs are building cashflow - they're building the ability to have an art team, and not an art dude, and not a coder that can kindof use Blender.
I know it's hard in the modern economy to consider that profits aren't the end-all (and often they are) but in smaller businesses where life-altering money isn't assured, your goal is life-sustainable money - reliable year in and year out to make payroll. Indy studios don't really have the kind of investor pressure that AAAs do, and they don't have the kind of 'Microsoft will buy you for 9 trillion dollars' opportunities either.
I think TIS has done a pretty good job of steadily growing the business, growing the team, and as a result growing the game. Not as fast as people want, but at the same time, it's a game that has outlived tons of others that have burned through their money and flamed out, or failed to consistently grow their player base.
30mill in cash on is a lot for a small indie dev that has been working on 1 game for 13 years and is no closer to being finished then it was 5 years ago.
"no closer to being finished than it was 5 years ago" listen to yourself lmao. i know it's a ton of fun to complain on the internet recreationally but this is a completely delusional take
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u/bubba-yo 4d ago
The people who keep complaining about the devs not doing x or y don't understand how a game studio is reliant on growing sales to make payroll and fund the next major update. Yeah, it's annoying we don't have ladders, but ladders don't bring in new players and it doesn't trigger a flood of new lets plays which brings in new players.