Uh, what? (Gaming)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Thursday, April 07, 2016, 00:46 (2941 days ago) @ Cody Miller

A failure for a large company is less costly than a failure for an indie studio.

In the sense that a large company can survive the hit, sure.

But consider on a project by project level: investors are usually more willing to take a risk when there's less money on the table, regardless of whether the company is big and will survive or not.

I know someone who has worked at lots of small medical startups. An enormous fraction of those companies appear out of nowhere with some interesting research pitch, do the research, and then dissolve and sell off their patents and whatnot if they don't get far enough to establish future profitability (i.e. produce a very marketable product). Occasionally one succeeds, and the investors get a huge return, and when they fail, well, some of the money comes back and it often wasn't a huge loss.

After all, with that there is zero need to make a profit.

If a kickstarter game breaks even, that implies that the developer was actually underwater for a while until a certain time after launch. An independent developer can't live a smooth survival off of non-profitable products. Unless the dev starts off with a lot of capital and can cushion the instability, they absolutely need to make some degree of profit.