Speaking of profit... (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Monday, November 04, 2019, 13:21 (1643 days ago) @ Claude Errera

Even if Bungie were entirely conscientious and transparent on those figures, the upshot would still be, depending on how they assign costs, that merch subsidizes the game and incentivizes the production of more merch and disencentivizes the less profitable work of... you know, making the game... even with some taken off the top for charity.

Again, I think this is wrong. We can't definitively settle this, because neither of us has access to Bungie's books, but my conversations with people involved suggest that you're incorrect, that the merch sold in the store does NOT subsidize the game (this is different from the merch sold by Eververse, which DOES subsidize the game), and that there is no disincentivization (not a word) for game development because there's almost no link between the two groups. (The money the store makes runs the store. Additional money goes to charity.)

Not saying they do this now, or suggesting that anything in the charity is not above board-- just that someone seeing inflows and outflows could potentially decide it would be advantageous to do it. If Bungie takes no artist costs for those items, that's good! But they likely could if they wanted to, and as far as I can see I'm not even sure those things would show up on a 990 form.

And again, the jumping off point for this thread was the sword, but I was pushing the idea that those items aren't that problematic in and of themselves, but they exist on a spectrum that leads towards depending more heavily on non-game items for revenue, should they choose to do so.

Eververse is way, way more problematic, and if they were to draw a line that says "yeah, we'll do replicas for charity but we're going to close Eververse" I wouldn't really have anything to complain about.

With Eververse persisting I think it's a reasonable worry that its model starts to apply to other items.