Thread 716003552

It was actually profitable.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/106506/machinegames-financials-reveals-indiana-jones-developer-has-6-profit-margin/index.html

>Spend a decade and risk losing almost a billion dollars to make 2.6 million
>These are people who are supposed to be very good at business and do it for a living

quite frankly, the thing i enjoy most about games is how much money they make.

oy vey how will they afford a third yacht with profits like that?

So the sequel in 2040 might make $4M, if they play their cards right? Wow!

a 6% profit margin for one year doesn't include the 3 years prior to release they spent developing it

>>716003552 (OP)
>6%
Just leaving it in bank does the same...

Adjusted for inflation? Taking into account base opportunity cost (i.e. interest on just having the cash)?

>>716003552 (OP)
>6%
People are done with jew revenge fantasies.

>>716003731
>>716003869
>>716003949
>>716004206
>>716004306
>nooooooo it was WOKE how could this be happening??? Is my narrative falling apart!?! It was supposed to FLOP! People love nazis now!!
Lol you incel freaks getting brought back down to reality is delicious

>>716004206
>Just leaving it in bank does the same...
What bank account is earning 6% interest?

>>716003552 (OP)
should have been third person

>>716003731
>>716004478
They still have to pay for jannies, Terrain, devs and the rest of the workforce every month
Not as expensive as In California

>>716004478
I played it and liked it, did the $1 game pass thing. But machine games is retarded, this shit took way too long, from a business point of view. But Microsoft lets every dev they work with be total retards, I guess I can't blame them.

>>716004524
Over 10 years? Quite a few

>>716003552 (OP)
Didn't it sell a lot on the PS5?
Xbox is actually accomplishing something when porting games.

>>716003552 (OP)
>Indiana Jones was released in December 2024, so it is unclear what proportion of game sales is included here, but also remember that the game launched into Xbox Game Pass.
This article tells us less than nothing.

6% profit. After it's been out all this time. AAA game development is either a joke or it's really playing the long game. Not many game studios can last that long until they gain profitability unless they have a war chest to survive on until they make it or a very extensive back catalog that keeps selling.

>>716003731
VFX industry has similar, very low profit margins because they need to employ hundreds of people and massive renderfarms.
However, they don't work on a single project for years either but turnover is quick, 3-6 months in many cases.

>>716003552 (OP)
>6%
DAMN THEY OWNED THE CHUDS LOL

>>716004524
Isn't that something like 0 point 2 percent interest quarterly?
My ETF got 8% in 6 months...

So it had a budget of 44 million and made 46 million? That's pretty goofy.

indy has been dead ip for ages but at least it was only dragged out with one movie unlike star wars

>>716003731
>>716006979
>>716007048
Microsoft will likely never release data on how many subscribed to Game Pass just for Indiana Jones. Game Pass must still be profitable.

>>716003552 (OP)
I wonder how much of the budget went into paying for the license.

>>716004759
>But Microsoft lets every dev they work with be total retards, I guess I can't blame them.

Many were up in arms over recent layoffs, but ignore the fact at least three of the studios had games in development for at least five years. One was in pre-production over a decade. They barely released anything on the games.

>>716007379
The Star Wars movies still made money through enough nostalgia, though it killed toy sales. The Indy movie was a $130,000,000 loss.

>>716007393
>Microsoft will likely never release data on how many subscribed to Game Pass just for Indiana Jones.
lol of course they won's because that just begs the questions of how many that subbed just for indiana jones, how many played and finished it? how many played even 10/20/50% of the game? how many cancelled after playing any amount of the game?

I remember Hi-Fi Rush.

>>716007048
aaa is a massive joke, especially since 2020 when cyberpunk started the dear gamers apology twitter images.

>>716007757
After Wolfenstein II, I'm surprised MachineGames is still around and were able to make Wolfenstein Youngblood and Cyberpilot.

>>716003731
>get paid $100k salary for 4 years
>ownership can afford to pay me $400k + employment taxes + benefits and still have money left over
6% margin sounds pretty good to me

>>716003552 (OP)
Pretty nice take home for investors

>>716003731
you're going to be in for a shock to find out 99% of companies are actually not profitable

>>716003552 (OP)
And then they're going to lose all that profit by making the next wolfenstein game

>>716003552 (OP)
Is the game good?

>>716008531
Apparently it's pretty decent, it's not assassins creed where you get into straight fights, your an old archeologist after all so you gotta worry more about stealth and solving environmental puzzles.

>6% margin
>good
lmao, might as well just shut the studio down and put it all into bonds for literally no risk. what a massive flop.

>>716003552 (OP)
It was a good game.

>>716007048
>>716007852
it doesn't help Indiana jones have been a forgotten franchise only remembered by late millennials and gen x nerds. they had a stinker of a film in 2007 and it never had the prequal treatment where nerd try to say it was good the whole time, the latest movie is just watching a sad old man move around with a woman no one cares about that they trying to make the new indiana jones or some shit

>>716009813
>it never had the prequal treatment

>>716010110
i mean by having retarded rediters and zoomers think it was some hidden work of art

theres no way thats enough to even pay employees, just did a 50k x 100 employees, x 3 years analaysis at most, and thats 2x the amount they made

>>716008143
Good for you and me, but not for studios with publishers which in turn have investors to fellate, and those wont be happy with less than 200% return.

jews will still fund it because muh nazis

>>716008143
>>716012178
not good for you actually. they didn't even beat inflation. which meant they lost money. which means that studio has to gut staff / gets shut down. which means gaming overall moves towards even more MTX.

6% is turboshit margin and doesn't even begin to fund business risks mitigation and contingencies. they could've done better if they just shut down the studio and put all the money into bonds instead and came ahead lmao.

you guys should really brush up your buisness 101.

>>716011018
I don't know, Indy losing his virginity to young Elizabeth Hurley is pretty masterful writing.

>heh, x woke game didnt make any profit i bet
>ok it made a profit, but it isn't enough of a profit
Chuddies always move the goalpost when they lose, which is 99% of the time.

>>716007757
>jeff grubb said

>>716010110
How the fuck do you not want to be a 95 year old one-eyed Indy rolling around in a monster truck telling stories about WW1 while trolling the locals and shit

Anyone who thinks 6% is a good profit margin has to be underaged or living off of the bank of mom & dad in their 40s

>>716012631
media uses hollywood accounting where they fraud their expenses way up so they never make money on paper so they never pay taxes

flop after flop. nice one microdei

>>716007757
I don't understand why Microsoft lies in such obvious ways.

>>716015063
They didn't lie. That was the idea back when that article was written. But then things happened (Read, Activision acquisition), and the board changed plans.

>>716003552 (OP)
>Net Sales- 428.483 million SEK ($44.325 million)
>Operating Expenses -401.470 million SEK ($41.53 million)
>Net Profit - 26.07 million SEK ($2.679 million)

oof... 2.6 mil is a rounding error when it comes to big companies like zenimax/microsoft. and that's with them surely playing around with numbers to keep it a positive number.
game companies are supposed to put up strong numbers in years they release a title to offset, you know, all those years they don't release anything...

>>716015710
You don't close don't profitable things, and the Activision acquisition wasn't something that randomly happened overnight.

>>716009813
the latest movie is just disney grasping at straws and harrison ford only signing onto the movie so he can finally be killed off and rid of the character, just like he did with han solo.

>>716016420
2.6m is really good according to redditors and the skg crowd here

>Make a profit
>Complain because its not big enough
>Make a big profit
>Still complain its not big enough
I hate capitalism

>>716018506
If you didn't beat inflation you didn't make a profit

is that enough profit to not be deleted by ms in their next round of inevitable cuts?

>>716018638
>Beat inflation
>Still complain its not enough

>>716018506
That's not making a profit money, that's parking your cash at the bank and sitting at home doing nothing money.
>I hate capitalism
If your system involves a bunch of highly educated and trained people spending years without achieving anything, it's shit and people will starve. Profit means that something works.
Walking 300 miles, filling up a bottle of water, walking back and selling it for $1? Not profitable. You know why? Because doing that would be retarded, and it would be a waste of human effort.

>>716008143
>>716012178
>>716012631
Note that OP's pic said MACHINEGAMES made 6 percent. Not that MS made it. Look at revenue from the game. There's NO way they even made 50 percent of dev costs.

>>716018712
I wonder about that. Because that's the profit they made when they were actively selling a new game. Which implies that the previous years when they were developing that new game must have been looking pretty dire.
If they were an indie studio, they would now have $2.6m for their next game after developing an AAA title.

>>716003552 (OP)
Stellar Blade made more

Such a small overhead on such a huge project is bad news.

>>716018717
That's right. It's not enough to only beat inflation. You have to beat it so massively so your company has money for mitigating business risks, contingency funding, and funding in general for your next project.

6% is so hilariously bad that you might as well just fire everyone, close the studio, and park the money in a Roth account and watch the money go up passively.

6% is so hilariously bad that it basically wasted years of human life developing this game.

For some contextual comparison: currently popular games are doing 20-60%+ margins (some are doing them every month).

>>716016716
>You don't close don't profitable things
They had no game in the pipeline for several years, and were barely in the pitching ideas phase. To the board, that was a studio siphoning money while giving nothing in return in the short term.
Is it stupid? Most likely. But as it goes, all the closures and lay offs are based on short term gains and expectations.

>>716018348
Most people don't understand the concept of risk when it comes to investment, and opportunity cost.

>>716003731
6% margin is actually better than some industries ever get. That's not a rousing success or anything, but it's fine. The real issue is that if they put out a true flop they probably won't have the resiliency to survive it. Studios like this can churn out mid games indefinitely but one genuine stinker(commercially) and it's over.

>>716019157
>>716018849
>The term profit doesn't incorporate costs of production, distribution, advertising, etc
What the fuck does profit mean then?

>>716018717
Resources are limited and should be invested into something that adds value to the world. You are too simple-minded if you think of money as some magical thing that doesn't matter and is just there because it has to be. Money represents value, time, human effort, work.
When the Soviet Union decided that bread should be free, farmers went in, took all the bread and fed it to their pigs. They had to immediately back peddle, because it turns out that feeding all your bread, that was meant for human consumption, to pigs is not profitable. It's a waste of human work and resources.

>>716019157
>>716019556
>Beat inflation
>Beat shareholder requests
>Beat world record sales
>Still complain its not enough
>Layoff team

>>716019805
"enough" is relative to one's own ambition and goals

>>716003552 (OP)
>6%
Investing that money into a Nasdaq index fund for a year would have given you 8.4%.
Also, that's only for the year they sold the game in, what about the years they spent developing it?

Expect a sequel recycling a lot of the same assets. Basically a remake with some spit and polish.

>>716019961
>It will never be enough to satiate the greed of devils

>>716003552 (OP)
>>716003731
They literally could have taken that money, bought Bitcoin, Stock Indexes, Gold, Silver, and fucking Pokemon cards and have made way, way more money.

>>716020021
>what about the years they spent developing it?

It was only developed to keep trademark shit probably. They expected to lose money

>>716003552 (OP)
Yeah if being profitable was enough we'd still have the Zune Player, Google Chromecast, etc..

These companies don't care about profitable they care only about REALLY PROFITABLE.

You think running TF2 and trickling in new TF2 maps here and there woudn't be profitable for Valve?

>>716020452
I'm kind of surprised they have those net sales each year considering the new wolfenstein games were all they were selling and it was 5 years since the last one at that time

>>716020452
>26 net
pitiful, after seeing what other companies are netting per month

>>716020452
>5% - 6% profit margin for the last 5 years
That's actually grim considering the gains of the overall stock market in each of those years
All it takes is one mediocre year to wipe out all prior years of profit

>>716020783
>Armchair warrior thinks his sofa surfing could do better
Better hit me with an anime image

>>716020783
>>716020867
6% a year wouldn't be bad if this was a mega corporation
For their size yeah they should have way higher margins.

>>716021020
it's a pitiful number by all objective metrics
western scene isn't doing volume worth a damn
witnessing the death of the industry in the west quite frankly desu ne

>>716021265
>it's a pitiful number
so is your weight

>>716003552 (OP)
Not surprised the game was a glitch fest and extremely bare bones, it was clear they pumped it out fast the same way avowed was.

>>716020598
net sales is probably just what microsoft/bethesda paid them to develop the game, which is why the "sales" rises and falls at the same exact rate as operating costs.

>>716018506
I don't get all the complaints about "line must go up" when talking about capitalism. How do those people think social programs are paid for?
Just this month Denmark and Spain have increased retirement age to 70 and 71.
Now France is thinking of getting rid of public holidays to save money. That's after increasing their retirement age once or twice already.

>>716022059
>How do those people think social programs are paid for?
Not by people who pay 0 tax

>>716019805
>Layoff team

Devs at MachineGames were laid off?
The ones hit with layoffs spent five or more years on developing games and still had little to show off.

>>716022293
>Beat world record sales

They broke world record sales?

>>716019364
>>716019364
This isn't quite true - 6% margin each year is good for some industries. 6% margin for an investment started almost a decade ago pre-covid and drove straight through the inflation spike is less of a return than they'd have received virtually anywhere else.

It's important to remember that this investment started in the '10s before $70 games were even fathomable.

>>716003552 (OP)
even if this is on the up and up and isn't some weird accounting bullshit where they actually lost money but are only counting some things and not others, this is a massive failure because you could make 6% interest on much less risky shit

>>716004478
6% ROI is terrible for something as risky as a game

>>716007379
>1 movie

This is bullshit since it was on Goypass. And everyone knows it doesn't translate to sales.

>>716012631
any time I see this character I remember the author made blacked porn of all the characters

>>716008143
It's good for the short term for the workers, but shit in terms of actually raising capital if you are a publicly traded company or need someone to invest.

>>716008149
the opposite. the investors could have put that money in something with zero to no risk

Is the game profitable or were they just profitable that year. I am not the best at reading comprehension

Is this the one where he says he is an atheist after literally witnessing the work of the christian god multiple times or is that the movie?
because it's one thing to be an atheist irl, but it's retarded to be one in a fictional setting where you literally witness evidence of god
>>716012762
6% on a video game isn't sustainable. no one is going to risk capital on an investment so risky when there are much safer forms of investment that will give you a similar RoI

>>716018506
shalom
there is a thing called risk.
You wouldn't go into a casino and play blackjack if every time you won a hand you got 106% of your bet back but every time you lost you lost 100% of your bet

>>716019364
6% is fine for some things, but it isn't sustainable for something as high risk as AAA vidya
like the fact people have to put up millions to fund the game makes it not worth the risk

>>716019805
that's not what happened here and yeah, private equity and publicly traded companies are scumbags
in this case what happened was a company that is in a really risky industry made 106% of it's budget back. You wouldn't play a single hand of blackjack where you could only win 106% of your bet back but if you lose you lose 100% of your bet

>>716024170
So don't gamble?

indie this, aa scene that, it's just gamer fantasy

>>716024468
>>716024170
Why are they playing if its a bad choice?

>>716024571
yeah and then there wouldn't be any capital invested in vidya.
>>716024634
because they were expecting a higher payout and different investors have different acceptable risk thresholds. I know for my 401k account I have the option to change my risk level. someone who is old and doesn't have much in the account might chose riskier ventures in the hopes they get paid out more

>>716008531
yeah it's good, it's kind of like lite-dishonored with some adventure game stuff mixed in and it's a better indy story than any of the recent movies.

>>716024832
Why not just make a good game on a shoestring budget and rake in millions like indies do instead of megadumping money into shit?

>>716007379
2 movies, the crystal skull was way after, then compass being "let's make one more before Harrison Ford kills himself flying a plane"

>>716024983
IDK, you see the same issue with films where no one funds mid budget comedies anymore. Like the film
>that thing you do
literally could not be made today because there are just safer places to send your money so hollywood only bets on the higher potential products

>>716008531
It's better movie than any recent Indy movies.

>>716012762
concord lost now go back to dilating, frogfaggot

so the game was profitable with gamepass and PC release and with the PS5 release and DLC this year, it's gonna make even more money since PS5 owners are voracious buyers of games.

Overally not bad at all.

Video game economics are beyond my comprehension.
>Some games make back their budget on day one, yet the studio struggles to get funding for another project.
>Meanwhile, other games barely break even after months, but their studios still get the green light to work on the next big project.

>>716025201
>Shovelware era was actually based

game was good but it ran like shit on my 4090 can only imagine how it ran on third worlder's computers

>>716025390
I don't know why, but every time I decide to get drunk, someone posts this gif and I laugh out loud every single time

Indiana jones is not even close to being as big as some americans think

>>716003552 (OP)
I've never heard a single person talk about this game other than shitting on it.

>>716025386
each company's liabilities and funding structure is unique

>>716025386
it has to do with investors. for a long time blackrock and co were getting interest free loans from the US and japanese government and then were investing public employee pension money in shit so it really wasn't that high risk for the blackrock fags and they could take losses since not their money. now that japan and the US aren't giving out free money to rich fags and there is more risk in regulation (actually it might be illegal to do the shit they did under brandon, because they were allowed to do it due to an EO, not sure if trump undid it) they aren't gambling as hard with public employee pension money

>>716025807
Gura said she liked it or whatever gura is called now

>>716025734
We don't even think about you

>>716007393
>Game Pass must still be profitable
I doubt it. Didn't they just say it has to massively increase by 2027 or they're cutting it?

>>716003552 (OP)
>>716004607
shouldn't have had the side shaved woman

>>716009813
>move around with a woman no one cares about
so is the game

>>716008285
yet troons claim we live in a capitalist society

>>716025734
Nobody cares what turdworlders think is big

Itt "we should have let the money rot in a bank instead of doing something without"

>>716023924
When corpos speak you only have to assume its the worst of whatever options are available. Reading comprehension is irrelevant because they'll just twist the definitions of words to whatever sounds best at the moment. They might say the game is profitable and then just not include employee costs because some of them were also working at other studios at the time, they could be playing fast and loose with definitions of the game like it got restarted and they are only counting the amount for the finished version and not the half a billion they wasted on the scraped version. Never take a word they say at face value.

>>716026601
if I had $300m and this is the ROI i got from couple years then yes I would've just kept it in a blackrock account

>>716025734
why would you brag about being a third worlder?

>>716026601
it's not worth the gamble for such a small ROI

>>716003552 (OP)
More profitable than most of the industry lol

>>716003552 (OP)
Boomers made more money by buying a couple houses abd waiting

>>716018712
MS has mostly been going yeetus fetus deletus on companies and projects that have wasted years without releasing shit. They might make some cuts. I think the ones that deserve it the most on this game was marketing.

>>716023924
It was absolutely not profitable in any year. It's financial shenanigans. Machinegames is a fully owned subsidiary of MS, and gets only what MS gives it, and takes everything.

>>716024634
They bought a timeshare back in the 80's, bought an upgrade to platinum 10 years ago, and can't sell it except at a huge loss.

>>716024983
Because the companies are weighted to not be able to do that with hordes of layers of management and marketing, and ad people that they still have to pay but would be unused. And those hordes of people still have a say in operations.

>>716025257
That's not saying much.

>>716025373
No it wasn't. Check sales vs rev vs dev cost. Machinegames was profitable because microsoft said so.

>>716025386
The funding is almost completely divorced from profitability, success and failure, much like hollywood. ubisoft for example, is completely addicted to goverment loans and incentives in shitty third world countries.

>>716026091
>>716007393
Gamepass is not profitable, and the only way they fudge it to being profitable is by not including dev costs of AAA games they feed into it.

>>716003552 (OP)
All thanks to boomer humor.. which is good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va9-Q7qa8qk