"SimmerGeorge;c-17821953" wrote:
"Kerrigan;c-17821950" wrote:
You are delusional if you think everything that happens after software is written doesn't cost money. Please, stop.
@Kerrigan Then please prove me wrong. Is it or is it not true that you can copy files with just one click? When you buy a game digitally all it does is copy the files from the source to your computer. What you buy is just a copy that doesn't cost anything to make.
Of course there are ongoing costs. You mentioned before that advertising is just game footage, but you still need to pay for someone to make the trailers and other materials. I’ve also seen ads for the Sims on other places like YouTube and Facebook, that’s an ongoing cost. Server space is another ongoing cost. Customer service (I doubt customer service for these 3 kits will be a big burden, but the more packs and kits that are added will increase workload and staff requirements over time as a franchise grows). Bugs (and the potential for more bugs) are increasingly inevitable the more content is added, you need to pay people to work on those as new content is created.
There are other more ‘invisible’ ongoing costs too- even specific gameplay often isn’t a one-time effort. Take seasons for example: seasons were added and paid for once when the seasons EP came out. But every new world created must be made compatible with seasons, which requires more work in the future, that’s an ongoing cost. And that goes for virtually every new gameplay feature, more work will have to be done to make future packs compatible. Every EP needs an increasingly large amount of budget in order to work with previous features.
To return to your pizza analogy, if I go and order a pizza, and then the next day I order a different pizza, the staff making it don’t have to sit down and work out if it will be compatible with every other pizza I’ve ever eaten.
