Saark
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 16, 2010
- Messages
- 2,272
You may call it flawed reasoning, yet you fail to engage with any of the points I made beyond the financial one. Is it likely that a PC release would bring in more money? Absolutely. Are they capable of doing so? Unlikely. Are they willing to let their publishers outsource it? No.This is flawed reasoning, it's assuming that it's a zero sum game. The original argument is that if they made a PC port, they would recoup the investment massively. More money = more time to develop the next game, possibility to hire more people to do it faster. And less odds of running out of money.
Clearly Vanillaware values their ability to have complete creative control over their products very highly, to the point where they continue making games that most people would agree are incredibly niche and unlikely to sell in high quantities. Yet they keep doing it. Clearly money isn't the prime motivator for them, consequently the entire "but they'd make so much more money" argument isn't as strong an argument either. They could release games "unfinished" instead of dipping into savings, cut down on QA before release or do any number of things that would be more fiscally sound decisionmaking. But they're not, and I would argue that their stance on not compromising on any of these matters is part of what makes their games stand out.
I could easily see that they do not want to put any of their current staff to do anything but work on their current project, instead of spending weeks if not months training before finally porting games to PC. And maybe they're not interested in bringing somebody in whose main responsibility would be porting the game either, since they're not actually adding value to the creation of the game, they'd just add value to the company. Would it bring in more revenue? Potentially. Would it actually increase profits? Probably, but there's no real evidence to support (or refute) that. Will that math be favorable for them in the end considering they have to either expand staff, spend more time before releasing games or compromise on game quality? I don't know, and I'm guessing a company that is already working from release to release barely being able to finish before going bankrupt, isn't willing to take that risk. Would you?