There are those of us that consider everything but mods to be the core game.
I've never been a big fan of modular loading, in part because add-a-[insert thing here] type mods are not my taste. I greatly prefer more extensive, monolithic mods.
Extensive, monolithic mods are far easier to write modularly.
For the same reason why you write internal APIs.
SimonL said:
Ten years ago, Babylon would have been included in the game. Maybe a Deluxe edition with a nice box and behind-the-scene stuff would have been available, but Babylon would have been in the game.
No one would have come here and cried about how they should have charged us more money for Babylon.
10 years ago, they wouldn't have been able to write Civ5, even if they magically had todays hardware.
You seem to think that what software is developed has no relationship to how much money the owners of the software can expect to earn from it. If they manage to figure out a way to get people with a high tolerance for "deluxe" edition extra charge to pay more money, then that increases the expected profit from putting out a game.
This encourages more game development. People who invest in game development make more money, so more people invest in it. We get more games, and (often) more lavish games.
You do not have to buy the add on. If you find you have no choice but to always buy every add on for every product, you will not be able to be a functioning member of a modern western consumer society. There are add ons for next to
everything, from cars to houses to pools to bikes to television sets to airplane tickets to fast food meals to fine dining meals.
These add ons are going to, quite often, not be worth the cost to you. To someone with a different ratio of valuing cash to add on, it will be worth it. So the producers of the base and add on item end up making more money.
Here is where you get the benefit.
Before hand, the thing they where selling went for 100$. Each cost 60$ to manufacture and sell (plus a bunch of marketing). 60$ is the marginal cost per item, not the total costs per item.
Every 1$ they reduced the price increased sales by about 2.5% percent (and didn't change the per-unit cost to make and sell). So their per-item profit drops from 40$ to 39$, and they sell 2.4% more -- resulting in a ~0.07% reduction in total profits. Answer: do not lower price.
Afterwards, 20% of purchasers buy a 20$ add on, with a marginal 15$ in profit.
Now it sells for an effective 104$, with a marginal profit of 43$. Lowering the price by 1$ generates 0.12% higher total profits!
Now, imagine they where selling 1 million units before. That means up to 40 million dollars in development and marketing costs before they are unprofitable. If the add on requires 1 million dollars in development and 1 million dollars in extra marketing, that means they have 1 million dollars in extra profit from doing the add on.
Imagine if spending a million dollars on more development would result in 2.4% more sales (or 24 thousand more sales). At 40$ profit a pop, that comes to 960 thousand dollars -- not worth spending the money on development. At 43$ expected profit a pop, that comes to 1.032 million dollars -- it is now worth spending an extra million on developing
the core product because of the add on.
For an even larger impact than "an extra million dollars of core development" and "1$ lower price" -- what if the entire project was initially projected to be 0.5 million dollars in the hole (after accounting for risk and time value of money). At that point, you say "don't do it". But with the add on added to the projection, it is now 0.5 million dollars in the black! The project went from "don't do it" to "go ahead" because of the add on.
In effect, sales of the original product act as marketing for the add on. So having a cheaper, better, more widely purchased original product is good for the profitability of the add on -- which means investing more money in the core product, and making it cheaper, can be beneficial for the company in question.
(Note that the lowering of price isn't likely, because marketeers like using fixed price points. Extra money spent on development is more likely than a price point change.)
Or, in short: profits from the Babylon add-on can be used to both fund the Babylon add-on development, and core development on Civ5.
And yes, while money from a game is not used to fund development of that game, the expected money that the game will earn
is used to fund development of the game. So the fact that there is an add on that can generate more profit does mean the game can get more funding.
but that's not in my game?"
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