i never understood this, what is the upside of making all these live service games? you'll be forced to pay for servers and you put a lifespan on your game, why not just make your singleplayer game offline? is it all just for microtransactions?
You answered your own question. They want recurring revenue. A gamer pays $60 for a game, and that's it. A f2p gamer may hopefully spend $60 a year, for years. Convince them to spend $120 a year and you're doing even better. Hell, if half the f2p players never pay, but 1/4 of your players pay $30 a year, and another 1/4 pay $120 a year, you've still made more cash annually(due to the recurring revenue) than you ever would have if you just sold the game initially for $60 and eventually discounted it to $40.
Then of course imagine being able to charge $60 for the game like normal, eventually you need to mark it down to $40, then 30 or whatever. But you still get a large chunk of the playerbase throwing another $30-100+ a year at your game. Why? Because you've convinced them to do it $5-10 at a time for decades, but now to get the best bundle of currency for whatever bullshit they need to drop $100 at a time. Oh, you've done some minimal work and tweaked a texture on an item with some minor stat differences? Time to ask people to pay up 1200 runesparkles, but the bundles are 1000 and 1300 so people naturally buy the 1300, and spend the 1200 leaving them with 100 runesparkles left. But the new item in 3 months that they want is also 1200, the 1000 bundle doesn't get them what they want, but then they can buy the 1300 bundle again, spend it, and now have 200 left over, great so next time you make the item cost 1425 with 1000 and 1500 bundles.
That's why all of these games use these insane currencies instead of just giving you the total cash price for shit. People are stupid and they fall for it. This shit works so fucking well, it's why mobile gacha slop will never go away. This chart is self explanatory. Yes, that's revenue per month, and the fans track this shit and hype themselves up over it.
The "big AAA" game publishers(ubisoft, blizzard, ea, etc.) want ALL of their games to be doing that. The games on that list don't start making under a million a month till #74, and under $100k a month till #119. This same stupid mentality is why EA was raking in a billion dollars a year on FIFA microtransactions alone, from retards re-buying the same game annually. It's why 2k sports games basically have vegas style slot machines and prize wheels. Paying some pajeet to re-design texture for a cloak and sell it for the equivalent of $10 once a month in a single player game is low effort and low cost revenue. That Fate Grand Order game on that chart at #8? That's been raking in monthly income since 2015, TEN YEARS of people throwing money at a low resolution anime waifu game that's basically rock/paper/scissors with PNGs. And that's before factoring in that this franchise gets theatrical movie releases, merch, etc. as additional revenue(the franchise technically existed before this particular mobile game, but it basically revolves almost entirely around it now for obvious reasons)
