05-12-2020 05:48 PM
Has Half-Life Alyx yet turned a profit for Valve? Putting publicly
available reports and estimates together, we can make a tentative
answer: Probably not yet.
Here's roughly how much Alyx has made so far:
Direct purchases of Half-Life: Alyx generated $40.7M in
revenue, and hundreds of thousands of free copies of the game were also
bundled with devices like the Valve Index headset to boost interest in
VR.
And here's how many people Valve paid to develop Alyx:
“Right now it’s around 80 people,” the company said, “which puts it as the largest single team we’ve ever had at Valve.”
And here's how long those 80 people have been developing Alyx:
We started in February of 2016, I think, with a small team, and we
brought out a small prototype. Then people started to play that,
understood what we were trying to do afterward, and started joining up.
We had 80 people on the team when we were about midway through.
VR device sales are a non-starter at the current price:
It's simply too expensive. That's it. That's literally all there is to it. No more analysis necessary, really.
Buying in to VR, even on second hand, 1st gen equipment, will run you upwards of $300-400 at least.
And that's not counting the overall hardware requirements you've got
to meet too, in an age where GPUs cost two arms and two legs because of
bitcoin miners driving the prices into the sky.And now, with the coronavirus destroying the economy and job market,
people are being more frugal about their purchases than ever.I know people who invested time and money in VR probably want [Alyx]
to remain an exclusive game to drive hardware sales and bring their
hobby more into the mainstream, but it's simply not going to ever reach a
sizable audience when it's being gatekept by the buy-in cost.Not everyone is even in a position where it's reasonable to throw
500+ dollars at the hardware/equipment necessary just to play one
admittedly very nice looking 10~ish hour singleplayer campaign.It is an absolutely terrible sell, unfortunately, no matter how good
the game is. Not really sure what Valve was thinking or what the
strategy here was, but it seems out of touch with the economic reality
of most working class Americans, to be honest.Half-Life 2 was my first PC game. I grabbed a Nvidia 6600GT to throw
in my shitty Pentium 4 bargain desktop, and it still ran fine at medium
settings. $149 dollars and that was it, in 2004.Now for this title, Valve wants fans to shell out $1000 for an Index first... yeah, sorry, hard pass.
05-13-2020 04:44 AM
This line of argument always puzzles me. It assumes that the main purpose of HL:A is to continue the HL franchise, but it’s being held back by being a VR game. Clearly, the whole purpose of HL:A was to make a top tier VR game; the fact that it’s in the HL franchise is being leveraged to attract more users to VR.
05-13-2020 06:19 AM
nalex66 said:This line of argument always puzzles me. It assumes that the main purpose of HL:A is to continue the HL franchise, but it’s being held back by being a VR game. Clearly, the whole purpose of HL:A was to make a top tier VR game; the fact that it’s in the HL franchise is being leveraged to attract more users to VR.
05-13-2020 07:14 AM
05-13-2020 07:32 AM
05-13-2020 08:12 AM
Kentobi said:
Valve is maybe the last true black box in the industry - since they’re a private company, there is no public knowledge at all of their finances, sales, or anything. Yeah, we’ve all kludged up some tools to make estimates, but that’s truly what they are. (And the SteamSpy dude that dug for a ton of that information was maybe secretly working for Epic? Topic for another day)
Agreed. I don't think anyone believes that. Similarly, Oculus and Facebook have a "loss leader" business model for VR since release in 2016, and clearly Facebook is not hurting for income nor business.
I would imagine that anyone trying to invest their own business in to VR software would probably care. If something like Alyx can't make a profit, then what chance does a VR Software startup company have at making a profit? We've already seen this type of discussion happen over the years. For example, it's the reason the developers of Eve: Valkyrie abandoned VR development.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/31/eve-valkyrie-developer-ccp-games-goes-cold-on-vr/
05-13-2020 02:31 PM
05-13-2020 02:42 PM
Kentobi said:
Hey man, I’m not trying to get into an argument, I’m just not sure what point you’re trying to make.
Valve gave away Alyx for free with orders of Index. So, I'm not sure how that fits in to what you are saying here.
I'm talking about the software others build for the MAC OS. This thread is about Alyx, which is software not hardware.
Agreed! I'd also like to see more amazing VR Titles that cater to more than just gaming. Data Analytics is more my jam.
I would challenge this by referring to what you said earlier:
They almost developed it as a public
service.
05-14-2020 10:25 AM
05-14-2020 10:42 AM
Digikid1 said:
Damn. That means that it won't be on sale for QUITE a while.I want the game but NOT at the price they are asking for it. $69.99CDN is pretty steep.