The reality is that Rockstar employs over a thousand people and they need to continuously earn money to cover for that.
I'm not saying R* isn't a big company.
I'm not saying R* doesn't employ an army of people.
And I'm not saying they don't have bills to pay.
What I *am* saying is that they've made $6 billion over the course of about 5 years, which averages out to $1.2 billion per year.
Now, think about it for a second - the federal minimum wage in the U.S. (inb4 "but R* North aren't based in the U.S." - I know that. This is called an experiment) is $7.25 an hour. Assuming an average work week is 40 hours and there is no such thing as unpaid weeks, that's enough to pay 400.000 employees their annual salary. For comparison, with inflation, GTA V cost $278 million to develop - equivalent to about 18.500 employees paid at all times.
Please explain to me when they hired an additional 382.500 employees, so that their operating budget is now $1.2 million per year.
And no, I'm not saying they shouldn't be making any money at all. I'm just saying, when they're pulling these kind of numbers, the story kind of tells itself. Or is the next argument going to be how EA is such a financially insecure startup that they need their lootboxes to stay in business, in which case - should they even *be* in business? (And yes, I kind of nicked that one from mr. Sterling)
As for inflation, that’s just a natural part of an evolving game economy. With each new update the rewards should increase slightly to keep players motivated to invest in new businesses / bunkers / whatever, but then the price of items also needs to go up because otherwise you’d soon end up in a situation where money becomes irrelevant and then your economy has crashed.
To a certain extent, I would agree. But it's all about finding that sweet spot.
A couple more numbers for you: at the launch of Online, Contact Missions was the grind. I've made calculations elsewhere that say you'd be making about $1,500 per minute doing Contact Missions, so let's assume for a moment that not a whole lot has changed there, in which case that's just over an hour for a regular Comet. That's fairly doable, I'd say.
Nowadays, a reasonable (and maintainable) grind routine can get you what, $7,000 per minute or thereabouts, as a combination of I/E, Bunker and Headhunter? Now, do we have a recent vehicle comparable to the Comet? Oh, yeah, the Comet SR,
which I even recall you being displeased about in a not-worth-the-price fashion at the start of this very year. In which case, combining the above grinding routine with the desire to purchase an SR, that's
nearly three hours.
The point I'm trying to make here is that yes, there are many more ways of making money nowadays - and some of them work really well - but in real terms, the balance hasn't shifted - and if it has, it's supercharged itself in the wrong direction.
And all that's before we get too involved in the whole is-it-a-game-or-is-it-a-job thing. Or the does-the-game-actually-need-an-economy debate.
