[user avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/13688759/avatar/small.1433274021.jpeg” name=“Chypsa”]13688759[/user] gaming industry is a business, its not a charity. Bohemia is extremely fair. You knew what game you bought in the first place and you can never expect improvements on it. Theres plenty of game titles that never got out of early access stage or were abandoned by their authors.
Its not like you have a game for 40$ and you sell 2M copies so you get 80M income. You pay taxes, steam fees, servers upkeep, technology and copyright fees if you use external solutions, you need to cover living costs for development time (salary for each programmer, art designer, animator, sound guy etc.) and equipment to develop the game (PC’s, audio recording, mocap, scriptwriting, game advertisement etc).
It’s an extremely expensive thing to do. Arma is a sandbox game which gives extreme freedom to the player and modability. It’s much easier to create bug-free game like call of duty or battlefield compared to arma, because you can limit user actions by having scripted solutions or limited content. AI doesn’t need to work in all conditions but only on X specified maps that wont change and follow simple engagement rules.
BI is a small-moderate studio based in Czech republic.
All the features they made were given free of charge.
Things like firing from vehicles, bipods and weapon resting, AI suppression, advanced flight model, sling loading, 3D editor etc. were never a vanilla part of arma series and they were given for free to everyone. Give me one game title that gives so much game improvements and content to all users free of charge.
Its not like you earned money once and you’re done for, then you’re doing everything for free.
You still have several costs and you still WORK so you want to get money for your work, which is totaly fair.
They did not separate community at any stage and all DLC content can be found "unlocked" as user-made mods if one does not wish to pay for it. You can always work around because of beautiful modable nature of arma.
However I see it fair to support people who work hard on a single product, constantly improving it, refining, adding new content. I’d rather support them and buy DLC package or expansion even if it adds X number of things that I will probably not use in multiplayer scenario because I can enjoy all the core features without giving a penny, than to be forced to pay 10-30$ to get some extremely important fixes and content updates.
Examples of doing it wrong?
Planetary Annihilation and its Titans expansion
Every CoD game after CoD:MW1
Battlefield series with their season passes
and many many more
Those games wont have a living gaming community around them that will last years.
They are one-season hits, that get new release each year, splitting the community every time and doing it even more with pay-to-win or pay-to-enjoy DLC’s.
Would you pay 60$ for Battlefield:Modern Warfare 20?
Or would you pay 40$ for Arma3 once and play it for years, and keep supporting its development by paying ~20$ a year for all DLC’s/Expansions that you do not require to enjoy all of its features?
Dont get me wrong, everyone has right to his opinion and he has some good points in it.
Thats my opinion, and its based on my observations and experiance.
Edit: If you want to see how hard it is to develop a working sandbox-like game, take a look at www.playrust.com
Rust is being developed for 2-3 years by Garry Newman, creator of Garry’s Mod which earned millions.
Each week or two they release a post with details of what they did and how it works, in-depth analysis of how job like their’s look like.