Randomly Mine: Half Life: Profit

Something I've seen online is people calling Half Life: Alyx a failure because "it didn't make a profit," despite Alyx's development budget never being made public. It's seemingly assumed the game's a failure because Valve set out to make a "Triple-A VR Game," and three hundred thousand copies sold is minuscule in Triple-A.

Now, not only am I a little unnerved by some players expressing the mindset of money-grubbing publishers, but there's some blatant misconceptions here.

Firstly, one of the reasons Triple-A games routinely cost $60+ Million, rarely has to do with the technology. That can certainly be a component, but what's really fueling the cost is the commonality among almost all Triple-A games regardless if their innovating or iterating.

Employees.

Famously, Resident Evil 6 had 800+ people attached to the project. Ubisoft games are routinely assisted by 4+ full-studios. Bungie expanded from eighty to three hundred people when transitioning to 7th gen consoles. But most notably, ID Software's credits used to fit on a single-screen.

Half Life: Alyx resulted in Valve's biggest development staff to date, with eighty people. That's it. The credits weren't even five minutes. At the average 100k salary per-person, four years of development would've only costed Valve $32 Million, and that's assuming everyone worked full-time, when quite a few of Alyx's vital members were contractors. Alyx made more than half that budget by March, 20th with 300k copies sold, just in pre-orders.

Even with the assumption the game sold less than that at launch, lets say just over 200k? Which is not at all consistent with most game launches which typically trounce their pre-order figures; the game already breaks even.

Assuming it were to follow in Beat Sabers footsteps of selling 1+ Million, Valve could potentially double their development costs.

And we haven't even gotten to the Valve Index, that sold 120k units by March 20th. At a $1000 USD per-unit, that's $120 million right there. Not to mention, all of this is taking place with the company that's already funded for life via Steam.

Half Life: Alyx is the opposite of failure.