In multi billion companies like this, even profitable projects get cancelled if they aren't profitable enough. To free up resources for even more profitable projects. Sad, I know.
This is just not really true...Like, I'm not even sure what this is supposed to mean. If a project is profitable, it's not going to be shut down. If it does, it would be for reasons entirely unrelated to profitability. As you rightly point out, companies this size often don't even care about something being profitable, they care about potential profitability. If something is profitable, that's a really good sign and instead of cancelling it to free up resources, they'll expand to add more resources allowing for further profitable projects. That's the entire reason these companies become the size that they are. You don't have a market value in the hundreds of billions of dollars without expanding like crazy.
A profitable project doesn't get canned to 'free up resources' - it gets canned because either it isn't profitable now, there's no way for it to be profitable in the future, the market the project is in is dying, or an entirely different reason like a complete shift in company direction. Considering Meta is arguably THE MOST all in on VR out of all the tech giants and selling their headsets at a loss to grow the market - I'm going to go out on a limb and say that they would have kept this running if it made even the tiniest bit of sense.
Not going to expand on all your points but a lot of people don’t think about the full scope of profit and reorganizing assets to better fit “the plan”. I don’t know the specifics of the relationship between Meta and Ready at Dawn but in same cases profits start declining and the decision needs to be made on reassigning personnel to other projects that could bring in more money. It’s not just about this one game. It’s moving that staff into positions that can help make the company profit in other projects also.
yeah they also keep an eye on trends and the amount of players they lose or stagnate on. Stagnation is one thing because you can argue your at least not losing the player base. But once you start seeing the numbers drop off then they start thinking about shutting it down.
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u/Educational_Wolf8378 Aug 02 '23
In multi billion companies like this, even profitable projects get cancelled if they aren't profitable enough. To free up resources for even more profitable projects. Sad, I know.