There’s only so much entertainment you can get out of one before you’ve seen everything, get bored, and look for another one.

You’re absolutely right, but that’s true from “your perspective”. For you the fame might last 50 hours and that’s all, but the developers still need to work on big patches, content and fixes even years after release.

If a studio fails to budget for that and make sure those costs are included in the price of the game, it frankly deserves to go bust

And this introduces another topic I think. Would the average consumer willing to spend more for a game with everything in it? AAA already cost 70$ at launch, would the average consumer accept further price increases, or would selling plummet in comparison with reduced price+dlc or free to play with microtransanction?

At the end companies are not inherently “evil” they just look for what works and what doesn’t by trial and error

but authors and filmmakers still make TONS of money.

This is an affirmation many writers would find offensive lol

The editorial sector is in deep crisis, it’s really hard to live off as a writer unless you’re ridiculously famous.

Same thing for the filmmaking industry, look at protest of screenwriters and actors, and to companies terrible financial sheets, and to movie theaters basically bankrupting as maybe their time is over. Also we both agree there’s been a shift from movies to tv series and one of the reason is that you “buy the product piece by piece”?

Ps: funnily enough, period publication of chapters were a thing until not long ago, and still are in somewhere (for example manga in Japan)

The big difference with physical goods is that it’s much harder to steal a McDonald’s burger that it is to crack a single player, offline game. Furthermore, once you ate your burger, if you want more, you have to buy another because it’s a consumables.

On the other hand games are prone to piracy, expecially on pc, you pay once but can play anytime while patched and updates require prolonged work after you purchase.

It isn’t strange that developers look at dlc, microtransanction or game as a service with subscription, because they allow a stable flow of income that can support development, and it’s harder to avoid paying when the game is always online and stuff like that.