Buying out competitors - Is it worth it?

[Kashaloth]

Is there any method to make profit from buying other devs and publishers (legendary mode)? All companies cost more than it can earn. It can be some kind of money holder because you can sell it later for more but not sure if it's worth to keep it. Maybe somebody found out some method with IP transfering for longer term... Any ideas?

[Kyouko Tsukino]

They make some money in endgame, but by then the money you should be earning by yourself will dwarf what they can give you. Transfering IPs doesn't do much, since NPCs will still make trash games (70%) which will sell a lot less, and since you're going to be sharing profit with the NPC. Coupled with the awfully slow speed they have when "making" games (dice rolling in the background) means you'll have to wait for months to maybe get a game that's scratching the borders of "acceptable" and giving you profit comparable to what your games gave you a decade earlier.

I'll say that subsidiaries at least aren't as bad as publishing non-subsidiary NPCs can be. Not that that's a feat to be proud of...

[joeball123]

Depends a bit on difficulty, but not really. You can compel them to develop for your consoles to boost the sales of your consoles, you can instruct them to develop for the larger platforms on the market to try and bolster their game sales, you can act as their publisher to get an 80% share of the profits rather than a 50% share, you can stick their games on your Game Pass once it becomes available for however many additional subscribers they'll bring to your Game Pass.

[GrumpyDragon]

I have found that its nice to have a subsidiary to be your publisher, since they will give you 20 dollars per sale, instead of the paltry 8-12 you can get with somebody you dont own. this saves you space and tedium, since you no longer need to worry about space for production rooms, storage rooms, or worry about when to take that game off the market, they handle it for you. You can even trick, i mean persuade them into sharing the marketing expenses

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Since automation was improved greatly*, I find self-publishing to be the best as far as "raw" profit goes. It also doesn't need that much space (at least in Legendary where you're usually at 1/10 or 1/20 of the sales you can get in lower difficulties) and saves you the monthly costs of throwing money away (since NPCs don't need money at all.) If set to $39 (or really anywhere from $30-39) then you also won't need to be fiddling with the price yourself, it gives the best profit-sale ratio.

And since I figured out hype is overhyped, and unless you royally suck at making games, they will all start with 60 hype after a while, then my marketing room tends to be small and only used every decade or two, when I decide to either expand or replace my employees with more skilled employees (and doing this saves me space I would use in all the obnoxiously huge training rooms I keep seeing in screenshots, too.)

And if you're really worried about space (to me this only really applies in the "European Manor" map) or just want to get the most money per week, and can handle making games at a somewhat decent (one every one/two/three months) pace, then setting your games' price to $79 will ensure you use the minimum space possible to get the maximum profit per week. Your games will last a bit less in the market, but you can ("should") always make more of those. And you'll have a fraction of the sales you would have with lower prices, which really minimizes the space needed for production and stock rooms.

* The best being "one room serves all" which pretty much removes any of the micromanagement production used to have. It has the issue of taking care of the older games first, but that's just nitpicking from me.

[Panda]

I've seen this mentioned a few times, but I've never an issue making a profit with my subsidiaries, sometimes a very significant one at that. This has been on legendary as well.

The first thing I always do is prune down their IP library, emptying out any lower rated IPs and buying or inserting some of my own higher rated IPs. Then I'll go through the settings to make sure any potential unprofitable choices are more restricted, make sure they focus on those IPs and I'll choose one or two to use as publishers for all my expansions since the profit margins are higher than publishing them yourself.

[joeball123]

Originally posted by Panda:

I'll choose one or two to use as publishers for all my expansions since the profit margins are higher than publishing them yourself.

If the profit margins on expansions are higher when going through a publisher than when self-publishing, then either you're not charging enough for the add-on or there's a balance issue. A subsidiary giving me $20 per copy sold implies that the wholesale price is about $30 - $20 for my share + $5 for their share assuming the same 80-20 split I offer them + ~$5 production costs - so I ought to be able to make a gross profit of about $25 per copy sold when self-publishing at the same price point, and even if you're going all-out on marketing you shouldn't be spending more than about a million dollars on an add-on ($5k for a beta demo + $25k for press copies + $50k for radio ads + $100k for internet ads + $500k for TV ads + $200k for overhype, maybe another $30k for a release demo if overhype failed or another ~$50k if you also have to do posters and magazine ads), which is eventually just a drop in the bucket and is also something that you might be spending even if you are going through a publisher.

[Moon-and-Star]

For me, once I got self-publishing rolling, I was rolling in the bucks enough to buy out quite a few low-end companies, including my old publisher and some dying companies. Then you just treat them as game farms. Have them prioritize their better IPs, give them my old IPs that have been laying idle while I've focused on other stuff, let one subsidiary be the publisher. Check in on them every now and then, specifically the expected rating for games that are almost done. If it's crap, I cancel them, if it's middling I let my other subsidiary publish them, and if it's a hit I'll take it myself with a few weeks of lead time for my marketing to work.
It's a decent addition to your income once you get it rolling.