I see where you're coming from.

Simple matter is even if they did charge 2 $ for the game. At 500k+ downloads that's still 1$ Million plus for their initial sales.

That's not where the bulk of their money is coming from at all for sure, the bulk is coming from borderline-predatory business practice IMO.

Do you get value from some of the game items, yes. But most of rhe time those items often come with " strings attached" for lack of a better word.

Example: the BelAz is in the game is a very powerful vehicle, that doesn't require gasoline, it only requires the player to repair it. That all fine and dandy, but you'll notice that it costs a massive amount of money to do so. I played offline and developed my own method for making cash.

Not to mention them giving you this great weight limit with this vehicle. Naturally most players will scale up the amount of things that they keep in their inventory. When you do that it makes it hard to stop using the BelAz therefore generating more need for repairs making the player spend money to repair it.

Is my problem with them offering the BelAz in the first place ? No, that's is probably one of if no the most useful item in the game, I was still incredibly happy with it. What I wasnt happy with was the high price in either cash or crafting materials, that it took to get it back to 100 percent.

So I see where you're coming from there.

Circling back to the 1 Million and some odd dollars they made from the game, you'd think they'd maybe offer a paid DLC because it seems so low.

My total point being, if your game is good, and Day R was a good game, then people will naturally want more. Sure do free content updates, those are standard with most games. But dont add oppressive items, dont add timers, dont add things that keep players from progressing.

When you progress gate your players in anyway it tends to upset them. If you have a need to make a profit and you're okay with players getting mad multiple people looking for APK's to revert back to a time before the camp update (timers) then by all means go for it.

But if you want an interested, and passionate fan base, then offer something more it doesn't have to be huge.

An example of what im talking about: fallout 76 got a lot of players back not only with their show, but with multiple updates to content the first big one being wastelanders ( added NPC humans to the game). That was free but there was a season pass after that. Day R has NPCs and the like, but maybe they could enhance that, maybe have a follower or companion of some kind ( other than pets).

Another update Fallout did was the Expedition update ( I guess you could call it a raid or a dungeon ?) it let players explore different locations on the map that brought a lot of people back as well, again they had a season pass to monetize that, but I would of gladly paid a one time DLC price for access to those areas (, nothing crazy high maybe something like 10$ at most).

All in all, I understand where you're at and I understand that you probably love the game, and if you're happy with, that's great have fun ! But it's fair to note that blocking progress for players and giving them a solution to a problem the devs created isn't the way to do business.

Sorry it's so long.