

The game industry was assaulted by the MBAs long ago. They have this financial concept of leaving money on the table. That if you aren’t skinning your customers alive for all they have then you are losing money.
Then there was that infamous power point slide that got leaked where, basically, the plan is to use games to bring in audiences then use gambling techniques to hook on whales then cash them for eternity. Thus “live services games” were born.
It feels like uncreative, predatory shit because it is. It’s a finance people idea, not a creative game developer idea.
They probably are. But, this problem is also much larger for them than for other players. Oneplus is estimated to have sold 10 million phones over a one year. Samsung sold 4 times that number of s24 alone. If the suppliers can’t provide that level of manufacturing then they have to build the supply chain themselves, and that takes a lot of time, R&D and money.