http://dbd.game/killswitch
How expensive is it to acquire a license for characters?
BHVR should have over 20 licensed characters in the game by now. These are not simply provided, but probably cost a lot of money. But how much money are we actually talking about here? Of course, not all of them will be similarly expensive, but do we know the numbers approximately?
These licenses will also need to be renewed from time to time. With new numbers? I could imagine companies getting bolder when it comes to renewing contracts, because BHVR can't really afford to lose licenses. But so far, it's always worked out pretty well (Stranger Things license excluded).
I've been interested in this question for a long time, but I haven't really found anything on the internet. Someone here on the forum once said that BHVR paid $5000 for the Bubba license, though I can't imagine the licenses being that cheap.
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I'd imagine that the intiisl cost isn't as much as you're imagining- £5k could be plausible, it could not, I don't know. But it's also worth noting that every purchase related to a licence gives royalties to the related company, so the cost would rack up substantially.
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What's the point of asking this? You're never going to get an answer, and even if you did, the number would be meaningless to you without understanding all their other financials. Is $5000 a lot? $50000? $500000? Who knows?
I also don't that there should be more licensed killers. The mix they have now is good. Almost all of the most fun killers to play are their original creations and it lets them be more creative.
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I dunno but in mk11 for example licensed characters cost less if you take into account that you get a lot more cosmetics for them for free (earned in game).
I don't think bhvr needs to charge this much but I understand how supply and demand works so...
Post edited by Shaped on0 -
To be honest it entirely depends on their cost model. MK11 costs £40, and each new character costs £5. Dbd costs £15 when not on sale and each recent DLC costs £5.50 for 2 characters (£2.75 per character), so while you end up with more content per person in MK11 it also costs over double.
Full disclosure: prices obtained from off-sale DLC and game prices from the UK Steam Store
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Could be, I didn't look at the bigger picture.
I just noticed that individual character prices were a lot less considering how much skins you get for those characters as well, and you don't have to pay for those skins.
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Also thanks for correcting me about individual character prices. I either saw the prices when it was a discount or I remember it wrong.
I will edit my first response to not spread misinformation.
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All good
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BHVR doesnt make license terms public, so we will probably never know. For most licensing agreements (at least in media) theres an initial upfront charge, then the license holder will get a flat percentage of direct sales for the licensed product (say 1.5% of each dlc unit). Then they will usually get a smaller percentage of company profits over the term (say 0.1% of quarterly revenue). Every company negotiates their own deals so it could be structured however they decide. This is just an example i made up of how most license agreements are structured.
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I imagine it doesn't just stop at the license itself. I'm sure BHVR takes into consideration lawyer fees and some other stuff. The actual price would likely be much higher than whatever they pay for the characters.
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It is a relatively interesting topic to me. Of course, I did not expect a disclosure of the data here, but simply asked out of curiosity. Maybe there are people who know more than me, and it seems that there are apparently. Thanks for all the answers.
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