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PA comic: Friday January 27, 2012 - Boxinalia
Bogey
I'm back, baby!Santa Monica, CAModerator Mod Emeritus
I'm back, baby!Santa Monica, CAModerator Mod Emeritus
Posts
Steam profile.
Getting started with BATTLETECH: Part 1 / Part 2
They have been on a dang roll lately.
(I haven't read the news post yet) I thought it was just about fantasy rpgs in general. I bet we all could list like 7 games this could be about off the top of our heads.
ALSO: Wyrymynyl. *slowclap*
I'd like to see some data on that. Anecdotally speaking, I bet out of the 300 or so games I have on Steam (I don't know the exact number because I'm posting this from work) I've paid full price for maybe 30 of them. I used to (back in the 90's) always pay full price and then share the games with friends who did the same. Now I wait for games on Steam to be on sale for 50-90% off before buying them.
Most people have a finite entertainment budget. Very few people buy every game they want as soon as it comes out and then sit on a big pile of leftover cash wondering what to do with it. The people who have infinite budgets probably didn't sell their games used previously because why bother? Stricter DRM and methods of restricting used game sales will not increase the amount of money people spend on games. People spend more on games either because they have more money (through inflation or an improved economy) or because the value per dollar of the games has gone up.
If Steam is bringing in more money for game developers it's only because they've increased the value of the games for users, not because they've made it harder for users to "cheat the system."
Steam didn't reduce prices on PC titles, if anything they're a little higher in price than they used to be but it has lead to a larger selection of available Oder titles.
In the days of yore before digital distribution what would happen is the publisher would print a number of games and the excess games that didn't sell at full price slowly became cheaper, ultimately ending up in a bargain bin.
I remember being told by someone who was around for this stuff that a large percentage of sales would come from the bargain bin titles, occasionally causing the publisher to print an additional run of the game.
I think you can see this sort of thing now a days with some console / handheld games in Walmart.
This differs in what you see now in that on steam the bargain bin prices usually only come about during sales, and the price of the games often stays a bit higher during non sale ties, sometimes staying at the origial full retail price.
It also doesn't help that publishers will end up in a battle of sorts with brick and mortar stores like GameStop if they offer the digital versions of the game for less than the physical copies would sell for, and that would be bad for business.
I mostly blame GameStop.
They basically threaten to pull all of a publishers titles from the shelf if the digital version of even one title is cheaper than the physical version.
So even if they want to, and I bet they don't for te most part, publishers can't really pass on the significant savings from digital distribution.
I don't think the price difference is the same, and this might have actually changed recently because of the kid of re-emergence of the PC as an actual competitive platform, but PC ports being cheaper than their console counterparts is pretty normal.
Well, even without Gamestop being a factor, a publisher/developer would need a pretty huge incentive to actively lower the net cost of their product, especially when price has never been any kind of deciding factor regarding sales. There's really no reason for them to charge less for digital distribution, fact withstanding that digital distribution is obviously less expensive to produce and maintain.
An important point though is that the sale comes much sooner than any hope of a permanent drop in price.
if anything steam is way more streamlined that sifting through a bargain bin for who knows what.
Same here, its one of the best games I've played in a long time. Ugh, as much as I am a huge SWTOR fan I just can't pass up fast-paced combat in an open world like this. If I love the game as much as I do currently after the demo, I can't imagine how much better it will be once I get my hands on the full game. My only complaint from the demo is the fact that I hate gnomes, but hopefully I won't be seeing them much in the full game.
Perhaps it has something to do with you posting this in a completely irrelevant thread in a completely unhelpful way rather than PMing a moderator as requested in the sticky at the top of the forum.
I know what it says there but its vague enough to make me feel overwhelmed (in a silly way) because I didn't know which moderator I should PM, if it would just be a nusance to said moderator, etc.