quick brown wrote:MrRixter wrote:Over 5 million Pc gamers on steam at the moment and over 30 million active accounts enjoying a great service. Steam experiences double digit growth every year. It's the way forward and you guys against it are a tiny tiny insignificant minority. Embrace it or forget about playing your favourite Pc games and find another hobby. Maybe you should go buy a console and join the cool kids talking gangsta online playing corridor shooters that turn your brain into mash. After going through that installing steam will look like a walk in the park.
This is entirely the kind of crap I mentioned previouslly.
On that we can agree.
I'll just count it as a drive-by troll or something.
Peanutrulz wrote:I would be interested to see what steams cut is. I dont think those numbers will ever be published.
But the recent sale on AP what did it cost 3$ ... how much did ego see of that 3$ ?
I've heard the going rate is 30% of each sale. That's actually a good deal less than a DVD Retail cut would net Egosoft.
In any case, that hardly matters so much as the fact that no manufacturing costs are incurred for each digital copy sold. There's a reason why some companies, like Paradox, have said that they now consider doing no retail releases. You don't have to shell out the initial upfront cost of producing discs and material.
Egosoft is slightly bigger than some other devs...so they do retail discs, but still use digital distribution.
Consider this though: Every game has die hard fans that buy on release. If a game is retail only, it rapidly looses steam(no pun intended) in terms of sales until it eventually hits bargain bin status. Some games hit it quicker than others. Bargain bin prices though, get determined by the retailer...not Deepsilver/Egosoft. They've already sold the copies in the store, and it's bargain bin, no fresh copies are going to be ordered...and definitely not at the initial price.
With Steam or another digital retailer, you're 'producing' endless copies for sale. Even if your price drops and with Steam taking a cut, you make direct profit from each digital copy sold. Even if Steam were taking 60% instead of the predicted 30%, its money that you make without any additional manufacturing costs.
When a holiday sale rolls around and Steam requests that you allow them to put your game on sale, you might make less per sale, but people flock to games on sale like flies on ****.
That's how I ended up noticing TC at all. I may have only paid $14 for it, but I'd likely have never bought it without noticing the sale and asking some guys on Bluesnews.com if it was a good game.
There is a reason publishers and small devs are gung-ho about digital distribution. In addition to the initial sales push of a new release...your game can continue to produce revenue long after you've released your last patch for it.
Most people have a limited budget when it comes to buying full releases(usually only so many per year), but that budget goes out the window when a game is marked down and offered as a digital sale. I know a guy on Bluesnews who has 1134 games on his Steam list. Needless to say he didn't buy all those at full retail(but he does spend a huge amount on games).
I've also seen sales of a game continue to be strong after its sale period ended(presumably word of mouth etc.).
It's a big mistake to think that Deepsilver/Egosoft are looking to lose money with this move. It may well be that the sales of X games on Steam over the past couple of years has lead them to this point. All that is pure speculation on my part, of course. I don't have any inside info.
If you want a different perspective, stand on your head.
) will end up with the same repeated debate
