Mr Puggsly said:
shio said:
Mr Puggsly said:
shio said:
I bought Half-Life for $0.99, and many other cool games for that price on Steam. I bought Mass Effect and Bioshock for $5, I bought Borderlands for $10, Witcher for $10, Mount & Blade for $7.50, Eve Online for $2, L4D2 for $13, Portal for $0, Zeno Clash with a 50% discount BEFORE IT WAS RELEASED, etc...
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Wowzers, you spend all that money! Developers must be getting rich with all your nickels and dimes!
Steam must make billions getting their share of that too...
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Actually yes, somehow those PC developers are all making huge amount of revenue AND growing. New, independent developers are forming and growing on PC, while they're dying on consoles.
How many new, independent console developers have made AAA games this generation?
You see, even though I bought The Witcher at $10 (more around $11), they made as much money as the average console developer makes from a $60 console game!! Publishers, retailers, distributors, marketing, etc... are all taking a piece of developers' money on consoles. Which is why there's so little AAA independent developers on consoles these days.
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Huge amount of revenue? Probably not. Atleast not huge for major developers.
I'd be willing to agree independent developers are still going strong on PCs. They are also going strong on services like PSN and XBLA. But we both know consoles are generally the bread and butter for major and big budget releases.
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Thing is, revenue is high on the consoles, yet profitability is ultimately quite low.
The costs of consoles (namely HD) games has been on the rise, yet the profit margins haven't really improved and even Activision, after MW2 was released was only just in the Black. Instead it was Blizzard with all the PC based profit that propped them up.
The costs of PC games is as low as ever (no royalties to platform holders) yet the profitability of the titles has increased due to digital download. If you have a first-party download service like EA or Valve then the profitability is even higher.
Starcraft 2 has shown it's possible for PC games to sell bucket loads, and with higher profit margins you can get your money back with lower sales than on consoles.
