| enrageorange said: but nowadays the vast majority of retail games, are also being sold on pc and available as digitial downloads. How are these "indie and small team" digital games able to compete with the huge budget "retail" titles. Its because so many dozens if not hundreds of brand new ips are released each year on digital services like steam, that eventually someone actually makes something that is really freaking good, and that product ends up selling a lot. There is so much "shoveware" being produced, that some of it is bound to be good. You could see it in the early years of the wii when it was very very popular. It was the console to develop cheap games on, and while a lot of them were utter garbage, some of them ended up being creative, crazy and imaginitive new ips. IMO innovation is mainly being hurt because of the high cost of development, but also because of costs involved with selling games on retail. Obviously development costs will be high regardless of the distribution if you want your game to look pretty, but regardless of what the exact numbers are, developers/publishers get a much bigger share of the profits from digital sales than retail sales, and thus are able to take greater risks because its easier to make their money back. |
I actually think it's because the vast majority of purchases for the big-budget games are still retail. As someone else said earlier in this thread, a big retail/digital title has to split its sales between the two mediums (a split that's generally skewed heavily towards retail), while every DD-only sale goes exclusively to one side of the ledger.
Additionally, I believe that ranking (relatively) low on the retail list still brings you far more revenue than ranking high on the digital list. While I agree with both your assertions that The Cream Generally Rises and that high costs are detrimental to experimentation, I'm arguing that destroying the retail venue won't lead to noticeably greater experimentation in gaming. Instead, those retail blockbusters (which still cost just as much to make and market as ever!) will migrate (most of) their sales to the digital realm, so the digital chart will look largely like the retail chart does now. The line might be drawn a bit closer to permitting experimentation (although the digital arena is already up and running, so I don't see how destroying retail games will improve what we have now), but ultimately the big picture will look the same.
I'm also hesitant to ascribe lower publishing costs to the digital model in the long run. The publisher's still going to want to get paid, and I don't see digital altering this part of the equation much. Meanwhile, the Steam/Origin/Whoever's of the world are also going to want their cut for the privilege of using their digital store. Logically, these distributors' cuts should be smaller than retailers'. Logically, a DD copy of a PC game should cost less than a physical copy.
