| Legend11 said: Gears of War 2 will likely make more money on 360 for them than any of their recent PC games. As for Steam I can't wait for them to start posting sales numbers on it because it's getting tiring hearing how that's where all the PCs sales went to. If they're selling millions of copies of games for everyone why are they keeping sales numbers so secret? I suspect it mirrors the NPD's PC charts but with Valve having the lion's share of sales instead of Blizzard and EA and everyone else getting small pieces. |
Gears of War 2 will make them very little money, because they don't own the Gears license, Microsoft does. Epic didn't make Gears, they were paid to make Gears. Same with Gears 2. They have very little control over the license, nor do they directly benefit from the sales. Microsoft pays for it, and Microsoft gets the profits. It also has nothing to do with Epic's PC development teams. What Epic has been making money off of is licensing the Unreal Engine. Far more than their games.
Steam isn't going to start posting sales numbers. Steam just tracks sales for the publishers in real time now. That's what Steamworks does. So every publisher knows exactly how much their game has sold at every moment. The beauty of Steam is that a game doesn't have to sell millions upon millions to make money. Because it eliminated the retail markups, the developer gets about 70% of the retail sales instead of about 30%.
I doubt Steam even comes close to mimmicking NPD since the majority of Steam users aren't from North America. North America is far from the largest PC market. Even small countries like Germany are larger PC markets, and Europe and Korea are far more important. I know it's hard for some people to understand that America isn't the end all be all of everything gaming, but it's true.
Also, I forgot about Activision and Blizzard merging. That's a good point. It's also interesting though... Activision started supporting Steam. Does that mean we'll see Starcraft 2 on Steam? That would be really cool.
