| Pemalite said: As for the last line on your post, it's difficult to understand it, could you elaborate? From what I can understand you're basically saying that AAA games don't benefit which is ironic, because even AAA games on Steam have benefitted from the sales, hence why Valve is happy to discount it's own franchises which have sold millions of copies already. |
Valve is happy to discount their own games or give them away for free because they are now in the business of pushing games as a service and their own platform and, besides, their games are all pretty old anyway and have long since become profitable. While Steam has done a lot to revive PC gaming, it's tough to argue that everything is coming up roses. Sure, some individual developers have done pretty well thanks to Steam sales, but there is a growing problem with these sales devaluing games. Most developers can expect few to no sales unless their game is currently discounted and featured. So It's true that a single successful promotion can make an indie game an overnight success, but it also makes things increasingly dicey as the consumer mentality becomes that it's not worth paying full price for any game and developers are therefore less able to budget based on how much their game "should" sell for. I mean, shifting a million units at half price is a lot less revenue than shifting a million at full price.
There is a reason that some big budget games like GTA 5 only show up after soaking up all those $60 sales on consoles (at least, I presume it eventually will turn up on PC), and others like Red Dead Redemption never come to PC at all.
