| NobleTeam360 said: This should be known. I mean you remove the middle man with digital sales where do you think that extra profit goes? |
You don't totally get rid of the middle man there are costs that replace some of the middle man cost in digital. "Hosting" a title isn't cheap; it isn't like the publisher/developer gets the retail/logistics part of the money as pure profit. Plus the extra money usually is used to finance retail incentives; for example the money that Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft allows the retailers to retain in the sales of the "points" cards.
I know that Nintendo uses a third party host for the eShop, Akamai, which hosts media streams for companies like ABC. They charge a flat rate plus bandwidth. And just to note that commercial clients don't get free bandwidth or unlimited hosting, I remember getting into a discussion with someone about this a few years back.
And in gaming there really isn't a middle man for retail, at least for the major chains which account for 99% of sales, since they have their own logistics channels. The smaller "mom-and-pop" stores do use them be they are not as middle man as people seem. When I tryed to start my own business the "middle man" was Jack-of-all-Games, and they were owned by Take-Two interactive. I stated it as was because i think they were sold off a few years ago to SYNNEX, who is a middle man company in its truest sense.
