Wholesale cost of games in Germany

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NJ5 said:
I don't know if I'm seeing the situation correctly, but this is how I see it:

Publishers - they pay a team of dozens (or sometimes hundreds) of highly-skilled people to work for a few years, besides the fixed costs such as rental space, hardware, software licenses, logistics and advertising.

Retailers - they rent a few square meters of space, pay minimum wage to a bunch of (mostly) clueless college students, and spend some money on logistics and advertising.

Of those two, who do you think should have the higher profit? Maybe I'm being naive in my mental picture of each one's costs, but I think it's unfair to have retailers profiting as much or more than publishers do.

Actually your view isn't quite correct, since you could think that the financial risk the retailer takes, is the same in comparision to what the publishers take. The small retailers can't afford to invest high amounts of money for their warehouse and they need to sell x% percent of the games they take in order to remain profitable and every new copy they sell after "x" needs a separate investment, when after selling x number of units, the publisher is getting basically pure profit from every unit they sell. Or another way to put it, publishers invest 10€ per game for the first two hundred thousand copies (with two million dev costs), while retailer invests 30€ per every copy they sell.