Samus Aran said:
Then why are there so many sales on Steam? Why are retail sales for PC games so low compared to console games? Why are PC gamers often treated as second rate citizens by third party developers/publishers? |
1) because people buy full price who are highly interested. But you can grab less interested parties via sales. And digital lacks the distribution costs of other platforms so it makes sense that they can do more sales and still make profit. Many games on sale on steam are games that were already successful, that's why publishers can afford to put them on sale.
2) Because PC doesn't respect right of first purchase anyway (you can't resell, trade in, or return PC games), most people buy digital. If there are no real benefits to buying retail vs digital, might as well get the perks of digital.
3) Number of reasons for that. One is that PC games take additional effort to do right and making a good port is key to success. Another is that PC demographics are harder to guage due to the ubiquity of PCs. With many companies relying quite heavily on analysts and marketing teams for making decisions (rather than developers), this uncertainty makes them nervous. Some companies get their knickers in a twist over piracy as well, though there's no real proven loss of revenue there. Some companies don't like playing by Steam's rules and know success outside Steam is uncertain. Also, the genres known to do well on PC aren't the same as consoles, which makes companies doing ports uneasy. Basically, companies are spineless these days.
