Samus Aran said:
Nuvendil said:
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.
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You make decent points, but at the same time, can you really say that console gamers aren't more likely to buy a game at full price than PC gamers? That's not what I've seen on PC gaming forums and my friends.
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I would say the big plus for publishers on consoles is preorders. Because more console players prefer physical, preorders are easier to drive up. Also, console players seem to be less informed often times. PC gamers tend to be more informed and less interested in preordering unless there's a big in game bonus. And of course, Preorders are always full price. That's probably the primary source of distortion. Also, because sales can be quite crazy on steam, people are more willing to buy more games that they are partially interested in. This also could explain the reason there are many purchases of games on sale. There are still plenty of early, full price buyers, but more people also buy more games on the side that they are only somewhat interested in.
