outlawauron said:
MTZehvor said:
While that's true, America lags behind the rest of the developed world in terms of citizens who have fast internet, particularly the Western Europe video game market, Australia, and Japan, largely because unlike those areas, the US's internet market functions much more like an oligopoly, which keeps prices from being lowered as easily by competition. Telecom companies have also made a habit of splitting up regions in the US and focusing on them exclusively as opposed to trying to compete in other areas, whereas in many European countries such as Britain, governments force telecom companies to rent out their infrastructure for smaller companies to use in order to reduce barrier to entry and encourage competition.
My point in all of this is that while America is not the entire world, when it comes to the video game market that developers are interested in appealing to, they are as far behind as anyone out there. Will it limit audiences? Sure, to some extent, but it also eliminates publisher fees, and the audiences it would be losing from the rest of the world are generally ones that don't play video games. From a developers' standpoint, especially when you're likely to have to meet strict censorship standards in order to have your games published in a certain area (like China, for example), it's probably a smarter business decision to simply focus on areas you know your game can sell reasonably well in and follow a more cost effective method than continue to use a more expensive business model for the sake of appealing to a very unknown crowd.
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Japan yes, but the US isn't far behind Europe and is light years ahead of Australia when it comes to fast internet. You grossly exagerrate the costs, and while the structure and dominance of some companies in areas leads to less growth and service, it's not unaffordable.
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Australia's figures are largely misrepresentitive due to where much of the population lives. Within large cities, Australia's connection quality rates slightly above the US (citing Akamai's State of the Internet Report), which is where game sales largely operate.
As for costs, I'm not sure what exactly you're claiming I'm exaggerating, because I mentioned several. The costs of contracting a publisher? Of localization? Of producing physical copies altogether? According to Feed Vibe, 30% of the revenue from any video game sold via a separate publisher goes to said publisher, and another 20% goes to the retailer. In other words, that's a full 50% of revenue being lost right there. Developers will be more than willing to drop large sections of the population in order to make up that additional 50%, especially if they're larger companies with shareholders consistently pushing them for greater profits.
