By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
MTZehvor on 17 March 2016
Edit Thread
outlawauron said:
MTZehvor said:

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.

You have a stronger argument for the same in  the US...

and I was talking about the cost of internet. Sorry for not being as clear.

So the argument is essentially that I'm underestimating the cost of bringing high quality internet to large groups of the video game playing demographic, if I'm understand this correctly.

I've got two responses for that. Firstly, internet costs are largely irrelevant for developers, all things considered, so long as their profit isn't affected. Keep in mind that, assuming the numbers I referenced in my last post are right, developers are losing 50% of revenue due to publishing and retailing fees. What that means is that (assuming no seller fees for something like Steam) a developer can sell half as many games digitally as they would physically and still make the same profit.

Now, obviously, some money will inevitably go to downloading platforms like Steam, so it's not going to be the full 50%. Valve won't post any official numbers, but numerous indie developers who have been interviewed have said they're very happy with the percentages given. So let's say that, for the sake of argument, there's a 20% cut for Valve. That means developers can still make as much profit from selling 5 games digitally as they would from selling 8 physically.

Here's the point to all that; developers that go digital can afford to ignore quite a few people now; an additional 30%, at least. So even if the costs for bringing internet to people are high, chances are...the developers won't care. Because it's still a better deal for them to just produce the product more cheaply and sell to a smaller crowd than to mass produce it via an expensive process and sell to a larger group.

Secondly, though, and perhaps more importantly, is that fast internet is pretty much avaliable to the VAST majority of people in America, Japan, and Western European countries where video games are prominent. America, as I mentioned before, lags behind the other two, and as a statistic for the US, according to WhiteHouse.gov, 98% of Americans have access to high speed wireless internet. $7 billion is currently being put into funding additional high speed internet infrastructure across the country, which will only bring that number higher. So, in short, the costs aren't even what I'm concerned about at this point; the infrastructure, in most places, is either already there or is being brought there by public funding currently. And yeah, while this excludes much of rural Australia, keep in mind that, as the Akamai article mentions, that's not a particularly popular video game market to begin with, so developers probably aren't concerned about losing them in the first place.