AngryLittleAlchemist said:
Aside from software sales and OS sales how would they make as much from PC gaming as they do on consoles? I mean don't get me wrong I'm a strong advicate for PC being a healthy platform but unless you develop hardware or have a store as popular as Steam you'd get less money then you do from selling overpriced TV boxes |
Aside from software and OS sales, they never would make as much money as they do on consoles. Once you say "aside from software and OS sales" you are excluding everything but sales of console hardware. It would be like asking an ice cream shop owner how they plan on making money aside from selling ice cream. The short answer is they don't plan on making money outside of ice cream. Ice cream is their main bussiness.
MS wants OS and Software sales (or subscriptions) to be their main bussiness. Maybe they want to slowly move all the MS IPs to a "games as a service" platform on PC. I mean, they don't exactly have to rival steam in order to make easy money. If enough gullible consumers buy into the "games as a service" subsciption they can rake in the money. For all we know Valve will go public as a company, have a change of management, and pull the same "games as a service" nonsense. In other words Valve could get new people running it, and those new people could wind up being scumbags. Or maybe publishers will finally grow tired of trying to coax money out of us with DLC, and microtransactions. Publishers might throw their hands up in the air, and sell games at $60 while requiring an online connection to a subscription service owned by the publisher of said game. That's basically what PSN and XBlive are right now anyway. The multiplayer aspect of your game is locked behind a subscription service. Why not take it a step further and make the entire game that way?
Or maybe MS is going to play the good guy, and sell AAA games digitally *without* taking a massive 30% publishing fee out of a $60 game sale. That would be good compitition to Steam, who currently *does* take a 30% cut for little more than publishing a game. PC games could and should be $30 to $45 for a digital version on release day for most AAA games. The reason why it isn't is because Valve, and developers don't want to pass the savings of publishing digitally on to the consumer. I mean, for every $60 game sale from a brick and mortar store, it costs $5 to ship a physical game, and $10 to pay the brick and mortar store to sell the game. There's plenty of room there for MS to go ahead and sell a 3rd party PC game, and say "Hey gamers! We are gonna be nice and pass the savings on to you. This game that just launched only costs $45 on our storefront, but it costs $60 on steam. Switch to us and save!"
