Duh. But we don't set the prices. Until it's main streamd* and it will be someday* your probliy better off just buying hard. Atleast you could resell it/gift it.

Exactly! But it isn't. That doesn't mean that this isn't true, that means fucking games companies are greedy and will charge the same for DD then take the extra margin they'd usually give to retail. Pretty sweet if you can get away with it, right? That's business.

please define.

Combine this with the "800,000 units to break even on an HD game" and we get a rough estimate of average HD costs. About $21.6 million by the intersection of these two statements, most likely not including any advertising.

PS: This is why DD earns pubs more money on PC than retail, and yes, it does let them set things cheaper than they'd otherwise be forced to. Do you really think PC games would still be $50 new if it weren't for DD?

Server cost, maintenance, bandwidth...

They can't sell the dd versions for less, if they do, retailers (their main source of revenue) will be very pissed-off with them as millions of customers would choose to buy new games  for 40$, instead of 60$. Now if they sold gutted or slimed down versions of their games online, they could justify the lower price by saying, it's not the full game. Imagine if Modern Warfare 3's online multiplayer was available seperately online for like 30$

Assuming this is correct, publishers take over 70% revenue of Online Distributed titles O_O'

Hmmm... I'm sure that developers make a bit more on DD aswel though. This is probably how SONY gets so many smaller devs interested in PSN.

Didn't NIS recently state that Nintendo's Royaltees were higher than SONY's? Now I'm wondering if this chart applies to both PS3 and 360...

This is why I think retailers should be pursuing some sort of print-on-demand capability that would remove the returns issue and most likely help out retailer margins, providing a cheaper overall product.

Dgc - You are correct. From my understanding, Nintendo has the highest royalty rate of the Big 3. As far as I know, MS charges slightly less than Sony, while both charge less than Nintendo.

Usually a lot less games get returned then sold and shipping costs get cheaper when you ship more.  So shipping a few copies back costs more then shipping a lot of copies out.