For lack of a better name, this is a discussion about the half life for pricing of games, not the game Half-life. Some games seem to hold their prices for long periods of time, for example Halo 3 or Mario Kart. Other games get discounted quickly. I won't name names, but you know what they are.

For example:

Game A: Sells for nearly full retail price after a year, because the market supports that pricing

Game B: Gets discounted heavily and bundled with systems months after release, sales steady but game may be priced 1/3 original retail price after a year.

Both games have the same sales, yet the amount of profit generated would be completely lopsided. Game A is far more valuable.

Yet there is no way to track these differences. I don't have a solution, but I think that a full price sale is worth twice as much as a game that is discounted 50% or more. Yet most people seem to treat these sales as identical, which they are not.

It would be nice if there was some way to track average retail pricing of products. It is possible to create a robot to poll the biggest retailers for pricing.

Games should become more profitable after a time, since the fixed development costs are paid off at some point. After a few months/years the only costs are retail/publisher margin and the physical cost.

So even tracking price reductions wouldn't account for true profit. A sale is a sale. If people coming here to look at figures solely cared about profit, a lot of games and several entire consoles wouldn't even figure (PS3, Xbox, DC...)

I have similar qualms about the magic 1 million sales mark that everyone seems to point to. Some developers games take years to crawl past a million yet are cited as having good sales but I would argue having the money trickle in at such an immensly slow rate nullifies any profit the publisher would have made. I'm almost positive that any developer would rather sell a million copies first week rather than a million over a year or even 1.5 million over 2 years.