First you admit that review bombing is rare. Then you try to make the case that money was somehow “stolen” because of review bombs as an excuse to delete reviews. There have been very few unjustified review bombs and there is no indication that sales suffered due to the action. In fact, the inevitable counter-response of positive reviews and the increased profile of the game most likely led to increased sales. Nothing was stolen and the attempt to use language indicating such shows an extreme and illogical bias.
Secondly, while I agree “garbage” appears in a number of reviews it is not enough to sway the score any more than the “friends and relatives” glowing reviews of games moves the needle. I rarely see true hate speech and always remember that one person’s garbage is another’s legitimate issue. I do not want developers determining what is “garbage” as quite a few on this very site have already outright said or indicated they would delete many unfavorable reviews. Hurt feelings is not a justification for removing reviews.
The options are not limited to “review system where your front page may show racist/sexist/hateful garbage” or “no reviews” and failure to pursue other options either is a failure of imagination or using these as excuses to attempt to limit the customer’s voice. If find it interesting that almost all of the largest online retailers in the US allows reviews but snowflake developers think they should be not be held to the same standards.
Developers should not need a safe space devoid of criticism from their customers in order to sell their wares.
I’m not sure about your economic theory here. The marginal cost is zero, so the price should be set for revenue maximisation. The cost of actually producing the game, and the cut steam/epic takes, are irrelevant in terms of the theoretical market price for the sale of the game at the storefront.
My gut feeling is in the real world things don’t quite work like that, and some of the reduced cost of sales/delivery will go to the consumer, but that more of it will go to the developer.
EDIT: actually my logic here is wrong, competition between games could drive prices down. I just don’t think the change from a 30% cut to a 12% cut for the storefront will make much difference in terms of developer pricing decisions.
It’s crazy to think that the 30% cut that Steam et al take doesn’t affect the target retail price of a developer’s product. Sure there are manipulations that’ll happen to get games priced at attractive values left-to-right digit values (such as 19.99 instead of 23.46), but overall the price developers need to charge in order to remain in business will change.
I think it’s incredibly naive to assume that developers won’t simply begin charging a lower rate in an attempt to lure additional sales away from their competitors. I’m sure some will try to stick with their original MSRP but if the cost for an entire platform has just lowered by some percentage, then the price for the platform is going to trend lower.
Edit: gah, sorry. I only saw your edit there after the post :)
Edit 2: Changing the revenue that developers receive from 70% to 88% is a 25% increase. That’s a significant amount that for all but the cheapest titles almost has to result in a meaningful price change even after accounting for left-to-right digit pricing.
Don’t really agree, and the 50%-70% change was also a gamechanger for indies.
I don’t think it’s like we’re selling widgets and competing aggressively for the exact same product over price. Mostly games win and make profit when they differentiate. And prices for games have not increased over time. No matter what, it’s a change in perpetuity that puts more cash in the hands of devs vs the store.
I agree. Uniqueness is going to provide some developers an opportunity to charge a premium over most developers – but they already do that. The question for them is whether they’ll be able to maintain those pricing levels against the other developers who now have a lower cost floor.
Agreed. I’m assuming the lower cost floor is going to be adopted broadly because if the storefronts don’t adapt to it, they’re going to be left behind. Steam may not like the idea of taking a significantly reduced cut, but they’ll eventually cave on that.
So now everyone has that lower cost floor. Now is that going to result in lower prices charged, or some magical utopia where the prices don’t change and those behind the production are suddenly more profitable? I’m sure Marx has a few theories on that.
Not sure anyone is painting a picture of a magical utopia - just making it possible for more devs to survive, and for those that do to reinvest that cash to make better games and to live lives with less uncertainty.
Nobody’s gonna force anyone use the Epic store. The PC marketplace is not going to shift to permanent exclusives. We are in a relatively brief window where there are some timed exclusives to launch said store. Once that window has passed, there won’t be any more and the store will live or die based on its momentum.
People will use the store they want, with the features they want. If they don’t like Epic’s store, they won’t use it, and they’ll get games where they want them.
If you feel strongly about forums, or feature X,Y,Z, you’re going to use the store that meets your needs and will have whatever game you want, and frankly, none of this storm is going to have mattered, because this period will be over.
At the end of it, Valve will have blinked on % and potentially other things, or they won’t.
And the world will merrily continue spinning.
It is well known that the overall review score moving to the squiggly line impacts sales. Why do you think Valve considered it such a big action to remove such reviews from counting towards that score?
They never forced any dev to distribute Steam keys for their own game. What are you even going on about? That they even allow it, means they don’t want to limit where you can sell your game.
