5938

“The era of Steam’s dominance is likely over, and Valve is going to have a tough time explaining to developers why they should take a lower cut of a similary sized or smaller pool of sales.”

5939

Oh look. It’s a garbage Forbes Contributor article covering the very tweets we already discussed in this thread.

5940

The “Valve is in trouble because an Epic exclusive was successful” hot takes are getting irritating too.

5941

Maybe Valve starts their pitch with “our community features exist, and our cloud saves work properly” and see how that goes.

I get that we’ve got a lot of industry folks here and appreciate that perspective but it feels… kind of gross when you pop in to pimp your wares in the face of the facts and discussion that we’ve been having for nearly 6000 posts now.

5942

Smaller pool of potential sales?

Ehhhhhhhh

5943

Until they release actual numbers, these articles seem dumb.

5944

5945
5946

Jesus, man. You’re just reposting old stuff now.

5947

Fair warning: we can’t really say for certain that the Epic Games Store had a positive effect on PC sales, mostly because it’s been seven years since Borderlands 2 and both the gaming industry writ large and the PC industry specifically are very different than they were back then.

From the same article you posted.

5948

Thanks for quoting the article (far preferred over vague insults or criticisms that others opted to do), and in this case I completely agree with the fair warning comment.

5949

I also find it curious the comparison is Borderlands 2, not the Pre-Sequel. Not sure what the distinction would be in sales data. And what is the total sales, console and PC? Are sales higher across the board? Are sales the same, but greater percentage on PC than before?

There is so much noise that Randy’s statement is meaningless.

5950

A peak CCU on a launch day that is twice the all-time peak CCU of the prior game Borderlands 2 is meaningless?

5951

I’m trying to do better.

It’s not the prior game though. the pre-sequel is. Borderlands 2 was before that. It’s a little weird they don’t mention that at all.

5952

I assume the Pre-Sequel isn’t mentioned because it was developed by 2K Australia with Gearbox only assisting.

5953

Thanks, I corrected my statement. I consider Borderlands 2 to be the superior game and I don’t have data but suspect it has a higher CCU than the pre-sequel; even this board has a recent resurgence of B2 discussion and play.

5954

I agree. I really enjoyed B2 and never even finished the prequel. The length of time really does matter. Everyone, not just industry insiders but people who track the industry in general, keeps telling me that there are more players now than ever, in gaming, but at the same time there is also more choices, it seems, … so it’s hard to say what a 7 year difference would make in when comes to numbers like that.

They seem happy with it though, so there is that.

5955

What Nesrie said, and also what is he total unit shift? Is higher PC users (which, even accepting at face value his is true, is not particularly informative) due to higher unit shift? Did heir console market stay the same while PC grew? Did sales across the board grow? Is there access to markets coughChinacough significantly different today such that PC sales are higher for that reason? Is this simply a case of competition, was there another major game at BL2’s launch that siphoned users (remember Randy said users, not sales!)?

Was there a long tail series benefit where the game has steadily grown sales of older games, so the audience is now present at launch when it wasn’t before? Remember, word of mouth on BL2 was quite strong so it could have had a long tail benefit due to people remembering how much more interesting it was.

Peak concurrent users doesn’t actually say anything other than there were a lot of people day 1. What is the total sales for day 1, week 1, month 1 etc in comparison. That would be far more meaningful.

5956

OK, all valid questions and I wish I was privy to answer them! I will simply say that PC CCU should not be ignored when discussed with an EGStore exclusive (console sales obviously don’t apply to the EGStore.)

5957

I mean good on them, I hope they are happy with their choice. I just think the choice of metric is uninformative, at best.

If the stat was, for example ‘we sold 100k units on Pc day 1 for Borderlands 2, and 200k day 1 for Borderlands 3’, that would tell us more. But it still would not paint a complete picture. Because if, say, console sales went from 300k day 1 to 250k day 1 then it says that the PC market grew, but some of that growth was at the expense of consoles.

And the foreign PC market is one I am very curious to the impact of. We know in Hollywood that foreign in general, and China in specific, are increasingly important to ticket sales. And that studios such as Marvel have higher across the board revenues, largely in part due to exploding foreign markets. Comparing Iron Man 1 to Iron Man 3. Those were 5 years apart, and 3 made >2x the money 1 did, and that is largely because of market changes.