1706

Apples and Oranges for PC from the old days, assuming the same MSRP and marketing.

Retail
MSRP = $60
Retailer discount = $25 to $30
Physical cost of goods = $3 to $5
Cost of shipping and distribution = $1 to $2
Marketing = $3 to $5
Developer royalty (if external) = $3 to $10
NET: Publisher receives between $8 and $25. Probably on average 25% which is $15.

Digital
Digital price = $60
Digital distributor share = $18
Marketing = $3 to $5
Developer royalty (if external) = $4 to $12
NET: Publisher receives between $25 and $35. Average $30.

Doubling your margins pays for a lot of costs.

1707

Back in my day, Milk was a nickel!

1708

I doubt this will happen to a “big” game. No experienced publisher will make such a newbie mistake, and if Epic does such a stunt once, every other publisher will notice it too. The result would be an uphill battle in the negotiations for future store exclusives.

1709

Friend linked me to this the other day when I was complaining about the Metro Exodus Exodus. ;)

“When lots of stores compete, the result is a combination of better prices for you, better deals for developers, and more investment in new content and innovation.”

There is no competition if your games are exclusive, lol.

1710

There could be competition for exclusives, leading to developers getting better deals, making more money, and ultimately leading to a healthier industry. That’s his argument.

Since we’re talking PC gaming here, that just means store-exclusive. I really just don’t care. It isn’t like I’m have an Xbone and can’t play The Last of Us 2 without spending a couple hundred bucks on hardware and setting it up.

His argument doesn’t really hold up for players, but I see it as a non-issue in even the mid-term. Who’s going to burn money paying for exclusives on a PC store? Well when you launch a new one, you need to build market share. It’s all a marketing exercise. Same as the free games every month.

1711

Let’s speculate a bit. A game like Metro could cost, say, 100M$, including actual development, marketing, distribution and the console tax. Of these costs the money for the development is already gone, some of the marketing money too, although not all. Distribution is cheap, and even in-house in Europe. The console tax is a huge wad of cash though. For 3M copies sell-in for release Deep Silver needs roundabout 30M$ - and I doubt Sony and MS will wait for their money. So that’s short-term money DS needs.
Let’s further speculate that the PC as their secondary platform needs to make, a wild guess, 25M$ within the first year and another 25M$ through budget and long tail sales according to projections.
Now imagine: Deep Silver gets a call from Epic. They offer guarantees worth 20M$ in the first 12 months. Positive effects for DS:

  • DS can take this guarantee and use it as a colateral for a credit over 20M$. This money is available within days and it pays for 2/3rd of the console tax in the example above.
  • 20M$ budgeted for the Metro project years ago are now free to be used for other things.
  • They can still make a near-full-price release on Steam a year later. Then they’ll call it Ultimate Edition or whatever, and it will include a couple of DLCs and all patches. They’ll sell it for 50$ at release, minus a 20% discount.
  • The risk for DS as a company and their PC division just got significantly lower. Especially the risk of a conplete loss on the PC platform is gone.
  • Visibility on the Epic store is perfect. There’s only one other AAA game.
  • Marketing value. Now everybody and his dog knows Metro is coming out soon. Maybe the backlash was harder than expected, but who cares. The game is in the news everywhere, for free.
1712

“I get that it’s yet another launcher and if you have Steam installed you’d prefer to just use it. But if you want way better games to be built in the future, then please recognise what good this store can do,” added Sweeney.

“The proliferation of launchers is an annoying side effect of this, but the problem could eventually be solved through federated or decentralised software update tools. There are ongoing conversations about this.”

Ohhh this could be awesome. Steam or Epic or GOG as an API. Then you could get a true third party store UI that could run all of your games seamlessly. One launcher for everything.

1713

Yes, I spoke about that a couple hundred posts back. All the stores could offer an API, so tools like PlayNite wouldn’t need to hack together support.

My feeling is asking them all to conform to a standard API isn’t going to fly, but they could each offer their own, and document it, and that would be OK.

1714

If Epic Store is the catalyst for Store APIs then that’s a win in my book.

1715

Hey, another store offering free games is a win in my book by itself. But yeah, disrupting the Steam oligopoly is a very good thing, and Epic is just burning Fortnite money to do it.

1716

The free games for those that don’t own them are nice.

For me personally my backlog/unplayed library is so massive and already spread across a large number of platforms/stores that I barely register free game giveaways anymore. They just amount to more digital hoarding of things I will likely never touch.

1717

Rich people problems.

1718

Isn’t this more like being the only popular store in a mall? Not what you usually want.

1719

Yeah, they’re king of the hill but don’t know how big the hill is.

1720

Usually it’s 100 players.

1721

Rich people can worry about yachts, private islands and how many people they can fit on their jet. Due to extreme sales, you don’t have to be rich to have a backlog. Come on, don’t complain about other people being ridiculous, and then say something like that.

1722

Thanks for your contributions.

1723

Look at Moneybags Nesrie here with $5-$10 to shell out on a game during a Steam sale!

1724

If that!

Go to a Humble Bundle deal and you might not even pay $1 for a title. I keep seeing all these ideals about competition in price, so are we talking what, release day only because 1-2 years out picking up a title for less than 20 dollars isn’t good enough. Or is this some weird hope that Blizzard titles and Sims might drop down as quickly as others do which of course won’t happen because they have separate stores already.

1725

The rich use Other People’s Money to pay for games!

It’s the worst kept rich people secret. That’s why they are rich.