They can always charge 999999999999999999999999,- € for games. Keep the following rules in mind:
Demand always exceeds supply to an absurd degree.
Price elasticity doesn’t exist.
The average willingness to pay for games is way above the 8,40 €, approaching infinity, contrary to the European displacement study on page 170 paragraph 4.
100 % of game pirates will buy games if they can’t pirate games, therefore DRM good.
It’s funny really. They probably could continued growth had Tim Sweeney just swallowed his pride and accepted the 30% commission rate. Instead, the game has a nearly non-existent prominence on mobile because of it.
Wanna know which game I last broke my “no pre-orders” rule for?
No Man’s Sky. The game that was a tech demo for the first year or so after release. It’s become a hell of a game since then, but it taught me a valuable lesson and I haven’t bought a game since then.
It’s kinda the natural progression of late stage hypercapitalism though. Used to be that you spent all your money up front, then your sales recouped your investment and hopefully generated you a profit. Once game companies figured out OTA patches they realized that they can push a lot of QA back until after release and use pre-orders and day 1 sales to fund it. Then with DLC they realized that they can sell the untested skeleton of a game up front and use presales and early sales to fund development. The natural progression seems to be the Star Citizen model, where you get huge chunks of your sales up front and use that to determine what you’ll develop and when (if ever) you’ll release it
The Bandcamp sale is hopefully good news. Songtradr looks like they’re just in the music business and don’t (from their Wikipedia page) have any obviously dodgy investors.
They also bought 7digital.com this year, which is a site I sometimes buy MP3s from since they have a better selection of mainstream record-label stuff than Bandcamp (no Amazon MP3s here in Canada).
Almost like crying about Steam “exclusives”, creating an actual exclusivity PC war, and handing out free games to prop up a shitty marketplace and launcher wasn’t such a good financial decision…
Well, competition for Valve might not be the worst thing.
On the other Hand I’m not sure if we would have gotten vive or steam deck if valve didn’t have a money printing machine with steam.
I’m rather certain that most companies would be worse for consumers, with the level of monopoly (/market dominance) that steam enjoys
@TheYang@Fazoo
Really like your perspective on it. Watching Disney and EA scoop up multiple IPs than misuse them like they are really puts Valve into perspective lol. At least Valve has the Steam Sales which is the most consumer friendly i've ever seen in recent history lol. Next to Sega promoting us to scream at our teachers and parents lmao.
This is the part that blows my mind. When you have a money-printing machine like Fortnite and you still manage to lose money, maybe it’s the CEO you need to be firing.
Like other commenters here, I’m hopeful. Epic owning Bandcamp was pretty scary. They never really answered questions about it and a lot of folks were worried it could have gone the Epic Store route. Epic might honestly have sucked up all the data and sold it off already, though. We don’t know what the future will hold; I feel like no Epic is at worst a neutral position. Songtradr is at least in the music business and isn’t headed by Tim Sweeney.
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