ceyan -> RE: Steam (or impulse i suppose) ? (5/24/2010 2:29:55 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Ocid Well since there aren't any public sales figures for Steam its a little hard to do that. What i was meaning by saying i find it hard to believe was that adding their products to other DD sites resulted in sales so poor it wasn't even worth the effort. Exactly what distrubution costs are involved in delivering content digitally besides the bandwidth cost. I could honestly careless about having a client to download some stuff. What i do have a problem with however is a company that says i have a set period of time in which to download something i paid for and if i want longer than a month to download it i have to pay extra. There are plenty of sales figures form Steam, just none from Valve. A good place to look is independent game developers who post up their data or quarterly/annual financial reports from the bigger developers. Not everyone does it, but plenty have. Furthermore, I said "Publishing" and "Distribution", meaning (as Erik pointed out) you get other costs involved such as a cut to Valve as the hosting service. It doesn't seem like that much, but there was a interesting presentation at the GDC (can't remember which one specifically) about the various platforms distribution methods and expectations for people selling their games through them. The report was general, but stated you could expect to lose 30-50% of your potential growth from sales on services like Steam to those costs. I'm not sure how that scales based on price, so it might not be quite so much of a hit for a full price game, but its still not a small amount. And you tack on a lot of baggage for that in some cases, and it doesn't do a whole lot of good if your primary sales via (for example) Steam are all done via 50/75% sales they do. I wasn't kidding when this is all Economics 101. Its entirely possible, and likely, that Matrix could make money off of publishing to other services, but there are numerous things which throw a grey spin to those black and white financial reports.
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