Because both of those costs are absorbed by the retailers, not the publishers.

But if you’re just selling on Steam, distributing something digitally is for all intents and purposes a big fat zero in the expenses column.

Your brick and mortar retailer took a cut, Steam takes a cut, that’s more or a less a wash, but all the upfront costs before you get your plastic on the shelf with retail don’t…

You are hopping all over this thread talking about AWS but you’re acting like the fluorescent lights and air conditioning systems in [retailer of choice] kept themselves on, because there are the types of infrastructure you’re comparing. You’re accusing people of treating digital games as fire-and-forget, while then…

Games are more profitable than ever and also riskier than ever. The tiniest slip can send an organization spiraling. You don’t need to look at the headlines too long to find a dozen places struggling to keep the lights on. No doubt the infinite tail monetization models are something certain corners would’ve landed on…

These are not prices being absorbed by most publishers. These are included in the platform cuts, which are not substantially different than the price of shelf space at brick and mortar retailers. If they are directly absorbing those costs, they have a 0% retailer overhead because they’re selling directly, which also…

$50 did briefly become more common during the transition to CDs, but $50 in 1995 is still $100 today. There have always been games above and below the typical sale price, but acting like game prices have exhibited any kind of steady climb when someone 30 years ago would find todays game prices typical of their time…

This is emphatically not true. SNES games regularly cost $70 in the early 90s. There were some $50 titles from the beginning, but $60 has been the standard price since well before the 360, and it was in fact significantly more common to exceed that price before that. It was only around then that everything started to…

It’s a crowded market. The expensive stuff is a (generally quite successful) way to stand out from the crowd. There are plenty of smaller games that do phenomenally well, but that masks how way, way, way more smaller games sell peanuts. Going absolutely massive on AAA is a huge investment but its an investment with a…

No they haven’t? $60 was a typical price for a SNES game, and $70 SNES games were not uncommon. That’s $130-$140 in today’s dollars. Even if you’re counting DLC expansion passes or w/e, those editions tend to go for ~$100, which is still comparatively less.

Yeah, game distribution costs have shrunk to next to nothing, and digital game sales scale arbitrarily high for effectively no extra cost. Selling 10 copies or 10,000 copies is (roughly) the same cost of revenue. And games as a market are much larger now than they’ve ever been previously. So some of those increased…

Games at large almost certainly should’ve ripped off that $60 band-aid sooner than they did. That price holding for over 3 decades was nuts, and brought alllll the other alternative monetization methods, some of which turned out to be infinite money glitches and obviated a sticker price at all. But now that all those…

But for that model to remain consistent you’d need to rotate the stick to look left and right instead of pushing it sideways. Whereas the model of pushing in the direction you’d like the camera to point (rather than simulating physically manipulating the camera) is consistent between up/down/left/right.

Don’t get me…

Lovely reflection, although it feels like there should be a content warning for aughts teens just dropping a Tila Tequila reference out of the blue. Suddenly firing up long dormant synapses like that is traumatic for our aging brains.

I mean any leak is bad, and there could very well be stuff Sony doesn’t want public/in competitors hands in there, but the summary view of the information is all pretty anodyne. Basically sounds like they social engineered their way onto a Sharepoint server or similar. It’s not great, but it’s probably not worth the…

No, what was on my mind was “this is a lot of Tate looking pictures, which I remember someone else mentioning elsewhere, but its really standing out to me that thats all thats here” so I said that, and then when made to elaborate because saying that somehow makes me a homophobe, I did so.

Your life has gotta be…

Not the only, the way its meant to be played, what the fuck else would that expression mean other than its the right way to play it. Someone is definitely being obtuse here but it isn’t me.

And what the fuck do you mean being sexual is reason to complain? It’s a bunch of anodyne portraits of his self-insert. The one…

“I don’t really have a problem with it”
“ You can certainly do that if you want”

I have a dead miner who spawns in almost every doorway in the game for me. I had one of those random proc gen quests to rescue them, I cleared out the bandits but they died to fauna on the way back, but it apparently never flagged them as dead (even though the quest failed), so every time it thinks theyve gotten too…

That would be exactly my response to you. It’s a roleplaying game. As in you roleplay. Do you know what isn’t roleplaying? Just being your own damn self. You can certainly do that if you want, but saying that’s somehow the right way to play RPGs is so fucking sad.

Quantic Dream games are my guilty pleasure of all guilty pleasures. David Cage is such a bag of shit, the games inevitably veer into unintended absurdist comedy with how poorly they stick certain aspects, and yet I can’t help but to love them.