It had a shaky start, but Valve eventually got it right with Steam, and much of it comes down to pricing. EA's Origin has a functional enough front end these days, but if you launch it up right now there's very little to lure you away beyond a couple of second rate exclusives. They need more bargains over there!
Steam gets almost all the PC games sales now..How do you feel about this ??
- Thread starter chaparral
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![[TW]Fox](/data/man-of-honor/2009.png){kind=avatar}
Your two paragraphs contradict each other. If negotiation takes place over the cut Steam take from the sale, then by its very nature the final price is influenced by Valve.
It is Valve who are responsible for the costs of using the Steam retail environment. Therefore, at the end of the day, it is Valve who have the biggest say on price.
If you want to sell your Widgit in my shop and I say 'no problem, you can take the money from the sale but I want £10 per unit' and you then sell the item at £14.99 when its £9.99 everywhere else as a result then I can't exactly say I don't set the pricing of items in my shop, can I?
Do I feel it's fair? It's bit of a difficult question to answer... It's fair in the sense that there are a few other competitors to Steam, but they haven't delivered anywhere near the support, price or platform that Steam has offered for years now.
Steam is in the position it is today because they offer fantastic support, great deals, easy to use platform and amazing features that they continue to work on - No other online gaming shopping platform has come close (I'm looking at you Origin, you hunk of junk *Spit*
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Steam is in the position it is today because they offer fantastic support, great deals, easy to use platform and amazing features that they continue to work on - No other online gaming shopping platform has come close (I'm looking at you Origin, you hunk of junk *Spit*
)[TW]Fox;23694994 said:
The same applies to every other digital distributor, they all have to take their cut somewhere.
Steam is no different in that regard. That is just how that business model works.
It is not unique to Steam.
With your logic, yes you are right, every digital distributor sets the price of every game ever sold.
Borderlands 2 for example is £29.99 at nearly all digital distributors +/- a few pence. Valve have nothing to do with other peoples prices yet the price is the same?
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I don't see why some people are bashing Steam, what you individuals seem not realise is that Steam is the single reason that PC games have made a comeback more recently. Not digital downloads in general (Steam arguably started this for games), not indie games, not kickstarter and definitely not the quality of PC games... just Steam. It was also helped by Valve letting developers release games on their platform without a major publisher being involved. Microsoft don't allow this for Xbox live, you need a (very) major publisher or you don't get a slot (for some, this meant striking a deal with one and giving them a chunk of your profits...for doing nothing), and Sony while a little more welcoming of indies (because they've been on the back foot) still have a long certification process. While I'm not sold on Steam Greenlight yet (this is very new though, and so perhaps not relevant), everything else they've certainly done right and in the best interests of the industry as a whole.
In light of the above, so what if Steam have a monopoly (if you can even call it that, numerous outlets sell Steam keys and Valve see no money from that... just more people to advertise to), frankly I'd prefer this to the state PC gaming was in a few years ago. It was almost dead in the water, which sucked for me because I hate playing FPS games with a dumb gamepad, hate having nothing ever released except 3rd person action games and COD and most of all hate having to develop solely for horribly limited hardware (360 and PS3) because that's all anyone will dare give you money to make games for (I'm a game dev).
In light of the above, so what if Steam have a monopoly (if you can even call it that, numerous outlets sell Steam keys and Valve see no money from that... just more people to advertise to), frankly I'd prefer this to the state PC gaming was in a few years ago. It was almost dead in the water, which sucked for me because I hate playing FPS games with a dumb gamepad, hate having nothing ever released except 3rd person action games and COD and most of all hate having to develop solely for horribly limited hardware (360 and PS3) because that's all anyone will dare give you money to make games for (I'm a game dev).
Not sure what your point is? People are saying Digital Distribution *is* expensive. It is. The whole 'who takes the cut' thing came about because people started to argue the price is nothing to do with Valve, which of course is rubbish.
Borderlands 2 for example - your example - is just £23.98 at OcUK. For a physical box that somebody has had to ship from publisher to wholesaler to OcUK.
Ordering it online means no delivery. No packaging. No wholesaler. No retailer. Various firms, all with profit margins and costs, out of the loop.
And the result? The game costs more money...
[TW]Fox;23696117 said:
but we'd need to see a break down of who gets what percentage to comapre apples to apples. I have my doubts that Steam take 30% from every sale as that's a very big chunk when publishers are complaining about margins in single digit percentage points. Also what enables The Rainforest to sell at cheaper? Surely the distributor doesn't have enough leeway to give a huge discount that allows £7 off the RRP?
It doesn't really matter who is 'taking the cut'. The fact remains that Digital Distribution is often significantly more expensive than buying a retail boxed copy. Surely you can see this is bonkers? If there is profit in OcUK selling Borderlands 2 for £23.98, which there obviously is, then where is the extra £7 going for the digital copy, given its obvious that making the digital copy available should cost significantly less than shipping out physical stock?
Sadly it wont change because everyone blindly pays huge money for digital distribution. I don't, I buy the cheaper physical copies wherever possible but the sheer number of people who just click 'BUY' and whack it on the credit card with everything else mean that this sort of practice will continue.
Years and years ago it was billed as the main benefit of digital distribution. Download it direct to your PC! No box. No production facilities. No worldwide shipping. No staff behind the counter of thousands of shops. It'll obviously be cheaper. Yea, sure.
Digital Distribution is for the industry, not for you. It's there to allow the industry to increase profit through monopoly power and to control what happens to the products you buy after you've bought it. Including the ability to deny you access to your entire game collection - products you've purchased - for lots of reasons they devise themselves and they enforce themselves.
Convenience is the hook that gets the customer in. This is business when consumer protection laws dont get in the way.
Sadly it wont change because everyone blindly pays huge money for digital distribution. I don't, I buy the cheaper physical copies wherever possible but the sheer number of people who just click 'BUY' and whack it on the credit card with everything else mean that this sort of practice will continue.
Years and years ago it was billed as the main benefit of digital distribution. Download it direct to your PC! No box. No production facilities. No worldwide shipping. No staff behind the counter of thousands of shops. It'll obviously be cheaper. Yea, sure.
Digital Distribution is for the industry, not for you. It's there to allow the industry to increase profit through monopoly power and to control what happens to the products you buy after you've bought it. Including the ability to deny you access to your entire game collection - products you've purchased - for lots of reasons they devise themselves and they enforce themselves.
Convenience is the hook that gets the customer in. This is business when consumer protection laws dont get in the way.
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[TW]Fox;23696880 said:
With the exception of Blizzard (who overprice stuff on their store as to not undercut the retailers of whom they rely on still), Steam is not expensive at all... it's in fact "normal" priced, and then when they have their sales (which are all the time, let's face it) they're actually very cheap.
What you're failing to realise is why retail boxed PC games have become so cheap. They were never that cheap before, or hadn't you noticed? Well I'll tell you why, it's because they have no choice. In order to sell any copies whatsoever, they have to vastly undercut Steam wherever possible...which has in turn resulted in pitiful profit margins for physical retailers and has almost put them out of business entirely.
You, the end consumer, are now getting games cheaper than ever, even through Steam. Without digital distribution, crazy cheap Steam sale deals would never exist and people wouldn't have libraries of in some cases hundreds of PC games all stored digitally, they'd more likely have dozens at a stretch instead all stacked on a shelf.
Not everyone has high speed internet though, on my 8mb line i get around 2.5mb due to the distance i live from the exchange so a 10 gig game takes a couple of days to dl.
About 2 years ago BT laid fibre down in the main roads where i live but have not let anyone connect to it and in a village of 11,000 people thats a lot of potential customers they are loosing out on
So all in all it's easier for me to drive 10 mins to my local Tesco (for the bigger titles) and install from disk.
This is completely false, physical copies of PC games - just like physical copies of console games - have always been available cheaply (mainly through online retailers) because they're competing to shift physical units that have cost them money in the first place. A digital copy of a game hasn't cost anything if it doesn't sell, which is why prices are often so high.
The industry is in valves hands because everyone else either partially of fully abandoned it.
Valve stuck by PC gaming and is now reaping the rewards, so despite monopolies being a bad thing, for now we're lucky it's valve that won.
It also makes you think how many industries get killed because of band wagon jumpers when in reality the consumers are there, it's just the businesses aren't interested in the market because they're bad at math.
My understand is the PC market has always been about as big as any single console market, if not bigger. Now if you take the entire console market together, it sometimes will dwarf the PC market, but that's not really a fair comparison. Unfortunately these figures were banded about and people who were obviously getting paid too much proclaimed the death of PC gaming and are now crying foul when they realise they play such a little part in such a big and open market.
I imagine some of this has been Microsoft/Sony's doing with exclusivity contracts because Valve and Blizzard have been making money hand over fist this entire time so the above logic doesn't make sense for the CEO of a company to make. So I'd say there hasn't really been a comeback though I suppose it's a good thing we're getting more games ported than we were a few years ago.
- Physical stores stopped stocking PC games.
- Developers / Publishers proclaimed PC gaming was dead.
- On-line stores didn't particularly compete.
- Nobody was interested in digital distribution.
Valve stuck by PC gaming and is now reaping the rewards, so despite monopolies being a bad thing, for now we're lucky it's valve that won.
It also makes you think how many industries get killed because of band wagon jumpers when in reality the consumers are there, it's just the businesses aren't interested in the market because they're bad at math.
Stanith said:
My understand is the PC market has always been about as big as any single console market, if not bigger. Now if you take the entire console market together, it sometimes will dwarf the PC market, but that's not really a fair comparison. Unfortunately these figures were banded about and people who were obviously getting paid too much proclaimed the death of PC gaming and are now crying foul when they realise they play such a little part in such a big and open market.
I imagine some of this has been Microsoft/Sony's doing with exclusivity contracts because Valve and Blizzard have been making money hand over fist this entire time so the above logic doesn't make sense for the CEO of a company to make. So I'd say there hasn't really been a comeback though I suppose it's a good thing we're getting more games ported than we were a few years ago.
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[TW]Fox;23694994 said:
Your example sets a flat £10 cut, the person you are quoting is stating a percentage. Regardless of how valid their point is, your comparison isn't.
Steady now, let's not give them any idea shall we?
They're already making plenty of money, there's no need to start donating more.
Fine.
Steam offers me so much convenience vs. the few remaining shops where I can buy PC games.
They have a big selection including weird / old stuff.
GAME or wherever do not. PC has been a secondary or tertiary thing for them for ages. I still buy from game because I like their cheap rack but that is like the last place that still does PC games on the highstreet.
I actually like having an online shelf of games I can just redownload from whenever I fancy. It's more convenient than lugging a load of boxes around with me.
Their DRM is relatively unobtrusive. Their software doesn't act as an obstruction like AIDS For Windows Live or EA Organ. The community stuff makes sense and I have a lot of friends on the list there.
I don't really see why I wouldn't buy from Steam.