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it does cost more. I am not saying the $60 is justified but for pc you get all types of problems resulting from different hardware and software. developers regularly get ripped on these issues and a lot of time is spent fixing problems that only occur in a few %.
Those are publishing fees. Console games have publishing fees as well. However, console publishers also have to pay console manufacturers large amounts of money for certification, and if the game happens to fail certification, then the devs need to fix the game and then pay again to send it back to certification. Those fees do not exist for PC games.
But then I see the thousands of dollars of hardware in your sigs.What the hell is $5-$15 to anyone on a forum like this? Who are you all kidding?
The whole thing just kind of makes me chuckle, that's all.
Don't care for it. They're charging what the market can bear, apparently, but given the current state of the market, there's no particular driving force behind it. I'm of the opinion that if you're going to raise the price of your products, there should be a compelling reason for it. In this case, I don't believe there is one.
It has to some extent. DLC played a major role in the 2008-2009 revenue increase, according to the PCGA. Revenue for PC games in 2009 hit $13.1B versus $11B in 2008. Annual revenues of $13.1B certainly make this a not unsubstantial industry.
They don't make less money if the PC variant is priced $10 less than the X360/PS3 variant as the cost difference doesn't line the publisher's coffers: It goes to Microsoft/Sony.
Profit per copy sold is higher for PC games compared to console games, even at $50 versus $60. PC development costs are also often cheaper.
Console development kits are expensive, you need to use the console manufacturer's own development tools, you need to train people to be familiar with requirements specific to certain consoles (each manufacturer has an extensive list of requirements that all games must comply with to pass certification), sending games in for certification is very expensive, etc.
I won't pretend to know exact numbers, but my information comes from talking to people who are intimately familiar with this kind of stuff.
Yes.
PCs aren't a development wasteland like you're making them out to be. Regardless of hardware variations, the way a game interfaces with your hardware is done through standard APIs. If the game code will work fine on one machine, it will work fine on most other ones as well. It's up to hardware manufacturers to write proper drivers so there aren't any issues with games, but that isn't the responsibility of the developers. And then you have manufacturer/developer partner programs like nVidia's The Way It's Meant To Be Played and ATI's equivalent, which go a step further in making games run better and be more compatible with hardware.
Very true. Things aren't always as straightforward as they might seem, though — the more research I do into the aspect of game programming, the more I'm coming to the understanding that it's not quite as elegant as it would appear to be on the surface. The APIs address a large chunk of compatibility issues (because that was, and still is, the goal of DirectX), but not absolutely everything. The prospect of documenting precisely how things work in the APIs is an insurmountable task, even for a company as large as Microsoft. And when you add in the potential of slight quirks in hardware drivers, things tend to become a pretty big mess on occasion.