Digital Distribution: Publishers are poisoning the well

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defiant007

2[H]4U
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Whole bunch of whining for nothing. Game development costs are not based on making a box and a DVD, but a bunch of other things. So publishers make more with digital. This seems "unfair" with a few titles. For others it allows them to "survive"
 
Yeah, because publishers weren't surviving before the advent of digital distribution. :rolleyes:

Well I guess making twice as much profit whilst screwing your user base out of ownership rights makes it easier to survive, or to at least buy several more private jets and super cars.
 
jiminator said:
Look at how many gaming companies are continuing to shut down....
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When haven't gaming companies been shutting down? The 80's saw many amazing developer groups shut down , that doesn't mean the industry as a whole is in a doom "state".
 
Godmachine said:
When haven't gaming companies been shutting down? The 80's saw many amazing developer groups shut down , that doesn't mean the industry as a whole is in a doom "state".
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There weren't nearly as many gamers out there though. It's messed up that there are litlerally 100's of millions of current gen consoles/gaming PCs and most games don't sell a million. That's just fucked.

Gamestop has all of these guys by the balls, so even if EA wants to make things cheaper then retail at launch(not likely anyways) they really can't since Gamestop could just block them out in a major sector of retail.
 
defiant007 said:
Yeah, because publishers weren't surviving before the advent of digital distribution. :rolleyes:

Well I guess making twice as much profit whilst screwing your user base out of ownership rights makes it easier to survive, or to at least buy several more private jets and super cars.
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This, especially what's bolded.
 
It sucks but I'll admit it just doesn't affect me. You can call it voting with your wallet but personally I just don't pay that much for my games. I have restraint. Not one of the companies out and yes that includes Valve have earned $60 preorders, Limited editions or day one purchases from me. I honest to god haven't seen a game really earn 10/10 since HL2 and even ones that come close like shadow of the colossus are no name titles from developers not a part of this mess.
 
jiminator said:
Look at how many gaming companies are continuing to shut down....
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blame the publishers. its what you get when you sell yourself to companies like activision, THQ, EA.. you pretty much know the development company will die at some point.
 
And they wonder why I refuse to pay more than $30 for most of my games.
I haven't seen a game worth $60 released in over 2+ years.

Pay $30 now, and the DLC will bring it back up to $60 on some titles. I can't see myself investing up to $100 on one game (Core game and DLC).
 
The article seems to be quite pro-retail without actually stating as such. It's all "don't buy digital because greedy executives get more money from you than if you buy in stores!" The issue of retailers-extorting-publishers is not mentioned at all.

There's no way to prove that publishers will keep DD prices inflated until retail goes bye-bye.

Retailers force publishers to price themselves out of the DD market, which means that the DD stores and platforms are extremely restricted in how they can price games since they are all determined by the publisher, who is subservient to the retailers. If publishers aren't forced to set their game prices in stone for set amounts of time, they and digital stores will have more flexibility to implement Steam-like summer/holiday sales and address region-based price-fixing.

As for ownership removal, PC games in boxes have been getting that ever since activation codes became the craze. Going digital-only won't change that.
 
The pricing is actually more a function of retail stores. Big retailers don't let you give better deals to other people, otherwise they'll cut you off. So you can't go and sell an item to Walmart for a price that has them retail it at $50, and then sell it on your own website for $40. Do that, and Walmart will stop selling your product.

Well for now, retail sales are still really big business. Don't believe the hype, digital sales have not out stripped retail sales particularly for consoles. So publishers must keep retailers happy. That means that, other than sales, charging the same price online as in store. Now don't get me wrong, the publishers have no problem with extra money, but that is why it is so universal. You can't piss off the big retailers, not yet.

Give it time. eventually digital will be where it is at and the retailers will get told where to stick it by at least some publishers. However at this point, prices will be the same for that reason alone.
 
Look at the lock retail has say... On Australia. They charge cheap prices for games and make steam charge $80...
 
Plague_Injected said:
The article seems to be quite pro-retail without actually stating as such. It's all "don't buy digital because greedy executives get more money from you than if you buy in stores!" The issue of retailers-extorting-publishers is not mentioned at all.

There's no way to prove that publishers will keep DD prices inflated until retail goes bye-bye.

Retailers force publishers to price themselves out of the DD market, which means that the DD stores and platforms are extremely restricted in how they can price games since they are all determined by the publisher, who is subservient to the retailers. If publishers aren't forced to set their game prices in stone for set amounts of time, they and digital stores will have more flexibility to implement Steam-like summer/holiday sales and address region-based price-fixing.
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I think you are wrong on this, and there is plenty of evidence of instances where publishers have been happy to maintain inflated prices on digital content when official retail outlets have since reduced prices. Here are a few examples of current price gouging on digital content:

NFS Shift 2 Unleashed
EB - $53.96
Game - $44.00
Origin - $79.95

Dragon Age 2
EB - $53.96
Game - $38.00
Origin - $79.95

Dead Space 2
EB - $44.95
Game - $48.00
Origin - $79.99

Medal of Honor
EB - $49.95
Game - $28.00
Origin - $79.99

Assassins Creed Brotherhood
EB - $38.00
Game - $48.00
Ubi Store - $69.95

HAWX 2
EB - $27.84
Ubi Store - $49.95

RUSE
EB - $24.95
Game - $34.00
Ubi Store - $49.95

So whilst publishers' digital stores may be on par with retail stores at release, they seem to be more than happy to maintain inflated prices well after retailers have reduced their prices, and I am willing to bet they will maintain the current RRP even once brick and mortar stores are wiped from the face of the earth.
 
Those games are all on a big mid-year sale though...those prices all go back up to $100 next week after July 30.

Your price quotes might be more comparable against prices of those games during the recent Steam sale. From memory:

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood - $20
Medal of Honor - $20.60
Dead Space and Dead Space 2 combo - $20
Dragon Age 2 - $40
HAWX 2 - $15
Ruse - $7.50
NFS Shift 2 Unleashed - $30

Youa re probably right in that DD prices will probably remain high in the event retail dies, but retailers certainly aren't doing much to help the situation. They see that the industry is moving towards DD being the primary form of game delivery in the next 5-10 years, so they're forcing up DD prices while they have their once-in-a-blue-moon supersales to convince people to buy games in their stores and then trade them back for 25% of the original price.
 
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you know for as much bitching about the cost of games now adays and how the game makers are riping us off, it seems people tend to forget it tends to cost more and more now adays just to make a game

if the price bugs people so much just wait till its on sale lol
 
Savi said:
you know for as much bitching about the cost of games now adays and how the game makers are riping us off, it seems people tend to forget it tends to cost more and more now adays just to make a game
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Which is countered by successful games selling in the millions nowadays.
 
This guy does not understand business when he talks. First of all the price of a game has nothing to do with how much it costs to make it. Well I say that carefully it has little to do with how much it costs. Most games have a vary wide variety of costs for development yet they all charge similar prices? What gives well that is price points you figure out customers purchase things in far higher volumes when you dip below a certain price point. So you set you price right under that point IE $50 so no the games are not going to suddenly get $3.84 cheaper if that is the average cost of the box and distribution when you go digital only. You also have to take into account your realistic customer base. The programming and work that goes into a game is just as much as many applications that are used for specialized instances but those applications can cost $10000 because so few people use them. FPS games are no different they have the ability to sell in the millions, but not hundreds of millions. So the industry seems to have settled on roughly $50. That will never change unless they can more than double the FPS player base for most games.

But at least the money has a chance of going back into games in some form and it is not being wasted on a box. Think of it from a value perspective businesses that are successful usually have a good sense of value and removing anything from a product that does not have value. IMO the box and disk had no value they added alot of costs that resulted in nothing except a $3.84 reduction to profit. Now that does not mean that $3.84 goes to the developer but it goes to something and some of it will go back to gaming in some what. For instance it could be advertising to take a game more main stream, or it could be improvements to the digital download systems. It could also go toward funding a better game from a completely separate company or a new start up game. Whatever the case is for most reasonable people the box had no value other than decreasing profit, harming the environment more and looking pretty on you moms basement shelf no girl will ever see.

My point is no there will not be a magic instant direct benefit to gamers of going digital in terms of price but over time we will see some benefit. For me personally I feel that valve with steam has already saved me so much time being able to just download games that I could care less if I saved any money, and on top of that I am pretty sure I have saved money no way I could ever by decent games in 4 packs at crazy low prices back before steam from walmart.
 
Plague_Injected said:
Which is countered by successful games selling in the millions nowadays.
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Costs are more than you think. Consider first you have to take all the direct costs of making the game. Whatever budget was given to the developer to make it, all the marketing, and so on. Then of course you have to add the costs for running the publisher itself, all the indirect costs. Just existing as a large company costs a good bit of money, and that comes out of game profits. Then you have to take the costs of games that failed, that didn't make back their investment. That cost comes out of things that do make money.

On top of that, you need to make some profit. If you are unprofitable for a long time at best your shareholders will make you change what you are doing and at worst you go bankrupt.

Now against all that, you have to set the amount of money they make per sale which is NOT what is sold at retail. In the case of retail sales, they make maybe half, less production and shipping, perhaps less. So a $50 game nets them probably $18-23 per copy sold. Digital is better, they get 70% or more, no other costs.

So say a game costs $50 million to make. You'd have to sell in the realm of 2.5 million copies retail to make that back. However you've just paid for the game at that point, not paid any other costs. It could be 3-4 million sales before you actually see any profits at all.

Have a look at some publishers and see how things are going. Electronics Arts? Lost money last quarter to the tune of $300 million, despite taking in $3.6 billion. Activision-Blizzard was profitable, in no small part because of WoW, but only to the tune of about 11% which is ok but nothing stellar (as some examples IBM had 15%, Cisco had 17%, Apple had 23%,Microsoft had 32%). Take Two had only 4% profit, in line with discount stores like Target (which are low margin).

There's big money in games, no doubt, but big costs too. You can have a game sell reasonably well, like a million copies, and if it was expensive to make it can still be a money loser. That's just what you get with big budgets.

If you want bargain games, well they'll have to have smaller budgets. That's fine too, I love me some indy games, but you can't demand the high dollar engines, art, and voice acting but want to have a cheap title.
 
Someone said something about digital distribution taking away ownership rights - if I recall correctly, we have never actually 'owned' the games we bought in the first place, we just basically bought a license to play said games. The only thing we really 'owned' was the case, manual, and the plastic the game disc was made from. The actual game itself? I don't think so.
 
Kill off retail = monopoly as you have only 1 place to get your game: The Internet.and with all the squabbles between online retailers (Steam/Origin for example) it's going to be get your game straight from said publisher...
 
Games have always been a monopoly as is any piece of art. There is only 1 single place to get that single game and that is from the developer, everyone else must buy it from them. But there is still competition. For instance while I know some of you may throw a fit COD and BF are basically the same thing made by different companies no different then a sedan from ford is the same thing as one from Toyota, you may whine about the details but there is competition between publishers and developers and on top of that the price of a game is always going to be harnessed by what the market will accept. Retail is in no way a form of competition and competition is what you need to drive prices for real. The only reason retail seems cheaper now days is because retail places are being forced to drop prices to lure customers into their out dated business model. No different magazines and news papers that now days offer insane deals to try to hold of the innevitable death of their business.
 
DD costs less by eliminating packaging and the middleman's cut, and the big publishers are passing the savings on to their stockholders and their own coffers.

As long as idiots are willing to keep paying it, the business model will work quite well. It's a sad state of affairs.

If only gamers were patient enough to skip out on the first two or three months of a game...publishers would learn quickly that we can make a game flop. But it won't happen; most consumers will play into their hands.
 
^ DD has a recurring cost of hosting said file on servers and I guarentee you that that adds up to more than the 1 time cost of packaging.....
 
The solution to this issue is simple; Buy your DD games when they hit $5 on Steam, or buy them some Asian resellers selling English language copies. If you are a console gamer then DD isn't for you regardless since you can't resell the copy.

This, and any other 'omg publishers are so greedy' topics are really only an issue if you are willing to pay full retail for your games because you want to play them at or shortly after release. Work on your backlog and wait for sales. That's a much more workable solution than to hope for publishers to change their ways.
 
Maybe this guy doesn't know where to look?

Digital has been saving me a TON of money on new an dupcoming games.

I have on pre order:

Rage - 35 bucks
Battlefield 3 - 35 bucks
Deus EX: HR - 28 bucks.

D2D, Green man gaming, etc have all had decen tsales that let you buy upcoming games/new ones at like 20% off and small sales.


I agree that "normal" prices don't make sense (since there's no middle man like the retail and no physical items to make/ship), they could EASILY pass on a small , say 10$ discount to us and STILL make more per-game then brick and mortar stores, but they don't.
 
I've always held the opinion that the $59 price point on today's games is fair. I mean I remember paying upwards of $70 for some cartridge based games back in the day. PS1 era games were $49 and sometimes $39 - and PS2 era games were the same price. With today's rising prices and higher development costs I am not surprised at the standard price. Digital downloads, though, are different for me. There's no disc pressing, cases, manuals or any of that so it would make sense for that stuff to be cheaper. I wonder how the cost of running servers for digital downloads compares to the cost of producing physical products, though. Anyone have any insight on that?
 
defiant007 said:
Yeah, because publishers weren't surviving before the advent of digital distribution. :rolleyes:

Well I guess making twice as much profit whilst screwing your user base out of ownership rights makes it easier to survive, or to at least buy several more private jets and super cars.
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Twice the profit?? I hope you are joking, that couldn't be further from the truth if you tried!
 
Stiler said:
Maybe this guy doesn't know where to look?

Digital has been saving me a TON of money on new an dupcoming games.

I have on pre order:

Rage - 35 bucks
Battlefield 3 - 35 bucks
Deus EX: HR - 28 bucks.

D2D, Green man gaming, etc have all had decen tsales that let you buy upcoming games/new ones at like 20% off and small sales.


I agree that "normal" prices don't make sense (since there's no middle man like the retail and no physical items to make/ship), they could EASILY pass on a small , say 10$ discount to us and STILL make more per-game then brick and mortar stores, but they don't.
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Same, been getting fantastic deals.
 
fattypants said:
DD costs less by eliminating packaging and the middleman's cut, and the big publishers are passing the savings on to their stockholders and their own coffers.

As long as idiots are willing to keep paying it, the business model will work quite well. It's a sad state of affairs.

If only gamers were patient enough to skip out on the first two or three months of a game...publishers would learn quickly that we can make a game flop. But it won't happen; most consumers will play into their hands.
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Well of course it wont happen...fans of games are fans of games. People tend to want to purchase a product they've been waiting for for X amount of time as soon as its available. I don't see what the problem is. If gamers abroad turned into a bunch of stuck up bitches and collectively refused to purchase games until companies met their price demands, then the companies would eventually have to start developing and advertising at lower budgets to compensate. We would likely see lower quality production values and games.with less content on average. Also - pricey add on packs and expansion packs would become much more frequent and annoying. Essentially - it would just make things worse for gamers and gaming.
 
games with less content? really compare older games Duke Nukem 3d to their current counterparts and then you tell me which game as less content.....Nintendo seems to do very well without mega monster budgets and most if not all of their first party stuff sells like hotcakes and so do the better 3rd party stuff....

games do not have to be high budget to be fun

problem is that developers think eye candy = game play......so they spend a LARGE amt of budget on fluff instead of content...

I love games where you can play as a character and be involved in the storyline Republic Commando, Star Trek Elite Force, and King Kong come to mind......
 
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The demographics are different. Yes there is a market for more casual oriented games that do not require the appeal of graphics "fluff" which some developers cater to. But take the audience on these forums for example, I would say in general there would be preference for graphical "fluff" which requires high budgets.
 
Simple really, Buy games when they're on sale for $10 or less. Publishers will not lower the price, if you keep paying. The only way is to change your own spending habits.
For example, I'm and avid movie goer. So when the 3D craze started, I went to every movie 3d screening if it was available. Than came the 50% mark up on the ticket prices. Now I strictly avoid going to 3D screenings (it really didn't add that much to the experience for me, certainly not 50% more worth). I even skip movies if they don't a have 2D showing (Pirates 4, Transformers 3).So in the end, I spend less, and theaters end up shooting them self in the foot, expecting regular price + 50% and getting less than regular price from me.
Can't really expect someone else to lower your spending. Anybody selling something will try to sell it for as much as possible, not for what is a fair price.
 
^uhm transformers 3 definately has a 2d version and I watched it just last week
 
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