Digital Releases - Cut of the Profits

[Magister Lajciak]

Digital distribution of games presumably has lower costs than distribution through retail stores. The servers and the bandwidth, of course, are not free, but nonetheless, I would think the costs are substantially lower than having to make the DVDs/boxes, ship boxed copies of games to retail stores and paying for all that retail space.

 

The costs of digital copies of games, however, do not differ much if at all from the costs of games bought at retail stores, allegedly not to undercut the still important retail sales channels. I am wondering, however, if developers/publishers get a larger share of the profits from digitally-distributed games than they get from games sold in retail? It would be nice if more money made its way back to the developers and publishers to recoup development costs of games, but I have not heard any indication as to how much of the cut is taken by the digital-retailers like Impulse, Steam or D2D. Anybody has thoughts or better-yet information (even if approximate) on the matter?

[Cl_Flushentityhero]

Actual information? What is this, Quarter to three forums?

[Pop]

I look forward to this and the many entries in the Digital Releases franchise to come.

[Masterfade]

Digital distribution services for PC games generally don't offer the same deal to all content providers like App Store or Android Market do. Different developers get different deals although I won't be surprise if bigger ones tend to cut more favorably.

 

The Gearbox CEO did come out and accused Valve of exploiting small developers shortly before Borderlands got released. Don't know if there's any truth to that but during the same period he also said Fallout 3 sucked because it had dialog trees.

[Mamoulian War]

Digital distribution services for PC games generally don't offer the same deal to all content providers like App Store or Android Market do. Different developers get different deals although I won't be surprise if bigger ones tend to cut more favorably.

 

The Gearbox CEO did come out and accused Valve of exploiting small developers shortly before Borderlands got released. Don't know if there's any truth to that but during the same period he also said Fallout 3 sucked because it had dialog trees.

 

I bet the developers get same money as from retail boxes, and publishers gets all the extra money...

[Meshugger]

Has Valve actually released any raw numbers on x amount of sales they have on Steam? Have they released any info regarding the ROI (Return of Investment) for each product that available through Steam?

[Humodour]

Steam is certainly worth it. I've bought so many games on Steam that I would not buy normally (including big-name titles), and it's a pretty effective form of DRM that most people seem to be actually neutral or positive about, unlike that SecuROM bull****.

 

That said, GOG.com is vastly superior.

 

Has Valve actually released any raw numbers on x amount of sales they have on Steam? Have they released any info regarding the ROI (Return of Investment) for each product that available through Steam?

 

No I don't think so, and they have indicated they are unlikely to do so any time soon for business reasons.

 

Individual developers/publishers do get data about their own games, however.

[Purkake]

That said, GOG.com is vastly superior.

 

The truth.

 

Good Old Games is like the DD nirvana.