• Kacarott@aussie.zone
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    12 hours ago

    Games on Steam are not usually recurring purchases, one person won’t buy the same product over and over like they need to for food. This means the market of people willing to pay the full price gets saturated over time.

    Sales are a way to increase the market size by lowering the “barrier to entry” (price). Sometimes a price will be permanently lowered, however usually not because a temporary sale encourages people to buy now instead of later.

    • index@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      11 hours ago

      Sounds like videogames sales are made to make money and the original price has not much to do with cover costs bur rather making as much profits as people are willing to pay

      • Kacarott@aussie.zone
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        10 hours ago

        Of course they are made to cover costs and make money, but you can cover more costs for future games or ongoing development the game if more people are buying the game, even if it isn’t at full price

      • sudneo@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        11 hours ago

        That’s how sales of anything works. Everything is sold at the highest possible price that people are willing to pay.

          • sudneo@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            4 hours ago

            Basically nothing is sold to cover the cost. That’s the basic of how making a profit works. So let’s start from there. Second, when you make a digital product, you invest X and you have no idea how many copies you will sell. It’s much harder to compute the marginal cost compared to a physical item. Videogames are a luxury item, they are by no means necessary. So there is no harm in letting demand and offer regulate the price. If you feel that paying a certain amount is not worth for a game, you don’t pay it, or you wait until the price drops.

            • index@sh.itjust.works
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              2 hours ago

              That’s the basic of how making a profit works.

              Not everything is made for infinite profits

              • sudneo@lemm.ee
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                9 minutes ago

                Any profit requires charging more than cost. Nobody is talking about infinite. In fact games after a few years end up costing pennies.

                You are literally arguing nothing. Devs have the right to profit off their labor.

      • potoo22@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        32 minutes ago

        It’s a digital good, just a bunch of 1s and 0s in a particular order. The manufacturing cost of making a copy is near 0. There are license fees, but those are almost always pencentage based. Valve takes 30%, the publisher takes a percentage, and so on.

        Then it’s a balance of volume vs price. If you can sell 10,000 copies at $10, vs 1,000 at $15, ($100,000 vs. $15,000), it is more profitable to sell the game at $10.

        And human psychology is manipulable. Seeing the original price at $15 will influence them to value the game around $15, and so $10 would be a good deal. If they want it, they should buy it on sale. Where as seeing the original price at $10 would influence them to value the game at $10, which could mean it’s not as good as a $15 game they can get for $10 on sale.

        The developers need to make enough profit to cover the development costs’ debt. Then after that, the rest of the profit goes to the next project and maybe bonuses… Probably to the executives. Part of that is also to cover the cost of past and future non-pofitable games. Not all games make a profit and developers and publishers need to offset the cost of past and future failures.