Quote:
Originally Posted by NinkobEi
It has been proven that Steam sales do not affect regular sales. The game continues to sell before and after their sales at the same rate. The difference being the huge spike in sales. It actually helps sales by a whole lot through
A: Word of Mouth
and B: people who wouldn't normally buy the game paying for it
There is virtually no overhead in videogame sales since they are all digitally distributed. It's not like they have to make a dvd and mail the game to you.
Here's a link to an article: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/1...p#.UM-653czSWY
http://steam.nanoaugur.net/gaben_m.jpg |
I read sites like gamasutra from the very beginning, and I aware of that article as well, but I don't agree that it will stay like that for long. I'm willing to accept defeat in this argument instead of writing a book here about my views, because it's just not possible to do it on a forum.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BlackZero
I also do not see where you reached the conclusion that continuous sales erode the value of the product. I am guessing you meant that by reducing price the item moves towards being considered 'inferior goods'? I would imagine that would depend entirely on consumer preference, I should also add that improved sales volumes lead to economies of scale which means reduces costs without a reduction in quality.
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No, no they are not considered inferior, they just simply fail to give the same level of satisfaction anymore. The problem is that it's not an open healthy market, but a closed one, because people mostly buy games for full price at release times or wait for sales, which usually happen in every few months. People buying games on Steam for $5-10 3-4 times a year don't value there product as much as people who buy it with the old fashioned way. It's a well-known statistics that most people not even finish their games on Steam anymore, they just buy it because it was 5$, (there are also hard core gamers of course, but they are the minority).
This is the phenomenon which erodes the quality, it's not the actual quality of the products, but the perceived quality by the consumers because of the too many choices they are “forced” to choose from because of the insanely low prices. This combined with a the paradox of choice what kills the system on the long run in my opinion (it's a very complex subject, perhaps this
old video sums up a little portion of it).
The bottom line is that if consumer satisfaction is going down, revenue will follow on the long run, which leads to reduced income in a closed system. And publishers will eventually invest less into innovation if they keep receiving less money from it, and at the end, imho they will only do COD-14, Mass Effect 9 or Diablo 6 instead, because there is no risk, since no doubt that it will sell well for the full price.
But this is all just my humble opinion, and I'm also secretly hope that I'm wrong tbh because I also like Steam of course, only time will tell.