As I mentioned it’s between 2 and 3 to 1. That is significant. And so long as digital game prices on consoles are HIGHER than retail (they often are!), digital game sales on console ain’t going to grow very much any time soon.
Do YOU get tired of running your games at crappy console settings?
Not everyone does. I do. You might, but as evidenced by console gamers, and plenty of PC gamers on lower end rigs, many people are happy playing games at lower settings.
The thing is, with consoles you don’t have a choice. With PC, you do. Even when it comes down to settings you do, even without bringing hardware into it. On PS4 BF4 is 900p, and that’s that. It’s what devs decided for you. But maybe you don’t care about soft shadows and would instead prefer a nice, detailed, sharp 1080p screen. Or maybe you prefer a solid 60 FPS with NO drops, and who cares about resolution? So drop it to 720p and enjoy fast frames. Or spend 1/2 the money you saved last year on steam sales on an upgrade. It’s all up to you.
Sorry, I just get that undercurrent from EVERYTHING you write.
Once again, you are comparing apples to oranges - digital vs retail is not a legit comparison when new games get day 1 digital on consoles. Say what you like, but digital game sales on consoles are growing, and quick.
Actually, all my PC upgrades except the most recent one (to an SSD drive, which was PRACTICALLY required, considering how long stuff was taking to load) were forced upgrades. It came down to “Do I want to play this game?”
It’s not always all “up to you” except in the sense that sure, you can decide you don’t want to play something.
Amazon sells PlayStation Store downloads. It was announced right around PS4 release. Don’t know if it’s convenience or competition. Or how much competition it would create.
It’s not apples to oranges. It’s money. You get X and Y dollars for digital pc vs retail console sales, and you can directly compare those dollar amounts. The idea that you can’t compare them “end of argument” is absurd and obnoxious. The goal for a publisher or developer is to get money for selling their game, and those are just two different routes to do that, so obviously they are directly comparable. Do you think Blizzard doesn’t care or can’t compare when they sell a copy of StarCraft 2 on their digital store and keep $59 of it, or when they sell it for retail and keep $12 of it?
First of all, the topic of conversation was if Valve could keep their next big release (HL3 in this example) as a steam exclusive to promote steam. Because Valve owns their own distribution system, they get a bigger return on sales there. Same with EA game and Origin. Or when Stardock owned Impulse, or I think GamersGate is owned by the same company as CDProjekt. So Valve keeps all their money aside from the marginal costs of bandwidth, which is pennies. Valve essentially keeps 99%+ of the actual purchase price of the game, which is huge.
For console retail, first, you have to pay royalty fees to the console makers to license their game. That’s actually how they make most of their money - the hardware is a subsidized money loser for most of the life of the cycle (excluding Nintendo) which they make up for with software fees. That fee alone is like 20-100 times the marginal cost of digital distribution (a big provider like valve probably pays less than a cent per gigabyte transferred).
Secondly, you need a retailer publisher. Sometimes this is different, sometimes it isn’t. On PC, a lot of independent studios can release on steam without a publisher at all, and you probably know that the video game publishing industry is the ass rapiest thing in the world, it would be great if all game development could go that way. But there are also publishers who front the money for developers, run the business side of things, and all the things that publishers do, but they don’t have a retail presence. If that’s the case, you need to involve another publisher with an actual retail supply chain, and pay them a percentage of the cut.
Third, of course there’s the actual cost of physical production and distribution of the games. For digital games, this part is under a nickel. For retail, this can be, I’m guessing, somewhere around $8. Pulling that number out of my ass though.
Fourth, you aren’t actually directly selling to the consumer, you’re selling at wholesale prices to retailers, who then sell it for retail prices. How much is that? I don’t really know, but the retailers need to make a profit on your game, and that profit is money you’re not getting back.
So for Valve, since they’re their own digitial distributor, they keep somewhere around the 99%+ purchase price of the game as profit. For digital publishers who are selling on DD sites they don’t own (obviously more common, but not the specific thing we were talking about here), they keep somewhere around 70%. On the other hand, retail sales have to pay $10 flat to MS/Sony, Another $8ish for the cost of production and distribution of the game, possibly another fee to a retail distribution publisher in addition to the original publisher (only applies sometimes), and some other amount because you’re selling it wholesale to retailers. The numbers I’ve seen for a full price $60 retail console game are that the publisher sees $8-12 of that money. So less than 20%.
So in the particular case we’re discussing, if Valve wanted to keep their own big game like HL3 a steam exclusive, they’re going to get $59.90ish of the money, in retail it’ll be more like $8 (they definitely need to partner with EA again to make and ship those boxes as they have in the past). So in this particular case, they could lose roughly 7 console retail sales for every PC copy they sell (again, talking about full price here, the multiplier is reduced but the total number increased with the inevitable PC DD discounts) and still break even. Just on HL3. If some of those people come to steam that weren’t there before and start buying games, then they make a shitload more money on the deal.
I have no idea what sort of system you’re running but I recently cobbled together a box out of spare parts (1156 socket i3, 550Ti, 4gb RAM, etc) and it works just fine for playing modern stuff. Works even better if I’m willing to be flexible with the settings. “Modern” in this case being limited to stuff like Skyrim, BL2, Far Cry 3, etc. I’ll admit I haven’t tried to run BF4 on it (since I don’t play the franchise).
But, yes, if your system is incredibly obsolete you won’t be able to play modern stuff on it.
Steam machines for the lucky 300 chosen beta users (any of you guys?!) are shipping today.
They are also releasing SteamOS for download tomorrow. But they say it’s still early days and they don’t recommend average users download it until 2014 unless you know your way around Linux. Probably won’t bother with it until it’s fully featured, but I’m looking forward to hearing impressions from others.
So I’ve been reading and it seems like Steam OS’ solution to Linux not being able to play Windows games is to stream. So yeah, we knew that. But from the articles I read, you will have to stream from your own Windows PC. Which seems to kind of defeat the point, if I have to have a gaming PC to stream to my Steam Box, why deal with the box?
I only have one PC, and it’s a monster, but it also means that the computer I’d want to use Steam OS on is the same one I’d have to be streaming from.
At that point it’s essentially a very expensive PC peripheral for playing PC games on your big screen TV without having to move your PC into the TV room (or run a long HDMI cord down the hall)
Right now, it seems a very niche product. A PC for people who want PC gaming, but in a console like setting and don’t mind a very limited back catalog with the expectation that more titles will appear, even though the same titles will almost certainly be released on the Windows platform anyway. And you’re paying more than a new generation console and only slightly less than a custom build PC for the experience.
Honestly, the only reason to own one seems to be to say that you own one. I have nothing against it and think the whole console/PC debate is silly enough without making a Steam Box/Win PC debate happen (which feels like trading in a Catholic/Protestant argument for debating over two sects of Lutheranism) but I just really can’t see the immediate interest. Best part about it is the controller and I’m sure extra/replacement controllers will go on the market and Win drivers will be released for them (from Valve or 3rd party).
There will be a steam machine that will be under $100 and it’s there JUST for streaming. If you’ve ever wanted to extend your PC gaming into the living room, that small, cheap device will allow you to do so easily.
If extending your PC gaming into the living room doesn’t interest you, then you have no need for a Steambox.
If you would like to make gaming a centerpiece of the living room and you care about the strengths of PC gaming, but are interested in an easier out of the box experience that plays nice with your TV, then a full blow Steam MAchine might be just the thing.
You could install windows in one, but even if you don’t want to, you can still either stream from another PC or simply enjoy the games that are available for it now an din the future.
That’s not the entire catalog by a long shot… but it’s a heck of a lot more games than a next gen console currently supports, and people still buy those.
What I’m saying is that I’m far more interested in Steam OS, and I have no intention of buying a Steam Box. Maybe the article I read got it wrong, it said that in the future Valve was planning on adding streaming “from a home PC”, but it didn’t mention plans to do any better-than-wine emulation or online streaming or anything like that, which is what I want. I don’t really give a shit about whether people are going to buy a $100 LAN streaming box, my point had nothing to do with the market viability of Steam Boxes running Steam OS. I was merely commenting about it for my own use on my home desktop as a secondary OS.
I’ll still probably use it to replace Mint, it’s just not quite as nice as I’d hoped unless I missed something.
I did read the thread, but I haven’t read it all recently, it’s possible I forgot something since it’s pretty old.
That is the hope. So far only iBuyPower has presented their version of the Steam Machine which will sell for $499 and in terms of hardware is better than a PS4, IIRC recently another model was presented from Piixl costing closer to $1,000, but packing a lot more punch and built to live behind your TV set:
What the prices will be and what power they bring is going to depend on WHEN you pick one up, but everyone’s hoping for more affordable prices when it comes to something matching a next gen console in terms of specs.
I believe online streaming is int he cards, but until the internet gets better, you’re going to be limited to within a few dozen miles of a data center. Nvidia is running a trial doing just that, but you’ve got to live somewhere near their datacenter. The consoles are looking into this as well, with Sony purchasing GaiKai in order to offer streaming games at some point in the future.
So some new developments since last time we posted.
Steam saw a rise of 10 million in active users in 2.5 months (over 75 million now), some actual Steam Machine prototypes have been unveiled, the Steam controller ditches it’s planned touch screen for actual buttons, Grenelight will be gone by the time Steam OS is ready for prime time, and Steam will be adding TV, movie and music to their repertoire.
They, along with Intel, AMD, Nvidia and others, are currently holding a 3 day conference with developers, so this does indeed seem like Valve pushing mightily for Steam and Steam machines in the near future.
I personally think greenlight is not the way to get indies on Steam. It’s a hassle for them. I think Valve should allow self publishing on steam, and develop some other way for games to get in on the main store page and be featured there.
What do you guys think about the new developments?
Greenlight is basically a sham and needs to go. The system is still basically just “Valve tells you when you’re allowed to put your game on Steam” only now there’s an obfuscating layer of voting and crap on top of that.
Good to see they’re willing to accept criticism on their …uhm… ‘creative’ controller design, but at the same time, I’m starting to wonder how different the final product will actually be from a standard controller.
Don’t really care about their added media stuff right now. It’s not like I don’t already have tons of places to get non-game digital media. Not sure what they think they can bring to the table there, but I guess they’re aiming to make sure they get ALL the moneys out of people who buy in on the Steambox, which I still think is a device in need of a market (and in need of a company that can actually design UIs to build its OS.)
I’m fine with Greenlight, but I agree with the sentiment that there needs to be a “Steam Greenlight Store” that’s completely separate from the rest of Steam’s offerings. There are too many early release games cluttering up everything else.
Via Steam itself? Interesting although it seems like a semi-bloated market to get into and an expensive one to do it well. There’s plenty of other options for those products and, if we’re talking streaming video, licensing fees on them just keeps getting more and more expensive. Do Xbox/PS have any content like that purchased through them? I was under the impression that they just act as a portal for Netflix, Youtube, Pandora, etc. Since SteamOS is just a Linux variant, I assumed Netflix, et al access was a given.
