If you buy a game on sale (say 40% or 70% discount), who loses the money?

[GunShooter]

Is it the game developer who takes the loss by the undersale, or is it steam? I'm curious because I'd like to pay full price to support certain developers and certain genres of games and just pay really low price for games I don't care too much about.

[Brujeira]

Valve take a 30% cut of all sales through Steam rather than a fixed fee, so both Valve and the game's devs lose out when you buy a game while it's discounted.

[EolSunder]

first off, why would you pay a higher price just to "support" a developer, thats like saying "hey this car is 30,000 dollars, i'll pay you 35,000 to help support the ford company. Why would you just give out extra money. If you wanted to just give them money mail them a check with a note saying "good job guys, go get some lunch"

No one loses money, they might not make as much as they want, but if you buy something your paying them for it, so they make something.

Not sure how steam works with gaming devs, either..

1) Devs set the price and steam gets a percentage of the sale, probably used with lower end games, small dev companies, etc

2) Steam agrees to a bulk contract with game dev (probably for larger games) buying 10,000 licences of said game for x amount of dollars, then resells it to try and make a profit. So they might buy the game from the game developer for 15 dollars each, maybe game resells currently for 20 bucks, steam might say "selling for 60 bucks, but on sale now 50% off only 30 dollars get it!". Just creative advertising. Plenty of prime games steam trys to sell for 50-60 bucks when the current prices in the store are 20 dollars.

[GunShooter]

No, that's not really what its like at all. Its like paying full price for a car rather than waiting until they drop the price 50% to try to get rid of excess inventory.

One is a profit for the company and genre, the other is by comparison a loss. If everyone stopped buying games at full price, box stores would have shelves and shelves of immobile inventory. They'd start losing money because of overhead associated with stocking it and not selling it, and them being unable to move product would go to the developer, which would cause them to lose money as they can't really produce more to make a living off of, or in extreme cases to simply pay off the cost of production.

Businesses aren't charities. Its always as balance act between profit and gain for business and customer. If a business can't profit, or certain venues of that business are less profitable than others, that gets cut off.

Its like radio shack. in the old days they used to sell everything. MBAs moved in and gutted the DIY form of radio shack for high turnover/higher profit. Businesses only follow the money. If you only ever buy the games you actually love at discount price, and everyone else does the same, that type of game or possibly even the developer goes under, and then you stop getting that kind of game in the future.

Its all a web.

[Washell]

EolSunder の投稿を引用：

2) Steam agrees to a bulk contract with game dev (probably for larger games) buying 10,000 licences of said game for x amount of dollars, then resells it to try and make a profit. So they might buy the game from the game developer for 15 dollars each, maybe game resells currently for 20 bucks, steam might say "selling for 60 bucks, but on sale now 50% off only 30 dollars get it!". Just creative advertising. Plenty of prime games steam trys to sell for 50-60 bucks when the current prices in the store are 20 dollars.

Speculation is all fine and well, but it only takes two seconds on google to learn that this is horribly wrong. You should've stopped at 1.

Steam takes a cut of each sale, rumored to be ~30%, though big developers can probably negotiate a better deal. So if the price is discounted, the whole pie gets smaller, and both Valve and the developer get a smaller piece.

GunShooter の投稿を引用：

Is it the game developer who takes the loss by the undersale

They're not taking a loss. The sale targets a demographic who wouldn't have bought the game at full price. It's all revenue and profit.

[GunShooter]

Brujeira の投稿を引用：

Valve take a 30% cut of all sales through Steam rather than a fixed fee, so both Valve and the game's devs lose out when you buy a game while it's discounted.

Thanks.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

EolSunder の投稿を引用：

first off, why would you pay a higher price just to "support" a developer, thats like saying "hey this car is 30,000 dollars, i'll pay you 35,000 to help support the ford company.

terrible analogy. some one has no idea how car dealerships work.

[Start_Running]

No one loses. Valve and the devs still get money and games that hit those discount levels are typically games that are well past their peak of interest. Secondly, since it doesn't cost the devs or valve any thing to produce thise copies, There is no inherent loss.

[JLBGold]

More discounts, more sales, more profit.

[EolSunder]

i know exactly how car dealer

cSg|mc-Hotsauce の投稿を引用：

EolSunder の投稿を引用：

first off, why would you pay a higher price just to "support" a developer, thats like saying "hey this car is 30,000 dollars, i'll pay you 35,000 to help support the ford company.

terrible analogy. some one has no idea how car dealerships work.

:cfacepalm:

moron, i know exactly how car dealerships work, ive worked at one, its a comparison to his statement don't you have a clue? me talking about paying 35k for a 30k car is his talk about paying 20 bucks for a 15 dollar game. Jeesh some people don't have a clue, or a brain.

[FPS]

Nobody loses anything, since the price of creating a digital copy is essentially zero. But both steam and the publisher get less money when you buy the game on sale.

[Black Blade]

EolSunder の投稿を引用：

moron, i know exactly how car dealerships work, ive worked at one, its a comparison to his statement don't you have a clue? me talking about paying 35k for a 30k car is his talk about paying 20 bucks for a 15 dollar game. Jeesh some people don't have a clue, or a brain.

He just said its a terrible analogy
And it is a terrible analogy

FPS の投稿を引用：

Nobody loses anything, since the price of creating a digital copy is essentially zero. But both steam and the publisher get less money when you buy the game on sale.

but making the game dose cost, So is Steam servers and maintrance
So in a way they do lose on it

[FPS]

Black Blade の投稿を引用：

FPS の投稿を引用：

Nobody loses anything, since the price of creating a digital copy is essentially zero. But both steam and the publisher get less money when you buy the game on sale.

but making the game dose cost, So is Steam servers and maintrance
So in a way they do lose on it

Yes, making a game does cost money, but that money is already pent. There is no minimumn price to make a development profitable. You can sell 1 copy for 100 dollars or 100 copies for 1 dollar and get the same money.

For most of the games, peak of the sales is always the first week after the release, after that week everyone interested in the game has already bought it.
Next peak of income is when the game goes on sale. So it is pure win situation for the publisher - sales make people otherwise not interested in the game buy it.

[GunShooter]

I think what blade is referring to is overhead. Presume a worst case scenario, the company makes a game and valvesteam creats a server to support it. One product for both entities to make money on. Every second the server is up without it being bought is a loss for steam. No copies sold is a loss for the company that made the game.

Sub par profits means the company either stops making games and goes out of business or they stop producing that type of game as it didn't sell as well. This also affects gaming as an industry in general. Using the car analogy, if people suddenly stopped buying mustangs at full price because people stopped liking that product in general, car lots would have a bloated inventory on their hands and then keep price cutting until they get rid of it. Awful sales would encourage the manufacturer to cut that line because it doesn't do well anymore. That line cut would change the auto industry's car design and utility principles, leading to an overall shift in the 'perks' cars are built for. Everyone knows that there's really good, really cheap cars out there. Things with high safety rating, low price, and good mileage. Why doesn't everyone buy that? After all, its the smart move. You pay less (as the car analogy guy is suggesting it'd be foolish to do otherwise), and you get more. Why haven't these cars completely overtaken the market? Because enough consumers want the 'other kind', and are willing to pay enough for it to be profitable for the manufacturer.

The moment it isn't like this anymore, the moment it isn't profitable, the manufacturer won't keep producing. Businesses are not charities. Its like the same rationale for downloading illegal copies of music and movies. Why pay if I can get it free, right? Once its free in some form, paying for it is a terrible idea. In fact, it feels like charity towards the producer of the object, since I don't really have to pay for it at all to get it. So why pay?


Every time the company and valvesteam collaborate to place a product on sale, they are both investing. Investments need a payoff. Resources are never free. Maybe hosting 1 more game on steam costs them .01 cents a day rather than 10 cents a day because they have so much server dedication to a large amount of products already that another one is a drop in the bucket, but that merely shifts the 'value' point over to fractions of a cent. The worst performing fractional-cost product on the steam market discourages similar games of the genre from being produced or hosted by valvesteam.

[Khonsu]

you really think 20$ makes any difference to a company that makes millions?

[GunShooter]

You really think its just one person in the world that wants to support specific types of games and products?