Jesus Christ, I can smell your fedora from here.
“consumers are stupid”. So I guess you and everyone else is stupid? Calling people who like things you don’t like stupid means you have the mind of a toddler and probably act like one.
But you’re right. People don’t want new things. It’s why movies like Oppenheimer bombed and only made almost a billion. It’s why “Everything, everywhere all at once” bombed and nobody watched it nor talks about it ever.
People like things that they like. Crazy.
Yeah a lot of people grew up with superheroes, so they watch their favorite franchises. Less so now since we can see some decline with people getting sick of it all.
People like sports, so they buy sports games. EA has a strangle on licensing rights for the players. People want to play as their favorite players. Fucking wild right? If a competitor came in, had the license rights and made a decent game, guess what, people would probably buy it.
I started off in MUDs. When WoW was new, the class synergy and the contexts in which they worked was new, exciting and fun. Yeah people wanted to see that outside of WoW because back then it was new.
You sound like a grognard loser who likes the smell of their own farts and tries to establish their milquetoast opinion as fact
Inb4 “you’re a marvel watcher” I don’t watch them because I’m not interested in superheros. Inb4 “FIFA slave” nope don’t care about sports ball.
Your reply is going to be some nonsense about how you’re right because you’re just…right! Don’t bother, I won’t read it.
Valve’s 30% is high, sure. But you’re not seeing the total cost of selling a game.
And yes, I’ve done this before.
Besides the user count, besides all other factors. Digital sales are kinda hard.
You need to offer the actual game. If you’re selling an indie game that’s a few hundred megs, well you get to go sign up for a service to deliver it. Could be as simple as a google drive link, but because this is business use you get to pay business prices.
Are they charging a flat rate per month, per gig? Per download? Some combinations?
Now there’s updates and patches that need to be delivered. Same deal as before, but also now you need to handle the actual patching. Do you ship one big patch that checks for previous patches? Small individual patches that your users have to figure out what one they need?
Does your game have multiplayer? Well damn have fun with that.
What about support and refunds and GDPR stuff? Gotta factor all of that in too.
Now we get to do payment processing. You get to pay a company to accept payments on your behalf because you are NOT doing that yourself you WILL get stuck on inane and silly laws.
That’s part of it. Paying steam 3 bucks on my 10 dollar game to handle ALL of that? Yeah that’s fair. Could it be cheaper? Sure. a lot of things could. I don’t spend months on a game and then cheap out on the most important part: sales.
My time is valuable and worth 30%