Steam is a pretty complicated thing to discuss just because there’s a lot of factors. But i have read first hand accounts from developers who made more money on a sale than they ever did during the entire first year or number of months when their game was out. And gained a solid following after said sale. So there’s definitely value for the steam sale in specific situations, however i suspect that the sale is basically a wash for most developers, and perhaps even hurts the bottom line for others.
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You didn’t need a modded 1541. There was a standard copy program (sorry, forget the name) that could run off of 1 (swap) or 2 (simultaneous) drives; the “modded” drives came much later. None of the drive-only copiers were better, however; rather, they were merely simpler and a bit faster, when making larger numbers of copies. Their success rate was the same, or even a bit lower; they couldn’t match bit density as well as the full version of the program, when that was necessary, for example.
By the by, the 1541 used a 6502 CPU, just like the Apple II and original Atari line of computers. The C64, however, used a 6510, which was a significantly better processor.
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Once you realize how low distribution costs are on Steam, it’s all about cashflow.
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I had a similar conversation with Jay Beale once… he said “Sendmail has had more bugs than any other mailer” and I replied “you mean more bugs have been fixed in Sendmail than any other mailer”.
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It definitely seems to be a factor that only effects certain companies. Or perhaps that only certain companies cant seem to find a sensible way around. No end of small and Indy developers who have made more money thanks to the sale. No end of large companies who have suddenly made a bunch of money on an older product by relaunching it on steam and hitting a sale. Even just companies that make better games seem to have no trouble with it.
But I have read some first hand accounts of those same small and Indy developers who got schwacked by a steam sale.
It does seem to mostly be an Issue with aaa studios. And it’s more of a feed back loop. They were already going for microtransactions and needless social/mobile elements and perfunctory multi-player to recoup supposed “losses” over the life of the game. They were already using pre-orders to front end sales during early full price. They were already operating in a weird marketing driven press environment. They were already trying to Side step reviews and word of mouth. The more they’ve done to shift those sales towards the first week, The more they need to do so. Because all the tactics used contribute to the fact that they’re shipping product that can’t really sustain sales long term. Once price goes down volume may not be high enough to make up for reduced margin.
I also think there’s some fuzzy math involved. The media business tends to view piracy as 1:1 lost sales. Which clearly isn’t the case. Like wise I think they’re assuming a sale at reduced price simply means lost money. Rather than accounting for the fact that increase sales at reduced margins often mean more profit overall.
So there seem to be real factors at work here. That do reduce profit to some extent (in a way that’s easily offset by increased sales). But the response to that from the biggest players largely seems to make those effects bigger. The window of profitability smaller. Which means you need to press more of your sales into a shorter amount of time. Repeat. Until your product out and out bombs.
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Suing people who expose security holes is definitely a problem, but it’s only tangentially related to the many eyes issue. I’d argue it’s more of a control issue; the vendors who are suing are trying to take too much control over their code to the detriment of their customers.
For that matter, most software–even open source software–is still consumed as binaries even where the source code is available. Having the source code doesn’t prevent someone from injecting back doors or malware into the binaries, and it doesn’t prevent sloppy code or administration (i.e., accounts with default passwords). For those who do install from source, how often do people actually audit the code before they use it?
Control is a much better argument for open source software. You can do what you want with it: modification, auditing, whatever.
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Brings to mind the app developers who get dinged by the Amazon app store sales or free app days. Amazon decides on this, sometimes without devs being notified. Then they get a huge new customer base who they have to support without much (or sometimes any) revenue to show for it, which then leads to a glut of terrible reviews because the less people pay for something the more weirdly high their expectations can become.
The way the free monthly games work on PSN and XBL seem better: they always pick games past their major revenue cycle, and never toss in any of the DLC for free. It seems carefully planned to benefit both Sony/MSFT and the game devs in kind.
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Those 2 statements are NOT contradictory.
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Amazon’s free apps (now found in their “Underground” app) are NOT forced upon developers; they are put there on agreement with Amazon. The dev can (and sometimes does) pull them at will.
Heh. Pain in the ass. Were you around in 2003 when it launched? THEN it was a pain in the ass. It’s awesome now.
People had legit beefs with Steam as a delivery platform 13 years ago, now days not so much.
I’ve been using it for 13 years (my steam ID is single digit) and I have basically never had a problem or issue with it beyond those very early days pain with HL2 launch. That doesn’t mean nobody has an issue with it, but beyond the early days, it’s really been just fine. Does it have a bad day sometimes? Sure, but so does Google, Facebook, AWS, etc. Everything online has issues sooner or later.
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That kinda makes sense. It is an odd dynamic though. It’s more like movies banking everything on their ‘opening weekend’ sales. Other software doesn’t work that way. Imagine if Photoshop or Microsoft Office had planned their business on only selling for a week and then packed it in to go do something else. (Never mind business software that runs for many years or even decades with year over year growth in sales.)
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Oh its absolutely weird. Particularly when you see so many releases not having a problem with it. Or whole companies succeeding and growing by doing the opposite. I’ll point at CD Project again. They built a really well regarded. Undeniably successful development studio and publishing operation. Off the back of imperfect but very interesting games. That sold poorly in the short term, but piled up sales over the long term. At reduced price. With lots of free add ons. Slowly accruing genuine enthusiasm and critical regard. And a DRM free web store that mostly sold out of print games. They are fucking huge now. And the last game they put out is probably the most critically acclaimed, and best regarded thing to come out of the games industry in a decade or more.
So I think the x-factor is. And why it seems to only be an issue for certain companies. Is you’re talking about products that can’t sustain sales for long. The companies and games that seem most concerned about this are often games with an annual release. Or games that end up not being so fondly remembered. Or those games that end up so borked on PC side that refunds happen.
I’m willing to bet it doesn’t help that a lot of these AAA releases are insanely expensive to make and maintain. If it costs you millions a month to run dem servers. Well you best be getting several millions in sales in that same time frame. Or at least taking in many millions more than you need in the first few months.
Movies are in that situation because the bulk of the money still comes from theatrical release. Which is a time limited thing. With sales dropping off as people have already seen it. Barring big hits. Opening weekend might be the vast bulk of what you make. Cause you can only guarantee you’ll be there for a few weeks. And whether you stay longer. Is going to be directly determined by how you do that opening weekend.
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When the one is doing all it can to encourage everyone to take a look at the code and the other is doing all it can to prevent anyone form seeing the code how can you possible say it’s only tangentially related?
Sure the vast majority of people don’t inspect their own code, the obvious reason for this is that the vast majority of people don’t have the skills to do this. It seems to me to be overwhelmingly obvious that the way you get as many eyes on your code as possible is to open access to it, and even though there is no way you will prevent all people from looking at your code, if you want at least some people with good intentions to also look at your code, don’t sue them!
It doesn’t prevent those things, no, it does make spotting them incredibly more likely. Open-source gives me the option to look at it, closed-source doesn’t.
Isn’t auditing just another word for having another set of eyes looking at the code? Are you now saying that one of the benefits of open-source software is that you can get more eyes to look at it?
Nowhere near all open-source users inspect their code, but that’s not what “many eyes” is about, what you want is to make it as easy as possible for motivated white hat hackers to look at, and comment on, your code. There will probably also be some white hat hackers that have a look at, and comment on, closed source software but the threat of lawsuits makes this number much lower.
Black hat hackers, criminals, hacking agencies of goverments, all have no such problems, they look at both code sets with the same amount of enthusiasm. So you can imagine that even if the amount of eyes that looks at the code is raised only a little, you may already get a big improvement is the ratio of black hats vs white hats.
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There is a new trend in FOSS called reproducible builds that attempts to remove the possibility of shipping binaries different than the source code. You can look it up on https://reproducible-builds.org/
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Nintendo has made its business on doing the opposite of expecting big sales on release. I’m sure they like to see those large figures at the beginning but they pride themselves in their games having a “long tail”, which means that they get consistent sales over time. It’s why used Super Smash discs or Pokemon cartridges still resale for much higher than other games, it’s usually because people generally aren’t looking to get rid of those games.
Valve has also worked on supporting their games years and years after they’ve been released so that they continue to consistently bring in more money and new players, while other studios just look to finish the game and then hope to make more money by making a sequel.
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