Comment on "The $60 Billion Gaming Scam Nobody Talks About" by mrixrt
TehPers@beehaw.org 6 days agoWhile I can’t speak to the amount itself (somehow the industry as a whole settled on 30%), I do think it’s fair to say that Steam, the App Store, and the Play Store aren’t just payment processors. They also are platforms for users to discover new software/games, and they do a lot of advertising for developers. I can agree with the fee being too high, but I don’t think it’s fair to compare it with PayPal, which only processes the payments.
Malgas@beehaw.org 6 days ago
The argument also ignores that these platforms don’t charge more than the original brick and mortar distribution systems they replaced, under which the industry developed in the first place.
The thing that has changed is that AAA budgets have ballooned to the point that their sales targets have to be unrealistic. The author suggests that needing 4 to 8 million sales to break even is too many, but a game that currently needs 8M sales would still need well over 5M even if the platform’s cut was 0%. And I don’t have any confidence that the publishers would actually reduce their expectations for units sold even in that case.
bad1080@piefed.social 6 days ago
which would be absolutely insane considering they have almost zero costs compared to those