The question is rarely asked outright, but often times it’s something along the lines of “Supporting more platforms is hard,” to which I would like to push back with, “Do you want to break Steam’s stranglehold on the market, or not?”
Comment on CONTROL Resonant released on GOG
Hubi@feddit.org 1 day ago
Why do so many games release with such a delay on GOG? Control Resonant didn’t even come with any special DRM and the previous game has been on GOG for ages.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
paultimate14@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I don’t think most publishers (Remedy in this case) care. The ones that do are ones like Epic and Microsoft who were trying to promote their own stores.
Like, yes they want to diversify their platforms. But if you want to bring in revenue quickly and start paying off thr debt accumulated from 3-5 years of developing a AAA game. You have to choose whether to delay your game’s PC release entirely for a couple of months, or whether to release on Steam ASAP and collect the vast majority of revenue from that and just delay the other platforms that are an insignificant fraction.
Remember that marketing budgets are a huge factor too. I suspect Lemmy users are probably more ad-averse than average, but your average gaming consumer probably saw a lot of ads for this game leading up to launch and was riding that hype train. Delaying the PC release means that you either need to pay for those marketing costs for longer, or release without that benefit (a death sentence). Or you delay the console launch too, which means even more time spent with financing tied up in debt and accumulating interest, waiting for the revenue to come in.
And even if you DO decide to go ahead and delay… The vast majority of PC gamers are going to buy it on Steam anyways. Only a tiny fraction of people care about DRM. Personally, I avoid anything with Denuvo and a lot of the publisher-specific stuff like EA Play.
You are paying a premium to buy a launch day game anyways. The reason people want to buy games on launch… Some people do just really want their gratification and don’t want to wait to enjoy the game, but a LOT of it is about social status. These are people who want to read articles, watch videos, engage in discussions both online and offline. They want to ride the hype train. And for people who want to maximize that experience, Steam is the platform of choice. They blow Epic and GOG put of the water in terms of social features. They are way better than any of the consoles too.
As someone not socially motivated myself… Well, I absolutely loved Control and I have been gushing to people about it for a couple of years. I’m in absolutely no hurry to buy the sequel. I’ll wait until it goes on sale for some reasonable price, probably $25-$30. Then it will sit in my library with my ~700 other games until the time is right. My mood, my schedule, the weather, etc. And I will almost certainly buy it on Steam for the convenience of having it on the same platforms as my other games, including cloud features that let me switch between my Deck and PC seamlessly, and stream to basically every screen I own.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Sure, but at a bare minimum, I’d appreciate a “coming soon to GOG” like they do for Switch 2. Or hell, they can leave the GOG logo off of the trailers and just put up a store page on GOG to let me know rather than shadow dropping it down the line. It’s not just Remedy and AAAs doing this either, as this same thing happens with Sea of Stars, Mouse: P.I. for Hire, and Kena: Bridge of Spirits. Right now, I can reasonable expect every new Silent Hill game to come to GOG within its release year, but they don’t signpost that. Square Enix games of many sizes and shapes are coming to GOG in batches, and not even batches that make any sense to me. Surely the pixel remasters would be easy to do, right? But now I know that if I want to play Final Fantasy VI for the first time, I’d be crazy to buy it on Steam if I can reasonably expect a GOG release now.
artyom@piefed.social 23 hours ago
To delay piracy.
MagnificentSteiner@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
To add to the other replies, the least charitable conclusion would be that the management are under the mistaken belief that piracy reduces sales so they don’t want to make it too easy until the initial sales window is over.
Hubi@feddit.org 1 day ago
Pretty sure Remedy games have always hit piracy sites on day 1 of release though. I’m sure their management is aware of that. They even built in a little Easter egg in the pirated version of Alan Wake where Alan would walk around with a pirate eyepatch throughout the game lol
okamiueru@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Smaller studios sometimes delay GoG release in order to have a chance of getting exposure on steam from a short burst in sales at release.
chisel@piefed.social 1 day ago
That makes sense to me. Better to concentrate all of your sales on the most popular platform to boost your visibility on that platform. Though, I believe it also released on Epic on day 1, so idk what’s up with that. Maybe the 50% lower revenue share Epic takes was worth the minor impact on Steam metrics?
ltxrtquq@lemmy.ml 17 hours ago
No one buys games on Epic, so releasing there doesn’t really compete with steam sales.
ajikeshi@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
epic has been known for paying devs for an early time of store exclusivity, so i would think that this is the case here as well