Right to the point Starkers. Low margin high volume. Especially when the economy slows down.

As a number of comments after the article pointed out, why give the game to early adopters for $25 when they are perfectly willing to pay $50, and you can always lower the price later?

I think Valve did it right - both with the original pricing, and the aggressive sales.

SD should sell Demigod for $10 some weekend, maybe coinciding with the release of additional content.

I disagree. Pricing is all over the map and isn't directly link to production costs. Still waiting to start saving on digital distribution, you know the part of the deal where publishing costs are cut (no box, no disc, no manual, nothing physical) but it still costs the same. Also if you can get the same or close to the same amount of money but your product is in the hands of more people, you're expanding your fanbase for future titles.

Is there anyway to even quantify the "destroy" most companies part. I at least for PC gaming, there doesn't seem to be anyone tracking digital to retail very well plus, let's not forget the B&M and e-tailers aren't the same either. As for not making more money,well it is not the consumer fault if there is a loss of effeciency due to bad contract terms, or extra services required (as if online verfication systems are a real service although having servers available is admittedly a replacement cost). The consumer is getting less for the same dollar amount (again less product and no shipping and handling costs) and that doesn't sit well with me.

Meh, hunt for a patch. Google pretty much does the hunting for you and that is if you are too lazy to just go to the publisher or developers website. Not a service I am interested in actually paying for. I have CDs that worked fine after 15-20 years, though I can't say the same for the companies that published them. Almoast all of them are belly up now so I guess if there was service attched to them, I'd be worse off without a CD than I am now. Having to have an account to play a game at all is pretty much the ultimate form of DRM (see previous sentence).

I don't know why you would be so elaborate with the digital distribution and so basic with the retail. Retail versions aren't just about what's in the box either. That product is shipped, stocked and displayed. Removing the box isn't just removing the box, it's also removing services attached to that box.

I can browse Amazon or walk into any local discount store and find a lot of the games sold on steam for half the price steam sells it. It's ridiculously expensive. Hell, most new releases aren't even sold at the suggested price at release at the e-tailer and B&M stores.

I can see you want to turn this into a digital distribution vs retail pricing. As in one has to be better than the other, and naturally, only one opinion can "win".  I really don't care either way, the pricing with software is messed up. You have games that cost millions to make and publish being sold for 40 USD and then you have a game that is little more than the rehash of some of these value/casual games being sold for 20. Thre is clearly no link to between production costs and actual price. Heck even in casual game markets you have World of Goo selling for 6.99 at BigFishGames and 19.99 on steam. You have Guild Wars being sold at Newegg for 9.99 and other places the expansion alone is 2-3 times that amount.  Now some of that is sales, some of it is not and all the while you have developers claiming they aren't getting enough money, publishers who advertise their DRM as a service and a justification not to be competitive and behind the scenes are these contracts about who gets what for each dollar.

The fact of the matter is it costs money to produce cds, make those boxes and make those manuals, ship them to the store and get shelf space. All those costs are essentially dissipated by digital distribution and the cost of the servers to allow those downloads to happen is even't close to publication costs and yet the consumers aren't seeing the savings, and if the developers aren't getting that extra money then yes, there is a problem with software pricing and how the dollars are divided on the way to deliver said products.

So you disagree with me, which we established months ago.  Fascinating.

No.  I don't want to talk about pricing.  Some games are cheaper digitally, some are cheaper retail, some are on sale digitally at different times, some are on sale retail at certain times, some prices are outdated at either.  That about sums it up.  Neither option is cheaper as a rule.

And what services come with a game in a box?  The ability to take it home and install it?  That's all you get.  Of course, there's publisher support, but that's true of every game purchased everywhere.  As to shipping, that's a negative, and once we can do away with that we'll get games when they're done instead of a month later after it's all distributed.

And lets talk about stock.  A lot of retailers don't carry PC games anymore.  Some of them have them in some cabinet somewhere so you can't even see what they've got.  The selection is often piss poor at the retailers that do carry it.  With digital, once its available, it doesn't go out of stock (with rare exceptions.)  Sure, that doesnt matter with new releases, but it definately matters if you're looking for an older one.

This argument could go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and probably will (with different people arguing) much like Intel vs AMD or ATI vs NVIDIA or any other retarded forum argument.  It's a subject with much depth and since we don't have the actual stats on things, pretty much everything we say is meritless.

In the end, all I wanted to say previously was that there are people who disagree with you.  You think you get less with digital, I think I get more with digital.  That's pretty much the beginning and the end of it.

Terrible. Terrible comparison here. You are talking about two different products in this comparsion. Steam and Retail versions are essentially the same. If it has online multiplayer, and there are no inherent version issues, the game won't know the differences between playing a Steam purchased game and the retail. ATI and Nvidia actually have physical differences about their cards. Always fun to see some throw around the word retarded in an argument to "strengthen" their point.

Sorry about that I was uhh...ahem having an interesting couple days  

Realized I prolly needed to chill a bit   Ah well life goes on and all that crap.

It's entertaining, have some more interesting days.

Yeah!  So they can continue existing!  That's usually what game devs want to do...otherwise they wouldn't be making games.