Glad to see you...

If the gaming industry is an automobile, and the game designers are the drivers, then that makes us, the players, backseat drivers, and we'll be damned if we're gonna let the industry keep on heading the way it's going (good or bad) without letting them know what we think. So buckle up, feel free to complain about there being no air in the back, and bring your most critical and analytical mind to the open air discussion of the current age, Backseat Gamers!
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Thursday, July 29, 2010

See You in a Couple Months

Starcraft II is out and it's fantastic, beyond fantastic, so I'll see you in a couple months. :D But seriously, I took a half-day yesterday and I've already sunk a good 13 hours into the SP campaign since Tuesday afternoon and it's just fantastic. I won't post up a long review since I'm probably the only PC player here.
Posted by at 7:52 AM

2 comments:

  1. JuniperRedJuly 29, 2010 at 7:58 AM

    I just saw this comment while reading an article on Starcraft II's sales data.

    Despite being in development for four to five years…the vast majority of SCII's development costs have already been expensed, which makes the margin impact of SCII even more positive," he wrote. "It already stands to be one of Activision's most profitable titles, given that it is on the PC (no $8-9 hardware royalty), it is retailing for $60, not $50, and it should sell a large portion digitally through Battle.net, foregoing the 20 percent royalty paid to retailers. We believe SCII can approach 50 percent operating margins and contribute at least $0.07 of earnings to Q3 results."

    Is that true? When a game is released on a console, there is an $8 or $9 hardware charge to the maker of the console? How does that work? It would definitely explain why games are, typically, $50 for the PC and $60 for the consoles... I always wondered why that was.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I 3N3MY IJuly 29, 2010 at 9:09 AM

    Glad you're enjoying the game and if I had a good PC and wasn't so damn OCD while playing RTS games I'm sure I'd get it.

    About your question I do remember seeing an article once for console games that broke down the percentages of who gets paid what in a pie chart. I couldn't tell you for sure what the dollar amount is that the consoles get, but I do remember being stunned when I noticed how small a portion the actual developers get.

    It's sad that the publishers seem to get a much larger stake in the cash and the retailers get an overly large amount as well. I guess it all goes back to the poor suffered artist and in a couple years when everything is digital the publishers may be up for renegotiating.

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