The STEAM Sales and Releases Thread

[Zed]

"Rather than looking at it as a 'lost sale' when people wait for these Steam discounts, I think it needs to be viewed as reaching out to a new customer that never would have purchased your game otherwise."

No shit. I wouldn't buy 90% of the garbage I do if it wasn't so cheap I can't help myself.

Hey I have these slippers I'm waiting to switch out after christmas. Uh, $10 + shipping (that's -75%!)
Today only. Daily deal.

Are they on Steam? Do they have cards? Steam achievements? What is the patch history on these slippers?

I can steam them if you want. that's probably hygienic considering the amount of morning and night leaks I've taken in them.
they come patched to the latest version. daily deal has passed btw they're only -25% now.

always buy during daily deals man.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Fuck. I waffled on it and it bit me in the ass.

 

[Metro]

Point is, we don't need games like that.

So buying a new PC is off the table?

No I need to play Wasteland 2 at 16xMSAA.

 

[Metro]

Instead you have companies like the Amnesia developers for whom the developers all still live at below poverty level.

They deserve to be.

 

[Zed]

amnesia developers in poverty?
you realize they are swedish?
even people in poverty here eat cake.

 

[Name]

amnesia developers in poverty?
you realize they are swedish?
even people in poverty here eat cake.

They may have cakes to eat, but they still can't do other things, like making big budget video games. Hence the poverty. Lol.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

hence why their games come out in very rough, beta states.

Except their games have been released in non-rough non-buggy state now since glorious Steam, and CK2 has apparently been their best selling title ever (And is Steamworks everywhere but Gamersgate), and CK2 was selling better a year or two after release than it was during the first year. And they're releasing their games for less money off the bat and run absolute assloads of sales on their shit.

Edit: And what the hell, shouldn't since this is HHR but here are some sources.

http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/7/4554042/paradox-interactive-history "Paradox has grown from seven employees in a basement to over 100. It's doing it by making its model work, living off publishing revenue and the sales of its back catalog in order to make new games. CK2 sells more copies now, per month than it did a year ago. Wester says the money is helping Andersson make the company's next title, Europa Universalis 4, its most polished yet."


http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...-Developer-Diary-%96-The-End-of-the-Beginning Regarding EU4: "We also have twice the concurrent users of any of our games from Paradox Development Studio and this has been our best-selling first month for any of our games ever."

Paradox is also a publisher, this isn't exactly a fair example that a Steam-only model allows for big-sized studios. They publish a lot of them and a significant portion of their staff is dedicated to these activities, in which they publish other studios' games while investing very little in turn.

I think what makes them sustainable is that they have a niche in which people are ready to make a lot of microtransactions to make cosmetic improvements. So in effect, it is the Matrix Games model of charging a lot of games, except instead of from the get go it is spread over multiple increments. You won't find many cases where it can actually work like that. I would also like to see the average salary these people make.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Instead you have companies like the Amnesia developers for whom the developers all still live at below poverty level.

They deserve to be.

Whatever you think about the game, the point is that when you make a darling Steam game that sells very well and has long legs, has been made on a shoestring budget, and with governmental subsidies on top of that, and yet it's not enough to allow you to give better than poverty levels living conditions to your employees in your small team, it's troubling, and it's proof that the Steam model is an illusion.

 

[Telengard]

Since you're basically paraphrasing EA, and you seem to like their business model so much, you do know that you can purchase Battlefield 4 Digital Deluxe Premium for $110 USD right now! and help pave the way for the $110 video game future. (Which is the going rate that EA and other AAAs are claiming everyone should value their games at.) They'll thank you for the business, for sure. And if you can convince 3 friends to not buy 20 discounted indie games with their $110 and instead buy a single EA product, they'll thank you even more.

Of course the brave old world you and EA will thus help create still won't have SirTech in it. It'll probably have an EA published Jagged Alliance: Ghost Dogs FPS, of course. But, it's all about the principle of the thing. Not actual product. People should do what's right. And what's right is for people to buy the games that they're told to buy and for the price they're told to buy them at by the publisher, not the price that people feel they're worth.

 

[taxalot]

Ah. Poverty and indie developpers.

On another forum, I saw someone complain about the pixel graphics of Hyperlight Drifter and everybody telling him "Dude, it's just a 600 000$ project made by four people."

*takes out calculator*
(600 000 euros / 4 ) / 12 / 3 (let's suppose it has 3 years development, which is PLENTY).
4166€ a month by person.

Yup. Poverty. Can't afford graphics.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

It doesn't tell anything. From that amount you have to substract a mountain of fees such as office space and related fees, taxes, freelance contractors, etc etc... what is actually left for them to make a living will be extremely slim.

 

[Ninjerk]

I like that you're presented with an article from a reputable industry organization that directly refutes your argument, and then you say

It amazes me how much people willfully blind themselves because they don't want to see this.

Right after

Also you don't see the accounting books, I really wonder what their definition of "success" is.

I was hoping you could tell me about chemtrails, or perhaps the New World Order, really.

 

[Zewp]

Yah, I can really see how 10 people being a game at $50 is a lot better than 100s of people buying that same game at $12.49. We should really strive for the former!

HHR, the tinfoil goes on your bread, not your head.

 

[Metro]

Instead you have companies like the Amnesia developers for whom the developers all still live at below poverty level.

They deserve to be.

Whatever you think about the game, the point is that when you make a darling Steam game that sells very well and has long legs, has been made on a shoestring budget, and with governmental subsidies on top of that, and yet it's not enough to allow you to give better than poverty levels living conditions to your employees in your small team, it's troubling, and it's proof that the Steam model is an illusion.

They made a semi-interactive movie that didn't appeal to a lot of people. For every group of devs living on welfare I could probably name ten other indie developers that made a fortune on Steam.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Instead you have companies like the Amnesia developers for whom the developers all still live at below poverty level.

They deserve to be.

Whatever you think about the game, the point is that when you make a darling Steam game that sells very well and has long legs, has been made on a shoestring budget, and with governmental subsidies on top of that, and yet it's not enough to allow you to give better than poverty levels living conditions to your employees in your small team, it's troubling, and it's proof that the Steam model is an illusion.

They made a semi-interactive movie that didn't appeal to a lot of people. For every group of devs living on welfare I could probably name ten other indie developers that made a fortune on Steam.

I'm confused, is Metro trying to counter-troll HHR's ridiculous lies about Frictional with complete nonsense of his own? It's really hard to tell at this point.

 

[Bruticis]

Is this the fucking steam deal thread or the edgy circle jerk GD discussion? It's bad enough nearly every other section of the kodex is completely destroyed by pretentious armchair analysts and hipster experts and now this thread too? It's just too much for Gabens devoted to handle. Jaesun WhiskeyWolf are you guys too busy merging and moving threads to clean this shit up? Take this stream of crap to the steam/valve discussion thread where it belongs or better yet, retardo.

 

[Arcks]

Instead you have companies like the Amnesia developers for whom the developers all still live at below poverty level.

They deserve to be.

Whatever you think about the game, the point is that when you make a darling Steam game that sells very well and has long legs, has been made on a shoestring budget, and with governmental subsidies on top of that, and yet it's not enough to allow you to give better than poverty levels living conditions to your employees in your small team, it's troubling, and it's proof that the Steam model is an illusion.

Do you have source for that? Because I've seen it several threads already, and all I could find this http://frictionalgames.blogspot.fi/2010/09/one-week-after-release-of-amnesia.html and this http://frictionalgames.blogspot.fi/2011/01/four-months-after-amnesias-release.html. And that actually tells their situation has improved since they started having sales.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

If it's a digital product, sales can only help everyone involved.

In another news, Dark Matter is up again.

New Ending Now In

Hi all, thanks for your patience in waiting for the developer to fix the ending of the game. When you boot up the game, you may notice there is a Steam update and we are happy to confirm that the new ending is now in.

Once again we’d like to take the opportunity to apologize for the abrupt and incomplete original ending which should not have been passed by our QA team. We aim to publish high quality games and please rest assured that we have learned from this experience and have taken steps to ensure that something like this does not happen ever again.

We hope you enjoy the game.

You DO realize that in most software companies, the project lead generally looks over everything before release, even AFTER QA is finished with it, right? Throwing your QA team (if you even had one) under the bus for what is obviously the product of bad design & programming is just disgusting.

Oh, and you didn't fix a damn thing. Instead of an abrupt ending & a wall of text, we now have an abrupt ending & a hastily slapped together ending cut scene. The wall of text was never really the problem; it was the abruptness which ticked people off. That you couldn't even perceive this doesn't speak well of your overall competence. [...]

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Instead you have companies like the Amnesia developers for whom the developers all still live at below poverty level.

They deserve to be.

Whatever you think about the game, the point is that when you make a darling Steam game that sells very well and has long legs, has been made on a shoestring budget, and with governmental subsidies on top of that, and yet it's not enough to allow you to give better than poverty levels living conditions to your employees in your small team, it's troubling, and it's proof that the Steam model is an illusion.

Do you have source for that? Because I've seen it several threads already, and all I could find this http://frictionalgames.blogspot.fi/2010/09/one-week-after-release-of-amnesia.html and this http://frictionalgames.blogspot.fi/2011/01/four-months-after-amnesias-release.html. And that actually tells their situation has improved since they started having sales.

The latter blog post is from January 2011, we're almost three years later. They have not released anything since. The first blog post told how while they were making Amnesia they were basically close to not eating enough. There is no way they have enough money to sustain a non-precarious living for all this time and especially now.

Gameloft has been one of the biggest mobile companies around, but even their culmulative sales only account for no more than a few dozen million dollars. This is a company that would not be anywhere close to sustainable without very heavy third world outsourcing, something the Guillemot brothers have pioneered. Even Roxio makes no money from Angry Birds, they make their money from the sales of plush toys, licenses and other derived products.

When you discount your game into oblivion, you will not allow for anywhere close to a prosperous situation to occur. You do so when you get something to keep its value.

 

[Metro]

Just banish HHR to GD.

 

[Pelvis Knot]

Humanity has risen!

I suppose when you're in a store, you always scour the shelves for the priciest items and snap them up? You never bought anything discounted/on sale? Because if you did, you are a huge hypocrite.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Instead you have companies like the Amnesia developers for whom the developers all still live at below poverty level.

They deserve to be.

Whatever you think about the game, the point is that when you make a darling Steam game that sells very well and has long legs, has been made on a shoestring budget, and with governmental subsidies on top of that, and yet it's not enough to allow you to give better than poverty levels living conditions to your employees in your small team, it's troubling, and it's proof that the Steam model is an illusion.

Do you have source for that? Because I've seen it several threads already, and all I could find this http://frictionalgames.blogspot.fi/2010/09/one-week-after-release-of-amnesia.html and this http://frictionalgames.blogspot.fi/2011/01/four-months-after-amnesias-release.html. And that actually tells their situation has improved since they started having sales.

The latter blog post is from January 2011, we're almost three years later. They have not released anything since. The first blog post told how while they were making Amnesia they were basically close to not eating enough. There is no way they have enough money to sustain a non-precarious living for all this time and especially now.

Gameloft has been one of the biggest mobile companies around, but even their culmulative sales only account for no more than a few dozen million dollars. This is a company that would not be anywhere close to sustainable without very heavy third world outsourcing, something the Guillemot brothers have pioneered. Even Roxio makes no money from Angry Birds, they make their money from the sales of plush toys, licenses and other derived products.

When you discount your game into oblivion, you will not allow for anywhere close to a prosperous situation to occur. You do so when you get something to keep its value.

Just let it go HHR, you really need to find a different angle.

 

[Cosmic Misogynerd]

When you discount your game into oblivion, you will not allow for anywhere close to a prosperous situation to occur. You do so when you get something to keep its value.

Totally, just ask Jeff "Steam changed my life" Voguel. With Spiderweb humble bundle he managed to get +100K for his kids college.

 

[Metro]

Unfortunately by the time they're of college age that will only pay for one year.

 

[Ninjerk]

When you discount your game into oblivion, you will not allow for anywhere close to a prosperous situation to occur. You do so when you get something to keep its value.

Totally, just ask Jeff "Steam changed my life" Voguel. With Spiderweb humble bundle he managed to get +100K for his kids college.

Not if you see the BOOKS bros. Steam won't let him show the BOOKS. They're withholding key information, obviously.