All purpose sales and sales rumors/anecdotes thread next gen+

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JPT said:
Physical

£50 consumer price including VAT
£41.67 consumer price excluding VAT
£30 the retailers price
£28 the distributors price

If we extrapolate a bit, in regards to digital price breakdown, using the information we have and using expected standard practices.

Digital

£50 consumer price including VAT
£41.67 consumer price excluding VAT
£32.06 is what the publisher gets after the storefront has taken their 30%
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Not going to go into actual number as retailer margins aren't uniform across retailers or distributors. Also as mentioned, publisher's get even less of that as Physical duplication, packaging, and shipping and handling are fixed costs. IIRC - the disc duplication is ~15-20 USD/10-13 pounds (someone will correct me if my memory is incorrect) for consoles (this includes the console holder licensing costs I believe, analogous to the digital storefront 30%). That doesn't include packaging or shipping and handling (double the shipping and handling if it has to go through a distributor).

So using your hypotheticals above. It's possible that for a physical copy a publisher may get as little as 15 USD/10 pounds (or less) for each physical sale.

Well to be correct, the publisher still gets that for each sale, but part of that has to go towards the sunk costs of duplication, packaging, shipping, and handling. Something that isn't applicable to digital sales. And as those are up front costs, that means...

For digital sales your only upfront costs is development costs.

For physical sales you have upfront costs associated with development, duplication, packaging, shipping, and handling. As well, duplication, packaging, shipping, and handling are ongoing costs if you do well enough that you have to make more copies to sell.

All of this has to be paid before a single copy is sold. And all of which has to be recouped before your title is profitable.

Regards,
SB
 
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$60 for ownership of a physical disc that contains the code and license of the game in question that allows you to maintain rights to the license as long as you have possession of the disc or the disc itself wears out. However, you are forced to present the disc every time in order to play the game.

Or...

$60 dollars for rights to a digital license thats tied to your hardware or a digital identity that allows you to maintain rights as long as you are in the good standings of the content owner or as long as the content is provided by the content owner. However, if you present your digital identity you can play on any compatible hardware if an internet connection is available.

Who cares whats the margins enjoyed by the publishers on either method of distribution? How much a publisher generates in revenue on a title is ultimately dependent on both the margins of the individual units as well as the overall volume of sales. And profits are a matter of unit margins, volume sales versus the level of investment in development and marketing.

Does it matter whether the dev is located in the US or western Europe where labor is more expensive? Would you demand cheaper retail pricing if GTA 5 had been dev'd in China? Do you need to know the level of marketing costs incurred by the publisher for any titles to make a better assessment of whether or not you are paying too much or too little for a game?

Ultimately if your experience with a game is bad is any of the finer details of the financials behind the production of that game isn't going to make your investment more worthwhile. Whether a pub received $1 or $58.99 for each unit sold isn't going to make your s@#$ty experience any better.

All that matters is how much you value the experience the game offers and whether you value physical or digital distribution and their inherent advantages over the alternative.
 
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But often, the prices of the discs are discounted, especially after a time.

Plus you can rent discs or buy them used or sell them when you're done.

I would not pay the same amount for a digital license which doesn't offer the same kind of flexibility.

I know used games are a big thing with developer, how they resent games stores making so much money on used discs. But ever since we've had media, going back to vinyl and magnetic tapes, people have been trading media.

Now developers have tried to stem this trading, by issuing one-time codes to use online features and such, but those efforts never gained much traction.

For now, people have spoken about what they prefer.
 
wco81 said:
For now, people have spoken about what they prefer.
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Wait, they have? I was not aware we had any firm breakdown comparing actual sales of digital vs physical, not for the vast majority of AAA games that we would need to support your statement and especially not the magnitude of sales dollars that are spent on all the indie titles and such that are only available digitally.
 
I think digital sales could get a nice boost if Sony starts a PS4 greatest hit discount on titles. If they're price at $30 it would be a very tempting buy, and that could be their perm price for a while.

Regarding if the people have spoken, no they have not. As the generation moves along expect to see a larger percentage of the market buy digital games. It may not eclipse overall disc sales, but it should grow as a percentage of the overall market. And that is the people speaking given a variety of choice. The two can coexist, but considering digital is becoming the more convenient of the options it makes sense it will grow as a percentage.

I think there should be laws in place protecting digital content purchases requiring the copyright holder to make the content available for the duration of the copyright.
 
dobwal said:
Ultimately if your experience with a game is bad is any of the finer details of the financials behind the production of that game isn't going to make your investment more worthwhile. Whether a pub received $1 or $58.99 for each unit sold isn't going to make your s@#$ty experience any better.
Click to expand...

I did not try to say if a game is worth its price or decide if digital is better than physical, but try to uncover how much or if there is huge extra margin on digital vs physical. My suspicion is that the publisher does not earn tons more on a digital release than they do on physical. So they can not actually drop the prices, like people expect, since its the retailer that does discounting in the physical world and it would mean that the digital storefront front would do it for the digital version. But since there is no incentive to get rid of bad stock, ie you do not have trash the extra discs and write them of as losses, you do not go for a fire sale to recoup some of your initial costs.

But SB's post murked it up a bit for me, because the duplication and platform holder licensing costs are included in the distributor price for physical. Then I wonder if that licensing is actually included in the the 30% storefront price or if the 30% is an addition to the platform licensing cost, which he claimed it was. So if he is correct, which I have no reason to doubt, then there might be a chunk more in there.
So I would love to see if somebody could fit that information into the equation and how different the end result would be.

And whether digital is better than physical, for me it's digital. I do not sell my used games and I do not really replay them and with digital I do not have to find a store to buy it in or place to order it online.
 
Sonic said:
I think digital sales could get a nice boost if Sony starts a PS4 greatest hit discount on titles. If they're price at $30 it would be a very tempting buy, and that could be their perm price for a while.
.
Click to expand...

Greatest hits branding in the PlayStation Store is actually a great idea. They publish a list of all the price drops each week on the Playstation blog, but just having a section on the store where you could see everything that has hit that $30 price point would be nice.
 
DieH@rd said:
What does monthly amazon tracking says for US in May so far? Is the difference between PS4 and Xbone larger than in April?
Click to expand...

It's kind of hard to track now. While the XB1 has two SKUs, the PS4 has had SKus come and go and its hard to tell if they funnel into the same item on the sales list. The PS4 currently has two SKus for some reason (bundle and non-bundle - why?), it also had a LBP3/Lego bundle which seems to have disappeared in the last few days. The TLoU SKU is #23 for May where the XB1 is at #28 & #37.

I'd say it was pretty close overall, neither system is selling great due to lack of deals. XB1 is still $50 cheaper, so that keeps it close.
 
People like convenience. Going back to crude pay-per-view systems where people paid $5-10 for a movie rather than rent the video at the shop around the corner for much less.

Or people choosing MP3 players which let them load hundreds of hours of music on a player over discs and CD players.

Or watching Netflix streams instead of opting for discs.

Some day, pricing of digital download for games may make more sense and download speeds in general may be faster that more people will download. Also need bigger hard drives and most people won't go to the trouble of upgrading. Or paying more for SKUs with bigger hard drives.

Then, maybe the scales will tip over to the other side. My guess is next generation at least. It would help if the base console SKUs came with at least 2 TB of storage.
 
wco81 said:
Then, maybe the scales will tip over to the other side. My guess is next generation at least. It would help if the base console SKUs came with at least 2 TB of storage.
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I think the current generation shipping consoles will have 2Tb as standard in a few years. Look at the first PS3 models which came in 20Gb and 60Gb configurations. You can't get those anymore although perhaps Sony still be selling that flash-based thing with a piddling amount of space.

I think before Sony announce a PS4 price cut they'll bump the standard HDD to 1Tb to increase the value proposition compared to the XBO.
 
DSoup said:
I think the current generation shipping consoles will have 2Tb as standard in a few years. Look at the first PS3 models which came in 20Gb and 60Gb configurations. You can't get those anymore although perhaps Sony still be selling that flash-based thing with a piddling amount of space.

I think before Sony announce a PS4 price cut they'll bump the standard HDD to 1Tb to increase the value proposition compared to the XBO.
Click to expand...
HDDs do not increase in capacity very much nowadays. Cost does not drop too.
 
Rikimaru said:
HDDs do not increase in capacity very much nowadays. Cost does not drop too.
Click to expand...
2.5" HDD capacities are still increasing and the cost difference between a 512mb and 1Tb 2.5" HDD is around £15 as a consumer. If I were buying 5 million of them wholesale, it'd probably be a whole lot less than than.

edit: beaten by London-boy
 
Even if they don't save a penny, they should be able to get a 1TB at the same price and likely 500GB will get hard to buy in quantity.
 
DrJay24 said:
Even if they don't save a penny, they should be able to get a 1TB at the same price and likely 500GB will get hard to buy in quantity.
Click to expand...
This usually happens when platter technology makes a leap forward in density but at the moment 2.5" 500Gb HDDs are often a single 500Gb platter, 1Tb drives are usually two 500Gb platters and 2Tb drives are usually four 500Gb platters or three 667Gb platters. So while 500Gb platters are still being main in volume, 500Gb HDDs will remain available, they'll just crash in price.

I think the largest 2.5" platter at the moment is Toshiba's 750Gb which is used in their 3Tb drives - which is four 750Gb platters.
 
Rikimaru said:
HDDs do not increase in capacity very much nowadays. Cost does not drop too.
Click to expand...

Wrong. Even with desktop drives they recently hit 6tb and 8tb drive sizes and HGST has 10TB drives set to be released.
 
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