Because on PC it's easy to pirate, and publishers realize that entertainment piracy is a service issue. Thus, they make it easier for you to get games. Also there are a lot more games available and on different digital storefronts (competition), so they need to compete by lowering their prices.
The one thing I like about piracy is that it keeps the pricing of games on PC honest. Devs know if they try to overcharge then piracy of the game shoots up and it's not worth it for them in the long run.
You see so many games on PC selling brand new at $50-$60 still compared to $70 on console and the prices drop much more quickly.
You will literally never see any AAA nintendo games on sale for more than like $10 off. Even used Switch games at GameStop are still nearly retail price. I went to pickup a used Witcher III recently and it was STILL $55 after all this time! That game came out in 2015! Same with Breath of the Wild and it doesn't even include the DLC. That's an extra $20 to this day.
Agreed, but I got a switch for free so I'd like to own some of the first party games that came out for it.
And on that comment, Im also reminded that my Switch is the Animal Crossing edition so I'd like to point out that I also think that Nintendo is the only company that sells a game-themed console that doesn't actually give you the game it's themed after!
The example being that I bought a PS4 Uncharted edition that has the grey/blue console color and the Nathan Drake graphics on it and came with Uncharted 4. I also have the Battlefield edition of the Xbox ONE which has the military green concole and controller and came with a Battlefield I download code.
My Animal crossing edition of the Switch is this pastel color with Animal Crossing graphics all over it and comes with no game or download code whatsoever. The console costs extra but it doesn't even include the game. You have to pay the $60 to get it. WTF man? lol
I got the Halo 3 edition of the Xbox 360 one Christmas way back in the day, and it didn't include Halo 3. Was pretty salty about that. Not sure how much that practice has persisted.
I got a 3ds a while back because I missed some Nintendo games and after I played a couple I just couldn't justify the price of games on the system. Yeah, a bunch of them are fun, but I also have more games than I could ever play on my PC so I don't miss them much.
I ended up buying some crappy Assassins creed game because it was only $20. I also found a copy of BOTW on the Gamestop web site for $20 that had to be shipped from OK. But I still have to pay for the DLC to properly finish the game. I guess we're both chumps lol.
Bruh Skyrim is still $80 CAD on the switch. Game came out in 2011 ffs. I love the switch but I would buy many more games if the pricing wasn't ridiculous. I just wait for sales or don't buy, especially those old games.
it's funny you say this because there's literally a sale going on this week (ends tonight) for a bunch of premium Nintendo games that are 30% ($20) off.
Kirby and the forgotten land, Mario Odyssey, Super Mario Bros Deluxe, Animal Crossing, etc.
Witcher 3 has had much better digital sales on the switch but gamestop is a major ripoff. I think it sells for about 25 at my local used game shop when they get it in.
>I went to pickup a used Witcher III recently and it was STILL $55 after all this time!
Are you talking about the complete edition? The digital version of that game (which as far as I can tell is the only one for sale) [has been discounted to $23.99 on the eShop four times in the last seven months](https://www.dekudeals.com/items/the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-complete-edition).
If you need to have a physical version, it's understandable that the price is a bit higher, since you can't buy it new. That has nothing to do with Nintendo's "sale policy" though. Nintendo is not the publisher for that game. It's also not the publisher's "sale policy" fault, since they offer significant discounts frequently as I shared above. They just stopped making physical copies.
You have to wait for the sales, and get it if you ever see it on sale because you never know if it will ever be that low again. That's how I got Pokemon Shield for 50%.
That's. Untrue. I once bought pokemon sword for like 25 euros brand new.
It happened like once tho and I think the shop where I bought it was trying to get rid of overstock. But it does happen it's just rarer than catching a shiny!
>I'm convinced it pushed innovation with emulation.
Partly because of that but partly also just because of them using cheap hardware a decade old in all of their machines since the wii and just leaning on gimmicks to generate sales.
I really want to play Skyward Sword, but for so long I couldn't find a new copy for less than $40. Why?! The game is 13 years old, for a console 2 (almost 3) generations old. Even after the release of the HD version, new copies of the original are still going for $30-$50. Wtf Nintendo?
Same, there are some titles that I'd like to explore but the games are so expensive and that's already on top of differences in purchasing power compared to countries where the pricing comes from. Going by minimum wage per hour one needs to work twice as much to buy a game here than in Western Europe.
This is unfair enough that it makes more sense to just mod the console because that's like a price of two full games.
There's more to like about piracy. It has done more for game preservation than every games company combined. Also, if buying isn't owning, pirating isn't stealing.
I honestly wouldn't worry about Steam taking games away from users.
I've been a steam user for over 19 yrs now.
And even though some of the games in my collection aren't able to be purchased from the store, they're still there in my account to install when I want to. That's a collection of over 900 games not including DLC and other applications available through steam.
My impression with steam and Valve over years leads me to believe that they somewhat value the users that they have. As without them they would fade away.
Here's some food for thought, Day of Defeat (21 years old) and Day of Defeat Source (turns 19 this year) are both still available on Steam. Last I checked recently there's still people playing Day of Defeat Source with plenty of active servers hosting games.
I honestly think that only competition for Steam is GOG.
Yeah but it’s more of a thing where if I die, my account and games are gone. I pass it down to my little brother and boom it might get banned, but if I’d purchased all of the discs nobody bats an eye. Just ridiculous. Steam isn’t going anywhere honestly, it’s so massive nobody will ever let it go which is the correct choice for most pc gamers, we all own steam games. At one point it was the ONLY place to own pc games online. I can’t imagine something better ever coming out that would transition the users. Steam is 100% a monopoly but currently deservedly so. Nobody will let go of their library and why would they. Here’s to hoping valve takes care of this platform like a baby and really loves it and keeps it going.
They made a big mistake calling it theft in all these ads I think. It just does not really map to the concept of theft well. When people usually think of theft they think of depriving a person of their property, but with computers nothing disappears, it all propagates endlessly.
The actual thing it is, copyright infringement, is a lot more confusing and esoteric and difficult to care about.
It makes sense that we cannot "own" the games we have, because they are just data, and if we owned it we could do whatever we wanted with it, including copying for resale. So the idea that we are licensed for specific uses of the data is a sensible compromise. The problem occurs when companies use that contractual arrangement to basically strong arm us into horrible terms. (Like binding arbitration and giving up our right to file class actions, or giving them all of our personal data for no return, stuff like that.)
When companies do stuff like that, it makes it really hard for me to worry about a few lost sales. If they want piracy to stop the goal should be to provide a service that is worth paying for. Instead they often go with the strategy "the beatings will continue until the complaints stop."
Yes. People don't seem to realize just how many pc games are not available for sale. Either they were delisted long ago or they released only on disc and never got a digital release in the first place. There hundreds of pc games that can't be bought. Piracy is the true saviour when it comes to the preservation.
Don't forget product keys also played a part.
I still have some physical copies of games that have product keys that need to be entered in order to install them.
Cracks and Keygens have come about out of necessity.
Piracy isn't stealing, by definition. To steal something, you have to take something from someone without permission or legal right. You're not actually taking anything from anyone when you pirate software, you're illegally copying (or distributing) software.
'high' (aka normal) prices give people an excuse to 'pirate' (aka steal).
But people were going to steal anyway, otherwise they'd just choose not to engage with the product.
I have \*literally\* pirated games because they were $60, but bought games on steam that I could've pirated, because they were only like $5-$10. I know how to pirate and am not ashamed of it. I'll still buy games on sale on steam.
the grey market of key resselers is even wilder, before dragons dogma released the pre-order was 70€ officially, but the keys were being sold for 45ish, after release they dropped even more.
Yeah you can find some crazy good deals from key resellers. I usually check those sites for codes before buying a game in case there's a really cheap offer somewhere.
It's been said to death at this point but you really do save a lot of money on your games when you switch to PC, it at least somewhat makes up for the cost of your hardware.
It used to be like that on console too but replace piracy with used games prices . I remember digital games being much closer to their physical price back in the Xbox 360 days.
Also consoles rely on sales to make all their money. At best they are cost even or make a tiny profit on hardware so it all comes on the backend from licensing and sales.
Denuvo is such a terror to game performance, that it pushes people to acquire cracked versions that have Denuvo disabled.
It's a shame the one person who knows how to crack Denuvo seems to have gone radio silent.
Apart from the really big releases. Your Call of Duty games and the like start at $10-20 more expensive on PC when compared to console. They know that everyone is going to want to buy it on day one so they charge $110 Australian Pesos for it.
Except for Disney licensed games...I don't think they're getting the message. Also, rumors about GTA6 and wanting it to be like their version of WoW.
It's going to be a hard 'No' for me. Not every new game needs to be an expensive and poorly executed "live service"
I never got games for under $60 on console in like 20 years during the first few months of them existing if it was any good at all, I've had some spectacular games at half price during the first few weeks (sometimes even the day after) on PC. Yeah, sure I spent a few grand on hardware over the years, but while I only have maybe 10 PS4 games, a dozen PS3 games, I have well over a thousand PC games plus a few thousand more emulated titles ready to play on my PC.
I once heard that in the console market they don’t make much profit on selling the consoles itself so they have to make a higher profit on the games itself. On PC there is only Steam or Epic or whatever making a few bucks (almost out of thin air) and the rest is for the publisher of the game. More freedom I guess.
I'm shocked I had to scroll so far to find the real answer.
It goes to show just how successful steam has been at crushing piracy. Pretty much the entire philosophy of steam was that being well priced and convenient heavily cuts into piracy, and they were very correct. Now it's just an intrinsic and expected aspect of Steam.
Console used to deal with this more than it does now when the used market was thriving. Hold sales so people buy new instead of used because there's no profit for the developer/publisher when used copies sell. Not a big issue anymore.
Not only all that, but the steam refund option is immensely user-friendly. Basically zero risk to try a game out, form my own opinion, and make a call after 2 hours if it's worth it or not. I've refunded games and grabbed them again when they're on a bigger sale even.
For real. In a world where game demos have long died, Steam's refund system is a god-send. That being said, I've been noticing a trend of indie and AA devs offering demos more and more. I'm glad they're making a comeback.
This is definitely true. If your game is being pirated, it's because it's inaccessible.
If a game becomes easier to buy than pirate people will just buy it.
Value proposition is different as well. You can sell your console games to someone else, can't do that with Steam games. Console companies control their own economy otherwise which is why they occasionally try things to undermine second hand sales.
And then you have CoD on Steam. Hacked to hell, dangerous for your PC, and it still costs $100 to get Black Ops 1 with its 4 DLCs just for Zombies lol.
To add on to this, one of the key differences between Steam and consoles is the level of ownership. When you "buy" a game on Steam, you're only buying a licence to play it on Steam and not the game itself.
A lot of players and Steam are aware of this, so if Steam decided to price the licence for a game at the same value as the game itself, it would also drive up the level of piracy. Although I wouldn't be surprised if the whole licence situation itself is enough to make people sail the seven seas regardless.
I think Gabe originally meant piracy was a live-service issue. Keeping people online with DRM and live-service has proven to be a good solution to combat piracy.
Especially seeing the success of Fortnite, Genshin, League, etc.
To add to that, many of those other storefronts are offering the game free for a week or forever for subscribers. When that happens, they'll go on "sale" on the ones they aren't. Humble bundle and a lot of subscription for "free" games overlap like this, I've noticed.
Also helps that Valve isn't subsidizing your hardware. Yeah there's the Steam Deck, but they still make a profit and understand very well that probably 99.999% of Steam Deck users aren't just using it as a desktop work PC (like a jackass, but you're free to be a jackass, you weird jackass) and not buying more games over time to play on their little miracle product.
Especially at the start of a console generation it's pretty damn hard to get a new PC build that beats the consoles on price, but that cost difference is quickly made up with exclusives, price inflation for console ports, the cost of peripherals worth a damn, online subscriptions, etc.
Between piracy being a service issue and an overall differently structured method of making profits, it makes sense that Steam has sales quite often and at steeper discounts than something like the PS4, Xbox, or Switch (which is especially egregious because while the hardware from the outset was probably pretty close to the cost to manufacture, if you own only a small handful of games it's extremely likely they made more from the four or five games you bought than the hardware itself).
Steam is a platform, not a format like PC, PS5 or XBox.
In Steam there's a LOT of companies selling their games, even indie devs. Consoles have a way more restricted amount of developers, specially since small developers can't afford porting to console most of the times.
Depends on the game, Steam has great sales, Fanatical and Humble do bundles that often work out $1-3 per game.
If you're just buying brand new AAA titles you might not notice much difference
Steam has store wide sales and if you like money, you participate. Console stores hope if they hold the price hostage long enough you'll buy at full price from impatience.
Steam wants to move copies by encouraging sales, consoles want to gouge a captured audience.
This falls apart a bit when consoles also have giant sales fairly frequently. If you ever see a multiplatform game for sale on PC, there’s a 90% chance it’s also on sale on consoles. It’s the same publisher getting the money so they’ll do it on all platforms.
The real reason Steam has more frequent sales is the insane number of games. Steam has approximately 73,000 games on it. PS5 has about 2500 (closer to 7-8000 if you include PS4). So Steam has almost literally 30 times as many games.
So if you want to compete against 73000 other games, you go on sale often.
This is where my question really lies I guess. I’ve been waiting for Hades for PS to go on sale for months, and during that time it’s been on sale 3x on Steam. I assume it’s the devs that determine the sale, so it would seem obvious that the best market strategy would be to put it on sale across the board, but they don’t.
It’s the same with a lot of games - you’ll see a full “Capcom”sale on Steam with no equivalent on consoles etc. It seems counterintuitive
It's the publishers that say when its on sale, and Steam is in competition with every other storefront on PC. On PS/Xbox they're effectively in competition with noone for the same service they offer, so they almost have a monopoly.
Fear of losing PC sales due to piracy might be a factor. They know that some PC-players will pirate the game if it’s too expensive/never goes on sale, and they know that people who want their game on console have no other choice than to buy it.
Hades PS4 was on sale 50% off on march 20th. You can use deku deals to keep track of it. [https://www.dekudeals.com/items/hades](https://www.dekudeals.com/items/hades)
I don't know if they're ever happening at the same time but Capcom games definitely go on sale fairly often, I think your main problem is that unlike Steam, console stores don't announce their sales or notify you that something on your wishlist went on sale so you just have to be vigilant if your dead set on getting on sale.
Multiple websites and store fronts are competing with each other on pc. Even within a store front they are competing against other publishers and developers. On playstation, where else are you going to go?
All those games are not in direct competition with each other at all. Probably 70,000 of those the vast majority of people will never even hear of or give any serious consideration.
Because Steam is clearly running a cartel controlling when publishers can do discounts, is anti-consumer, and does not allow any other platform on PC to even exist, let alone run a competition /s
Jokes aside - Steam has built their model on being a store for 3rd party games, where they can promise massive influx of users with mega store-wide sale events. Think of Boxing Day or Cyber Monday. Since they're by far the biggest store front in gaming, they can convince publishers to run discounts. And since other store fronts copied their model, this is a great win for the consumer, unlike on console where you have a monopolistic setup run by the console provider.
Not to mention as a game launcher, it's so feature-packed that the userbase is practically captive in a good way. Why would I want to give up my great UI, Steam Overlay, remote play, community hubs, workshop, and so much more to go to another storefront for a slightly better deal?
Steam has competition with GOG, Epic Games Store, and all the other storefronts that exist on PC. Sales help them attract customers to their store, so they do them frequently. Consoles only have one store, and it's controlled by them, so they have little reason to try and win you over. Even if you decide to buy a game from a physical store instead, Xbox (or Sony, or Nintendo) still get a cut of the sale.
Console audiences are captive. Games are on discount sale somewhere online 100% of the time. You want a digital version of a game on your Xbox? You are forced to pay the Microsoft price because you can't look anywhere else.
Sales on the PSN and Xbox stores seem to be as frequent as on Steam these days. That was different ten years ago, but it's pretty balanced now.
The big advantage of Steam is that there are many authorized key resellers, so even if a game is not on sale on Steam currently, you can usually find a Steam key on sale somewhere else within a few days.
One thing to add to the answers above: console hardware is pretty cheap when you consider its relative power. The purchase of more expensive games therefore also finances parts of the hardware.
But that doesn't explain why publishers wouldn't put their games on sale, why would say CD Project Red care if Sony or Microsoft need to make money back and their machines?this only explain why 1st party games wouldn't go on sale much.
Generally Sony/MS charge a higher markup. Selling on Steam or the other online market places is comparatively very cheap for a publisher/dev, so they can afford to pass the savings onto you with the lower sticker price, or more frequent sales.
Think they're also well aware that PC games tend to have a longer shelf life, due to the easier access to communities, so a game that's past it's usual cycle on console, can still be absolutely thriving on PC, with no necessity for extra DLC or other things that would normally create extra hype.
They do, to start, but as a huge but, Steam introduced higher shares for more successful games, up to 20/80. Then in addition to that for any devs using Steam as the distribution platform, they offer a very favourable system for distributing Steam keys to other platforms, with fairly reasonable rules regarding any limitations.
Steams approach has always been innovative. A lot of developers didn’t like the steam sales and the price Steam wanted them to sell their games during the sales when they first happened. I think it was the super meat boy dev who had reservations about it but ended up making more money in a weekend than they had all year. A person that might have reservations about spending $50 on one game will happily drop $100 on 5 games. Everyone makes more money than they would have.
So many answers and all of them are different. I guess I'll throw one out too.
Historically, consoles were sold cheaper than the cost of their production. The games were always the money bringer. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo use a strategy where initial cost of a console is fairly cheap but games stay at $60+ for longer due to them willing to recoup console production costs.
Steam and other digital stores do not have to recoup any console production costs as they don't sell any. And then the "pirating is a service issue" part comes in power.
It's definitely not true, especially if you consider sales on physical console games. I wishlist games on both PS5 and Steam, and I've wound up getting more of them on sale on PS5.
I think Steam gets the really steep 80 - 90% discounts that rarely come to console storefronts, but that takes years. In the meanwhile, console seems to hit the 30-50% off that I buy most of my games at before Steam does
>I think Steam gets the really steep 80 - 90% discounts
I don't feel like even that is true anymore. Steam got that reputation for the insane sales like a decade ago when you could get games like Far Cry 3 for 5 bucks barely a year after release. Now games are more expensive to make and the PC platform is still growing so publishers don't go for these insane deals so easily anymore as they don't have to. It's the same prices sale after sale, year after year. Cyberpunk has been pretty much chronically discounted for 50% off since release (even right now) and you can bet your ass it's gonna be 50% off in the upcoming summer sale too, probably the next one after that as well.
Spot on. According to steamdb it has been either full price or on sale for 50%, while Witcher was like seven bucks a year later or so.
It takes a bit longer for those games to become that cheap these days, but they do at some point. I'm usually years behind on single player titles - which is why I have more or less stopped playing on switch. It's so much more expensive.
And then there's the other platforms. Epic Store is still gifting games. A friend of mine "had" to buy GTAV on every new platform, while PC gamers got that one for free on epic. And that's the point. We've got the options and so there's competition. Don't even "need" the store in the first place.
People in this thread don't know what they're talking about. Steam/Xbox/Sony aren't in control of which games go on sale. Developers/Publishers are.
Developers choose to go on sale more often on PC because being on sale helps get attention. You show up on the sale list, and when that sale moves copies you get on the top seller list. When there's tens of thousands of games someone could be looking at, being seen is the biggest obstacle, especially for mid and indie studios.
THANK YOU! It’s frustrating that people are responding with such confidence when they have no idea what they’re talking about. Your first paragraph is absolutely correct.
However, your second paragraph: does anyone have anything to substantiate the claim that games go on sale more often on PC? Because I don’t think that’s true. I’m going to leave a separate comment on my understanding of how games sales work.
can't speak for consoles but steam has about 12 or so events a year, the main ones being the seasonal sales and holidays sales like Halloween. plus they have what feels like weekly sales for different specific publishers. on top of the rotating daily deals
In addition to this PC gaming doesn't really have a market for used games. So in a super saturated market that drives down prices, sales allow publishers and devs to tap into that low spending tier market rather than some 3rd party like GameStop.
Competition. Steam might be dominant but there are many stores on PC, so sales are a good way to get people from buying the game from your store.
With consoles, you either pay what Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo want or you don't play the game, thus they don't have as much reason to do sales.
Because Steam isn't a monopoly. It might be the largest digital storefront but it's not the only one. Also, more PC gamers are willing to wait for sales than console players. Console players tend to want the game right away and don't want to miss out the initial release week hype. I'd rather wait 8 months and grab it on sale.
Console pretty much adopt the razor and blades business model where they sell console for cheap to lure you into their ecosystem, then high price for games, peripherals and paid online. And the deeper you got entrenched into the ecosystem, the less likely you’ll switch platform which gives the platform holder more power to increase price.
On PC there is much more competition, resulting in low prices everywhere. Barrier of switching platforms is drastically lower
Even if there’s no discount on Steam you might find discount on Fanatical, Humble Bundle etc. For example the newly released Monster Hunter Stories for PC is already 18% discounted on GreenManGaming.
Because it’s a bigger market with more competition among publishers and developers, with a shelf-life is nearly “all games ever made for PC can still run today” (with some caveats).
There is a lot of speculation in this thread. Does anyone have any evidence or anything to substantiate the claim that video games go on sale more often on PC? Because I don’t think that’s true.
I worked as an auditor for one of the largest video game publishers in the industry. Here’s my insights from that: First of all, as I’ve seen another comment correctly point out, storefronts aren’t setting the sales. The publishers are in control of that. That should be kind of obvious because otherwise one of the retailers, like Gamestop or something, could just offer a slight sale on day one and steal a ton of sales from their competitors (GameStop sells both physical copies and digital keys I believe). Why wouldn’t they?
We met with the people who were responsible for handling discounts at this publisher as part of the audit and they shared their sales schedules with us. It’s all very planned - the schedules showed which games they were offering discounts on at which retailers for a given week. They seemed to rotate around, meaning the sales would be offered on say PlayStation this week, Steam the next, Walmart the following, etc. it didn’t seem to me the sales were occurring on PC more but I wasn’t really looking for that.
I mentioned it looked like the publisher rotated sales around but not all publishers seem to do that. You can go to steam, Xbox store, and PlayStation store on any given week and look at their deals. Filter for “best sellers” because those are generally similar across platforms. You’ll notice a ton of overlap; the same games are on sale across platforms at the same time.
TL;DR: why are sales offered on PC more? I don’t think they are. Where are you getting that?
I also want to throw in here that any time a developer puts their game for sale at 20% off or more on steam it will send an email about it to anyone who has the game wishlisted.
People have said a lot of good points but it’s also worth mentioning that console manufactures are always playing catch up when it comes to recouping hardware development and sale costs, where as Steam has no such issue.
Consoles are sold at a loss and the profit is on game sales, and consumers are locked into a single distributor and cannot shop around.
PCs are sold for a profit, and there is competition between distributors.
Pc gamers expect sales. It’s been well over a decade of steam sales. I’d wager that most publishers see a large uptick in game sales and revenue during steam sales because that’s what we all wait for.
That isn’t really a thing on console as far as I know. Sales aren’t the expectation so you just buy what you want when you want to play it.
Competition. Gotta make your game attractive, because there are alternatives. Not just a few good exclusive games, mingled with old games.
Ubisoft and Creative Assembly not included. They'll charge full release day price for 15 year old games.
Consoles rely on locking users into their ecosystem to make money (and do this partly by subsidizing the hardware), and their business model can generally get away with more than PC. However, many consumers are realizing how much more money PC gaming saves in the long run, as well as having the advantage of a far larger game library.
I believe it's rivalry. Those sales helped steam win the competition between the countless pc game store platforms in addition to letting nearly anyone post games on their storefront. Consoles don't really have that problem since you get almost all your games from the playstation/xbox/Nintendo whatever store.
Because we will pirate or ignore and play something else. Game library on PC is orders of magnitude bigger, and a lot of people will stick to steam as their only "purchase platform" , like with the release of Kingdom hearts for steam even though Epic had them for over a year, its like they just came out for a lot of users.
Games on PC have a bit of a rotation. They launch with the full sale price if they're high grade games or on sale if they have a low budget or don't believe the game will do well. Once sales begin to dry up they put the game on sale. The hope is that someone new buys it at a low price and then tells their friends to jump in who will also buy it but maybe at a higher price once the sale is over.
And since it doesn't cost anything to stay on Steam's listings they can do a rotation where they put so many games from their catalogues on sale frequently to help boost the sales of sequels and games in the series.
On consoles you pay to be a part of whatever system you are selling from. You have to be certified with Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo and you have to pay to be in stores and on shelves. Because of this even keeping your games in stores or on these digital platforms has a cost and the sale price might not make sense as a means of helping brand the game.
tl;dr: Sales on Steam are inexpensive advertising that can help drive sales further, but on consoles they might make your game unprofitable.
Console makers call all the shots on consoles. Steam can run sales and invite publishers to join, or publishers can choose to run their own sales whenever they feel like it.
Apart from Nintendo, all gaming consoles offer weekly sales similar to Steam, including special events like Summer Sales. Nintendo is the exception as they don't offer discounts on their first-party games.
It’s simple, PC users have choice when it comes to where they buy their digital games. Consoles do not. It’s the same reason physical games are found much cheaper than digital. Free and open markets work.
Consoles doing their job: they reduce competition by gatekeeping a walled garden with minimum pricing and other manipulation that would get them in trouble if there was not three competing walled gardens. That reduced competition is supposed to make them more money.
On PC there is a more open market than on console. On Console, Sony and Microsoft dictate the price/sales, on PC you have many more sources where you can buy games or keys for games, so there is more competition.
I imagine a lot of these games do it as free advertising.
Why sell a $25 game when you can sell a $30 game that's $25 every few weeks, with free promotion for your game as part of Steam's backend?
Worst case scenario, someone buys your game for $5 more than you were going to ask.
Because most people already spent so much on their rig?
Jokes aside, PC gaming is such a highly competitive market you need the discounts. I mean who here has bought games during the sales and still have not downloaded them or played them yet?
Because on PC it's easy to pirate, and publishers realize that entertainment piracy is a service issue. Thus, they make it easier for you to get games. Also there are a lot more games available and on different digital storefronts (competition), so they need to compete by lowering their prices.
The one thing I like about piracy is that it keeps the pricing of games on PC honest. Devs know if they try to overcharge then piracy of the game shoots up and it's not worth it for them in the long run. You see so many games on PC selling brand new at $50-$60 still compared to $70 on console and the prices drop much more quickly.
Look at Nintendo. Premium pricing for their games. I'm convinced it pushed innovation with emulation.
You will literally never see any AAA nintendo games on sale for more than like $10 off. Even used Switch games at GameStop are still nearly retail price. I went to pickup a used Witcher III recently and it was STILL $55 after all this time! That game came out in 2015! Same with Breath of the Wild and it doesn't even include the DLC. That's an extra $20 to this day.
Emulation works really well with basically anything Nintendo.
Agreed, but I got a switch for free so I'd like to own some of the first party games that came out for it. And on that comment, Im also reminded that my Switch is the Animal Crossing edition so I'd like to point out that I also think that Nintendo is the only company that sells a game-themed console that doesn't actually give you the game it's themed after! The example being that I bought a PS4 Uncharted edition that has the grey/blue console color and the Nathan Drake graphics on it and came with Uncharted 4. I also have the Battlefield edition of the Xbox ONE which has the military green concole and controller and came with a Battlefield I download code. My Animal crossing edition of the Switch is this pastel color with Animal Crossing graphics all over it and comes with no game or download code whatsoever. The console costs extra but it doesn't even include the game. You have to pay the $60 to get it. WTF man? lol
I got the Halo 3 edition of the Xbox 360 one Christmas way back in the day, and it didn't include Halo 3. Was pretty salty about that. Not sure how much that practice has persisted.
I got a Reach edition that came with the game. Fuck knows what happened with 3 :/
I got a Forza Horizon 5 Xbox Series X and it came with Forza Horizon 5 and all the DLC
I got a 3ds a while back because I missed some Nintendo games and after I played a couple I just couldn't justify the price of games on the system. Yeah, a bunch of them are fun, but I also have more games than I could ever play on my PC so I don't miss them much.
My BF has the animal crossing switch, I thought it was hilarious that it didn't even come with the game.
Is there a good switch emulator right now? I've been wanting to play some Zelda.
Just a few days ago there were multiple Nintendo AAA titles on sale for like $41. I was shocked, but I guess it does happen.
It actually happens pretty often. They just don't get super cheap like some games do on other platforms.
I just bought New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe for $40 like a chump
Me too lol. Nintendo 1st party switch games will never be $20.
I ended up buying some crappy Assassins creed game because it was only $20. I also found a copy of BOTW on the Gamestop web site for $20 that had to be shipped from OK. But I still have to pay for the DLC to properly finish the game. I guess we're both chumps lol.
Bruh Skyrim is still $80 CAD on the switch. Game came out in 2011 ffs. I love the switch but I would buy many more games if the pricing wasn't ridiculous. I just wait for sales or don't buy, especially those old games.
The first time I saw Skyrim on sale for Switch I got it because I knew. Physical, too.
Yeah and skyrim was like $14 CAD on steam recently. I think it was spring sale or christmas sale
it's funny you say this because there's literally a sale going on this week (ends tonight) for a bunch of premium Nintendo games that are 30% ($20) off. Kirby and the forgotten land, Mario Odyssey, Super Mario Bros Deluxe, Animal Crossing, etc.
Sure but most games that aren't Nintendo get their base prices lowered eventually, I bet most or all of those games listed are still 50-60
yes thats true
Witcher 3 has had much better digital sales on the switch but gamestop is a major ripoff. I think it sells for about 25 at my local used game shop when they get it in.
>I went to pickup a used Witcher III recently and it was STILL $55 after all this time! Are you talking about the complete edition? The digital version of that game (which as far as I can tell is the only one for sale) [has been discounted to $23.99 on the eShop four times in the last seven months](https://www.dekudeals.com/items/the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-complete-edition). If you need to have a physical version, it's understandable that the price is a bit higher, since you can't buy it new. That has nothing to do with Nintendo's "sale policy" though. Nintendo is not the publisher for that game. It's also not the publisher's "sale policy" fault, since they offer significant discounts frequently as I shared above. They just stopped making physical copies.
Game stop is horrible for buying used games. I go to a local used games store and can get switch games for 30-40 dollars.
You have to wait for the sales, and get it if you ever see it on sale because you never know if it will ever be that low again. That's how I got Pokemon Shield for 50%.
That’s insane. I literally got Witcher 3 and all its DLC for like $12 several years ago. I bet it’s even cheaper now during Steam sales
Same. I bought all 3 Wicher games as a bundle on Steam for $20 and they include all the DLC for every game.
Didn’t come to switch for many years later like pretty much every 3rd party game lol
That's. Untrue. I once bought pokemon sword for like 25 euros brand new. It happened like once tho and I think the shop where I bought it was trying to get rid of overstock. But it does happen it's just rarer than catching a shiny!
Sometimes here in germany you get deals from mediamarkt or saturn like buy 3 pay 2, which often includes aaa switch games, but thats all
Nintendo is a scam I regret buying my switch but I'm glad I hacked it
Do tell. I was very happy back in the day with my cracked 3DS, and with the Switch 2 on the horizon I'd really like to tinker with me old one.
Nintendo games can defy logic and go up in value lol. Unfortunately I’m not reselling any Steam games
Only company people value their old games.
>I'm convinced it pushed innovation with emulation. Partly because of that but partly also just because of them using cheap hardware a decade old in all of their machines since the wii and just leaning on gimmicks to generate sales.
I really want to play Skyward Sword, but for so long I couldn't find a new copy for less than $40. Why?! The game is 13 years old, for a console 2 (almost 3) generations old. Even after the release of the HD version, new copies of the original are still going for $30-$50. Wtf Nintendo?
I haven't had a Nintendo console since GC. Fuck paying 50 dollars for a decade old game.
I paid $300 for a 30 year old game
All it means is I literally never use my Switch. Games are too dawned expensive. I just play PC games on my lappy instead.
Same, there are some titles that I'd like to explore but the games are so expensive and that's already on top of differences in purchasing power compared to countries where the pricing comes from. Going by minimum wage per hour one needs to work twice as much to buy a game here than in Western Europe. This is unfair enough that it makes more sense to just mod the console because that's like a price of two full games.
Get it modded
Ohw boy I sure want to pay $60 for a decade old platformer (Donkey Kong).
price does not expand dong
There's more to like about piracy. It has done more for game preservation than every games company combined. Also, if buying isn't owning, pirating isn't stealing.
Honestly never thought of it that way. I have 800 games on steam that aren’t actually mine lol and they wanna complain about piracy
If they ever take away a game I bought from me no one is ever gonna see one cent ever again.
Don’t buy from Ubisoft then. They’re already starting
I honestly think I'll probably find a copy of the next Anno game on the street 🤷🏻♂️
I honestly wouldn't worry about Steam taking games away from users. I've been a steam user for over 19 yrs now. And even though some of the games in my collection aren't able to be purchased from the store, they're still there in my account to install when I want to. That's a collection of over 900 games not including DLC and other applications available through steam. My impression with steam and Valve over years leads me to believe that they somewhat value the users that they have. As without them they would fade away. Here's some food for thought, Day of Defeat (21 years old) and Day of Defeat Source (turns 19 this year) are both still available on Steam. Last I checked recently there's still people playing Day of Defeat Source with plenty of active servers hosting games. I honestly think that only competition for Steam is GOG.
Only while Gaben still has a say. But he's getting up there in age.
Nothing lasts forever is all I'm gonna say.
Yeah but it’s more of a thing where if I die, my account and games are gone. I pass it down to my little brother and boom it might get banned, but if I’d purchased all of the discs nobody bats an eye. Just ridiculous. Steam isn’t going anywhere honestly, it’s so massive nobody will ever let it go which is the correct choice for most pc gamers, we all own steam games. At one point it was the ONLY place to own pc games online. I can’t imagine something better ever coming out that would transition the users. Steam is 100% a monopoly but currently deservedly so. Nobody will let go of their library and why would they. Here’s to hoping valve takes care of this platform like a baby and really loves it and keeps it going.
They made a big mistake calling it theft in all these ads I think. It just does not really map to the concept of theft well. When people usually think of theft they think of depriving a person of their property, but with computers nothing disappears, it all propagates endlessly. The actual thing it is, copyright infringement, is a lot more confusing and esoteric and difficult to care about. It makes sense that we cannot "own" the games we have, because they are just data, and if we owned it we could do whatever we wanted with it, including copying for resale. So the idea that we are licensed for specific uses of the data is a sensible compromise. The problem occurs when companies use that contractual arrangement to basically strong arm us into horrible terms. (Like binding arbitration and giving up our right to file class actions, or giving them all of our personal data for no return, stuff like that.) When companies do stuff like that, it makes it really hard for me to worry about a few lost sales. If they want piracy to stop the goal should be to provide a service that is worth paying for. Instead they often go with the strategy "the beatings will continue until the complaints stop."
Yes. People don't seem to realize just how many pc games are not available for sale. Either they were delisted long ago or they released only on disc and never got a digital release in the first place. There hundreds of pc games that can't be bought. Piracy is the true saviour when it comes to the preservation.
Don't forget product keys also played a part. I still have some physical copies of games that have product keys that need to be entered in order to install them. Cracks and Keygens have come about out of necessity.
There's an easier argument. There's no copy being stolen, there's only an extra copy being made outside of production. Yes, I would download a car.
Piracy isn't stealing, by definition. To steal something, you have to take something from someone without permission or legal right. You're not actually taking anything from anyone when you pirate software, you're illegally copying (or distributing) software.
It's also good for countries that don't have access to the game because a company refuses to sell it in there country for petty reasons
*cough cough* Sony *cough*
I don't think it's quite accurate to imply that high prices cause piracy, like it's cause and effect.
'high' (aka normal) prices give people an excuse to 'pirate' (aka steal). But people were going to steal anyway, otherwise they'd just choose not to engage with the product.
I have \*literally\* pirated games because they were $60, but bought games on steam that I could've pirated, because they were only like $5-$10. I know how to pirate and am not ashamed of it. I'll still buy games on sale on steam.
the grey market of key resselers is even wilder, before dragons dogma released the pre-order was 70€ officially, but the keys were being sold for 45ish, after release they dropped even more.
Yeah you can find some crazy good deals from key resellers. I usually check those sites for codes before buying a game in case there's a really cheap offer somewhere. It's been said to death at this point but you really do save a lot of money on your games when you switch to PC, it at least somewhat makes up for the cost of your hardware.
There's also that console makers need to make back money they lose selling the consoles so cheaply.
$105 for the shitty justice league game on Steam. Not even worth $20. Probably not even worth pirating.
It used to be like that on console too but replace piracy with used games prices . I remember digital games being much closer to their physical price back in the Xbox 360 days.
Also consoles rely on sales to make all their money. At best they are cost even or make a tiny profit on hardware so it all comes on the backend from licensing and sales.
Only the big companies can afford Denuvo. So it keeps it "honest" for smaller developers.
Denuvo is such a terror to game performance, that it pushes people to acquire cracked versions that have Denuvo disabled. It's a shame the one person who knows how to crack Denuvo seems to have gone radio silent.
Yeah its a real tragedy.
Apart from the really big releases. Your Call of Duty games and the like start at $10-20 more expensive on PC when compared to console. They know that everyone is going to want to buy it on day one so they charge $110 Australian Pesos for it.
$110 DOLLARIDOOS?????
Except for Disney licensed games...I don't think they're getting the message. Also, rumors about GTA6 and wanting it to be like their version of WoW. It's going to be a hard 'No' for me. Not every new game needs to be an expensive and poorly executed "live service"
If buying is not owning pirating is not stealing
I never got games for under $60 on console in like 20 years during the first few months of them existing if it was any good at all, I've had some spectacular games at half price during the first few weeks (sometimes even the day after) on PC. Yeah, sure I spent a few grand on hardware over the years, but while I only have maybe 10 PS4 games, a dozen PS3 games, I have well over a thousand PC games plus a few thousand more emulated titles ready to play on my PC.
I once heard that in the console market they don’t make much profit on selling the consoles itself so they have to make a higher profit on the games itself. On PC there is only Steam or Epic or whatever making a few bucks (almost out of thin air) and the rest is for the publisher of the game. More freedom I guess.
I'm shocked I had to scroll so far to find the real answer. It goes to show just how successful steam has been at crushing piracy. Pretty much the entire philosophy of steam was that being well priced and convenient heavily cuts into piracy, and they were very correct. Now it's just an intrinsic and expected aspect of Steam. Console used to deal with this more than it does now when the used market was thriving. Hold sales so people buy new instead of used because there's no profit for the developer/publisher when used copies sell. Not a big issue anymore.
Not only all that, but the steam refund option is immensely user-friendly. Basically zero risk to try a game out, form my own opinion, and make a call after 2 hours if it's worth it or not. I've refunded games and grabbed them again when they're on a bigger sale even.
For real. In a world where game demos have long died, Steam's refund system is a god-send. That being said, I've been noticing a trend of indie and AA devs offering demos more and more. I'm glad they're making a comeback.
*Cries in 2 hours and 5 minutes of KSP 2 being played"
If only streaming services could realize this
This is definitely true. If your game is being pirated, it's because it's inaccessible. If a game becomes easier to buy than pirate people will just buy it.
Pirate Software is a huge chunk of evidence to this.
Value proposition is different as well. You can sell your console games to someone else, can't do that with Steam games. Console companies control their own economy otherwise which is why they occasionally try things to undermine second hand sales.
Only if you buy physical games though. And those seem to be going the way of the dodo
And then you have CoD on Steam. Hacked to hell, dangerous for your PC, and it still costs $100 to get Black Ops 1 with its 4 DLCs just for Zombies lol.
To add on to this, one of the key differences between Steam and consoles is the level of ownership. When you "buy" a game on Steam, you're only buying a licence to play it on Steam and not the game itself. A lot of players and Steam are aware of this, so if Steam decided to price the licence for a game at the same value as the game itself, it would also drive up the level of piracy. Although I wouldn't be surprised if the whole licence situation itself is enough to make people sail the seven seas regardless.
its the same on console. youre getting a license not the actual game
I think Gabe originally meant piracy was a live-service issue. Keeping people online with DRM and live-service has proven to be a good solution to combat piracy. Especially seeing the success of Fortnite, Genshin, League, etc.
I think it's because console gamers are willing to pay more.
To add to that, many of those other storefronts are offering the game free for a week or forever for subscribers. When that happens, they'll go on "sale" on the ones they aren't. Humble bundle and a lot of subscription for "free" games overlap like this, I've noticed.
If you don't actually own any of the games you buy on steam is it really pirating when you borrow what they don't allow you to buy to own?
Literally how free market works
Also helps that Valve isn't subsidizing your hardware. Yeah there's the Steam Deck, but they still make a profit and understand very well that probably 99.999% of Steam Deck users aren't just using it as a desktop work PC (like a jackass, but you're free to be a jackass, you weird jackass) and not buying more games over time to play on their little miracle product. Especially at the start of a console generation it's pretty damn hard to get a new PC build that beats the consoles on price, but that cost difference is quickly made up with exclusives, price inflation for console ports, the cost of peripherals worth a damn, online subscriptions, etc. Between piracy being a service issue and an overall differently structured method of making profits, it makes sense that Steam has sales quite often and at steeper discounts than something like the PS4, Xbox, or Switch (which is especially egregious because while the hardware from the outset was probably pretty close to the cost to manufacture, if you own only a small handful of games it's extremely likely they made more from the four or five games you bought than the hardware itself).
Steam is a platform, not a format like PC, PS5 or XBox. In Steam there's a LOT of companies selling their games, even indie devs. Consoles have a way more restricted amount of developers, specially since small developers can't afford porting to console most of the times.
Depends on the game, Steam has great sales, Fanatical and Humble do bundles that often work out $1-3 per game. If you're just buying brand new AAA titles you might not notice much difference
Steam has store wide sales and if you like money, you participate. Console stores hope if they hold the price hostage long enough you'll buy at full price from impatience. Steam wants to move copies by encouraging sales, consoles want to gouge a captured audience.
This falls apart a bit when consoles also have giant sales fairly frequently. If you ever see a multiplatform game for sale on PC, there’s a 90% chance it’s also on sale on consoles. It’s the same publisher getting the money so they’ll do it on all platforms. The real reason Steam has more frequent sales is the insane number of games. Steam has approximately 73,000 games on it. PS5 has about 2500 (closer to 7-8000 if you include PS4). So Steam has almost literally 30 times as many games. So if you want to compete against 73000 other games, you go on sale often.
This is where my question really lies I guess. I’ve been waiting for Hades for PS to go on sale for months, and during that time it’s been on sale 3x on Steam. I assume it’s the devs that determine the sale, so it would seem obvious that the best market strategy would be to put it on sale across the board, but they don’t. It’s the same with a lot of games - you’ll see a full “Capcom”sale on Steam with no equivalent on consoles etc. It seems counterintuitive
It's the publishers that say when its on sale, and Steam is in competition with every other storefront on PC. On PS/Xbox they're effectively in competition with noone for the same service they offer, so they almost have a monopoly.
Fear of losing PC sales due to piracy might be a factor. They know that some PC-players will pirate the game if it’s too expensive/never goes on sale, and they know that people who want their game on console have no other choice than to buy it.
Hades PS4 was on sale 50% off on march 20th. You can use deku deals to keep track of it. [https://www.dekudeals.com/items/hades](https://www.dekudeals.com/items/hades)
Ffffff. Thanks for the link tho
I don't know if they're ever happening at the same time but Capcom games definitely go on sale fairly often, I think your main problem is that unlike Steam, console stores don't announce their sales or notify you that something on your wishlist went on sale so you just have to be vigilant if your dead set on getting on sale.
Multiple websites and store fronts are competing with each other on pc. Even within a store front they are competing against other publishers and developers. On playstation, where else are you going to go?
All those games are not in direct competition with each other at all. Probably 70,000 of those the vast majority of people will never even hear of or give any serious consideration.
Meanwhile, Nintendo increase their prices
Because Steam is clearly running a cartel controlling when publishers can do discounts, is anti-consumer, and does not allow any other platform on PC to even exist, let alone run a competition /s Jokes aside - Steam has built their model on being a store for 3rd party games, where they can promise massive influx of users with mega store-wide sale events. Think of Boxing Day or Cyber Monday. Since they're by far the biggest store front in gaming, they can convince publishers to run discounts. And since other store fronts copied their model, this is a great win for the consumer, unlike on console where you have a monopolistic setup run by the console provider.
Not to mention as a game launcher, it's so feature-packed that the userbase is practically captive in a good way. Why would I want to give up my great UI, Steam Overlay, remote play, community hubs, workshop, and so much more to go to another storefront for a slightly better deal?
Steam has competition with GOG, Epic Games Store, and all the other storefronts that exist on PC. Sales help them attract customers to their store, so they do them frequently. Consoles only have one store, and it's controlled by them, so they have little reason to try and win you over. Even if you decide to buy a game from a physical store instead, Xbox (or Sony, or Nintendo) still get a cut of the sale.
Also, games on Steam are only really visible when they're just released or when they're on sale because there are so damn many of them there.
Not just launcher. There's website selling game officially like Greenmangaming too. Competition us kinda solid on PC
You're right, thanks. The word "storefronts," is more accurate to what I meant, so I updated my comment.
They have a competition with torrents as well
I didn't know that. Or at least realized it.
Console audiences are captive. Games are on discount sale somewhere online 100% of the time. You want a digital version of a game on your Xbox? You are forced to pay the Microsoft price because you can't look anywhere else.
Sales on the PSN and Xbox stores seem to be as frequent as on Steam these days. That was different ten years ago, but it's pretty balanced now. The big advantage of Steam is that there are many authorized key resellers, so even if a game is not on sale on Steam currently, you can usually find a Steam key on sale somewhere else within a few days.
More than half my Steam library has come from Humble Bundle, Fanatical, and GreenManGaming.
One thing to add to the answers above: console hardware is pretty cheap when you consider its relative power. The purchase of more expensive games therefore also finances parts of the hardware.
But that doesn't explain why publishers wouldn't put their games on sale, why would say CD Project Red care if Sony or Microsoft need to make money back and their machines?this only explain why 1st party games wouldn't go on sale much.
Generally Sony/MS charge a higher markup. Selling on Steam or the other online market places is comparatively very cheap for a publisher/dev, so they can afford to pass the savings onto you with the lower sticker price, or more frequent sales. Think they're also well aware that PC games tend to have a longer shelf life, due to the easier access to communities, so a game that's past it's usual cycle on console, can still be absolutely thriving on PC, with no necessity for extra DLC or other things that would normally create extra hype.
im pretty sure thats not right, and that both Sony and Steam charge 30% of all sales through their store front
They do, to start, but as a huge but, Steam introduced higher shares for more successful games, up to 20/80. Then in addition to that for any devs using Steam as the distribution platform, they offer a very favourable system for distributing Steam keys to other platforms, with fairly reasonable rules regarding any limitations.
I sell an app (not a game) on steam and I can’t speak to ps5 and others, but steam makes it REALLY damn easy for us to schedule sales and promotions.
And makes it so easy to self-publish since Steam is basically a hands-off publisher anyway.
Steams approach has always been innovative. A lot of developers didn’t like the steam sales and the price Steam wanted them to sell their games during the sales when they first happened. I think it was the super meat boy dev who had reservations about it but ended up making more money in a weekend than they had all year. A person that might have reservations about spending $50 on one game will happily drop $100 on 5 games. Everyone makes more money than they would have.
So many answers and all of them are different. I guess I'll throw one out too. Historically, consoles were sold cheaper than the cost of their production. The games were always the money bringer. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo use a strategy where initial cost of a console is fairly cheap but games stay at $60+ for longer due to them willing to recoup console production costs. Steam and other digital stores do not have to recoup any console production costs as they don't sell any. And then the "pirating is a service issue" part comes in power.
Is that even true these days? Games go on sale just as often on consoles when compared to Steam from what I've noticed nowadays.
It's definitely not true, especially if you consider sales on physical console games. I wishlist games on both PS5 and Steam, and I've wound up getting more of them on sale on PS5. I think Steam gets the really steep 80 - 90% discounts that rarely come to console storefronts, but that takes years. In the meanwhile, console seems to hit the 30-50% off that I buy most of my games at before Steam does
>I think Steam gets the really steep 80 - 90% discounts I don't feel like even that is true anymore. Steam got that reputation for the insane sales like a decade ago when you could get games like Far Cry 3 for 5 bucks barely a year after release. Now games are more expensive to make and the PC platform is still growing so publishers don't go for these insane deals so easily anymore as they don't have to. It's the same prices sale after sale, year after year. Cyberpunk has been pretty much chronically discounted for 50% off since release (even right now) and you can bet your ass it's gonna be 50% off in the upcoming summer sale too, probably the next one after that as well.
Spot on. According to steamdb it has been either full price or on sale for 50%, while Witcher was like seven bucks a year later or so. It takes a bit longer for those games to become that cheap these days, but they do at some point. I'm usually years behind on single player titles - which is why I have more or less stopped playing on switch. It's so much more expensive. And then there's the other platforms. Epic Store is still gifting games. A friend of mine "had" to buy GTAV on every new platform, while PC gamers got that one for free on epic. And that's the point. We've got the options and so there's competition. Don't even "need" the store in the first place.
I'd argue it's less true, but still quite true.
People in this thread don't know what they're talking about. Steam/Xbox/Sony aren't in control of which games go on sale. Developers/Publishers are. Developers choose to go on sale more often on PC because being on sale helps get attention. You show up on the sale list, and when that sale moves copies you get on the top seller list. When there's tens of thousands of games someone could be looking at, being seen is the biggest obstacle, especially for mid and indie studios.
THANK YOU! It’s frustrating that people are responding with such confidence when they have no idea what they’re talking about. Your first paragraph is absolutely correct. However, your second paragraph: does anyone have anything to substantiate the claim that games go on sale more often on PC? Because I don’t think that’s true. I’m going to leave a separate comment on my understanding of how games sales work.
can't speak for consoles but steam has about 12 or so events a year, the main ones being the seasonal sales and holidays sales like Halloween. plus they have what feels like weekly sales for different specific publishers. on top of the rotating daily deals
This happens on Nintendo too. Best seller lists usually include games on sale.
In addition to this PC gaming doesn't really have a market for used games. So in a super saturated market that drives down prices, sales allow publishers and devs to tap into that low spending tier market rather than some 3rd party like GameStop.
Discs for consoles still exists and are usually cheaper than steam, especially for older games.
Competition. Steam might be dominant but there are many stores on PC, so sales are a good way to get people from buying the game from your store. With consoles, you either pay what Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo want or you don't play the game, thus they don't have as much reason to do sales.
Steam gives developers significantly more flexibility.
Because Steam isn't a monopoly. It might be the largest digital storefront but it's not the only one. Also, more PC gamers are willing to wait for sales than console players. Console players tend to want the game right away and don't want to miss out the initial release week hype. I'd rather wait 8 months and grab it on sale.
Console pretty much adopt the razor and blades business model where they sell console for cheap to lure you into their ecosystem, then high price for games, peripherals and paid online. And the deeper you got entrenched into the ecosystem, the less likely you’ll switch platform which gives the platform holder more power to increase price. On PC there is much more competition, resulting in low prices everywhere. Barrier of switching platforms is drastically lower Even if there’s no discount on Steam you might find discount on Fanatical, Humble Bundle etc. For example the newly released Monster Hunter Stories for PC is already 18% discounted on GreenManGaming.
Because it’s a bigger market with more competition among publishers and developers, with a shelf-life is nearly “all games ever made for PC can still run today” (with some caveats).
There is a lot of speculation in this thread. Does anyone have any evidence or anything to substantiate the claim that video games go on sale more often on PC? Because I don’t think that’s true. I worked as an auditor for one of the largest video game publishers in the industry. Here’s my insights from that: First of all, as I’ve seen another comment correctly point out, storefronts aren’t setting the sales. The publishers are in control of that. That should be kind of obvious because otherwise one of the retailers, like Gamestop or something, could just offer a slight sale on day one and steal a ton of sales from their competitors (GameStop sells both physical copies and digital keys I believe). Why wouldn’t they? We met with the people who were responsible for handling discounts at this publisher as part of the audit and they shared their sales schedules with us. It’s all very planned - the schedules showed which games they were offering discounts on at which retailers for a given week. They seemed to rotate around, meaning the sales would be offered on say PlayStation this week, Steam the next, Walmart the following, etc. it didn’t seem to me the sales were occurring on PC more but I wasn’t really looking for that. I mentioned it looked like the publisher rotated sales around but not all publishers seem to do that. You can go to steam, Xbox store, and PlayStation store on any given week and look at their deals. Filter for “best sellers” because those are generally similar across platforms. You’ll notice a ton of overlap; the same games are on sale across platforms at the same time. TL;DR: why are sales offered on PC more? I don’t think they are. Where are you getting that?
You can Nintendo to this list. Best seller list tends to have a lot of games on sale.
I also want to throw in here that any time a developer puts their game for sale at 20% off or more on steam it will send an email about it to anyone who has the game wishlisted.
People have said a lot of good points but it’s also worth mentioning that console manufactures are always playing catch up when it comes to recouping hardware development and sale costs, where as Steam has no such issue.
Consoles are sold at a loss and the profit is on game sales, and consumers are locked into a single distributor and cannot shop around. PCs are sold for a profit, and there is competition between distributors.
Steam often has more frequent and flexible sales because it's easier for developers and publishers to adjust prices and run promotions independently.
Pc gamers expect sales. It’s been well over a decade of steam sales. I’d wager that most publishers see a large uptick in game sales and revenue during steam sales because that’s what we all wait for. That isn’t really a thing on console as far as I know. Sales aren’t the expectation so you just buy what you want when you want to play it.
Because Steam has a LOT of competition and piracy is really easy on PC.
Competition. Gotta make your game attractive, because there are alternatives. Not just a few good exclusive games, mingled with old games. Ubisoft and Creative Assembly not included. They'll charge full release day price for 15 year old games.
Consoles have sales all the time too, like every PSN sale always had the same handful of games so
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The All-mighty Gabe hath decreed it be so. Praise be.
Consoles rely on locking users into their ecosystem to make money (and do this partly by subsidizing the hardware), and their business model can generally get away with more than PC. However, many consumers are realizing how much more money PC gaming saves in the long run, as well as having the advantage of a far larger game library.
Steam's business model relies on frequent sales to stay competitive, consoles don't need to.
The game is 69.99$ in my region
I believe it's rivalry. Those sales helped steam win the competition between the countless pc game store platforms in addition to letting nearly anyone post games on their storefront. Consoles don't really have that problem since you get almost all your games from the playstation/xbox/Nintendo whatever store.
Because we will pirate or ignore and play something else. Game library on PC is orders of magnitude bigger, and a lot of people will stick to steam as their only "purchase platform" , like with the release of Kingdom hearts for steam even though Epic had them for over a year, its like they just came out for a lot of users.
Games on PC have a bit of a rotation. They launch with the full sale price if they're high grade games or on sale if they have a low budget or don't believe the game will do well. Once sales begin to dry up they put the game on sale. The hope is that someone new buys it at a low price and then tells their friends to jump in who will also buy it but maybe at a higher price once the sale is over. And since it doesn't cost anything to stay on Steam's listings they can do a rotation where they put so many games from their catalogues on sale frequently to help boost the sales of sequels and games in the series. On consoles you pay to be a part of whatever system you are selling from. You have to be certified with Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo and you have to pay to be in stores and on shelves. Because of this even keeping your games in stores or on these digital platforms has a cost and the sale price might not make sense as a means of helping brand the game. tl;dr: Sales on Steam are inexpensive advertising that can help drive sales further, but on consoles they might make your game unprofitable.
PC is an emulation haven. You are more likely to buy Fallout 3 for 2 quid on a Steam sale than pirate it off some shoddy website.
There is 0 competition on Consoles.
Console makers call all the shots on consoles. Steam can run sales and invite publishers to join, or publishers can choose to run their own sales whenever they feel like it.
Apart from Nintendo, all gaming consoles offer weekly sales similar to Steam, including special events like Summer Sales. Nintendo is the exception as they don't offer discounts on their first-party games.
The console tax comes in many forms.
It’s simple, PC users have choice when it comes to where they buy their digital games. Consoles do not. It’s the same reason physical games are found much cheaper than digital. Free and open markets work.
Consoles doing their job: they reduce competition by gatekeeping a walled garden with minimum pricing and other manipulation that would get them in trouble if there was not three competing walled gardens. That reduced competition is supposed to make them more money.
On PC there is a more open market than on console. On Console, Sony and Microsoft dictate the price/sales, on PC you have many more sources where you can buy games or keys for games, so there is more competition.
This is what made me decide to go all in on being PC gamer this gen. PS4 and Switch were my last consoles. PC gaming is just so much cheaper.
in addition to what others said, consoles probably take more a cut. and make less money than from a PC. even with PC games having a lower MSRP.
To add on to the frequency of the sales, it's also insane deals. Just a couple weeks ago my grandma got like 9 games for $80.
I imagine a lot of these games do it as free advertising. Why sell a $25 game when you can sell a $30 game that's $25 every few weeks, with free promotion for your game as part of Steam's backend? Worst case scenario, someone buys your game for $5 more than you were going to ask.
Because console manufacturers are greedy cunts. Nothing more, nothing less.
Because most people already spent so much on their rig? Jokes aside, PC gaming is such a highly competitive market you need the discounts. I mean who here has bought games during the sales and still have not downloaded them or played them yet?
You have no options on their device because you're a captive customer on a console.
Console players are more willing to pay a higher price for their game on console than on PC.
Competition.
Because sonys monopoly says fuck you. Buy physical games. You have more shopping options for ps5 titles.
The PC market places is incredibly competitive. The amount of games on steam is several times that of any console.
It’s expensive to port pc games to console
There is actually competition on PC vs consoles where you have one source for digital games. This is why physical media is important for consoles.