StingingVelvet wrote on Jul 19, 2011, 03:01:
Yeah but you're missing the whole point. Valve take 30-40% of the price when they make a Steam sale. When Blizzard sells Starcraft 2 on battle.net they get 100% of the price. When EA sell Battlefield 3 on Origin they get 100% of the price. More to the point in this exact storyline, when they sell DLC through the game itself they get 100% of THAT money.
In other words losing a small percentage of sales from the people who really do refuse to buy anywhere but Steam is made up for by all the people who would have bought it on Steam who are now going to buy it on battle.net, or whatever. Then they get all the DLC money too. It's a win-win.
That's certainly the math that blizzard and EA are doing. Blizzard already had the infrastructure in place with the bandwidth needed because of battlenet and WoW setups.
But the suits at EA who are shutting out steam are overlooking the point that it costs money to develop and maintain a new download service, to maintain and autoupdate things, it costs money for bandwidth and infrastructure, it costs money to process credit cards and deal with chargebacks, and customer service issues (even if they are outsourced to china) and other things. That's where the the 30%-40% of the steam cut goes to (and valve's profit of course). The question is, will these costs be low enough for EA that its a profitable move to do this. They think so. I think that they won't end up getting enough customers to spread the costs out enough to make up the extra sales they would have had through steam.