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.

Like I said in another thread on this same subject a while back I see nothing wrong with someone making a game and selling it directly on their website. The consumer and seller have a direct relationship and no middle-man gets in the way or takes any of the profits. I always try to buy indie games on the developer's website when possible for this reason. What EA is doing is the same thing, just on a larger scale. They're not even doing that actually since they still sell the games themselves elsewhere, they just want you to buy from Origin and want to sell the DLC themselves... any why not? You would want the same thing if you ran EA.

More to the point Valve do EXACTLY the same thing. They only sell their games digitally on Steam and they have their own in-game shops. Valve, Blizzard, EA... all of them are doing this for the money, none of them are your friends. None of them care about losing some customers if it means more profit from the other ones. All of them are trying to leverage the download market to get the most profit...