Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy… and then it’s only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can’t it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It’s so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
Evidence please. In order for me to be correct that some publishers want to offer lower prices, I don’t need it to be the case that every game off Steam goes on sale for less than “full price” at the time. I just need it to be the case sometimes. If sometimes, a publisher wants to offer the game cheaper, but can’t because they’d lose all of their Steam sales, then Valve is harming consumers by leveraging their market dominance to dictate prices on other platforms.
You mentioned a handful of games without doing any research on them, and one of them accidentally proved my point. I guess I should say at least one of them, because it was the very first one I actually bothered to check.
I’m not sure what your point is here. They set the $50 price tag to maximize revenue. Raising prices doesn’t always raise revenue, if it did, why not sell for $99 or $999?
Whether they were right or wrong that $50 was a better price, and whether they made a profit or a loss, is irrelevant from a consumer’s point of view. We got a AAA GoTY nominated game for $50. I guess we can be thankful that Sony and Microsoft’s 30% cut console stores apparently don’t have anti-competitive policies like Steam does.
Of course it’s not necessarily in consumer’s interest if they go out of business in the long run, but it looks like they at least broke even as of November, so it seems it’s a sustainable model: https://gameranx.com/updates/id/515494/article/alan-wake-2-is-not-profitable-yet-but-it-just-about-broke-even-by-the-end-of-september/
You asked for a list of games that fit my “steam hasn’t impacted pricing” statement, so I gave you games that had prices inline with what steam prices games at and industry standard. Like I explained in my previous comment. I know how much those games cost: between $50 and $70 dollars, which is what games have retailed at for decades.
Games on steam and off steam have had roughly the same price, and games not on steam have had perfectly reasonable times making sales. Except the one on epic.
My point was that even with lowering the price to the low end of standard, they have had some difficulty getting enough revenue to cover the cost of the game.
If other retailers are able to compete just fine, and one isn’t despite lowering prices and paying for exclusives, and it’s the one that, as you mentioned, people complain about when they buy an exclusive, then maybe the issue is with that retailer.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1388073/average-price-of-video-games-by-platform/
If you want more discussion, you can Google “video game prices over time”.
Given that you’re starting to ignore large bits of replies and have been repeating yourself pretty consistently without expanding on the point, I’m not sure that there’s much value in continuing. You think it’s anticompetitive, I don’t think it’s so obvious. We’ll see what the courts say.
Have a nice day, and I hope you find the same passion for your next endeavor. :)