Portal is coming to retail stores as a standalone game!
Yes folks, the three games which make up the Orange Box are finally being brought to retail stores as individual standalone games on April 9 for the US and April 11 worldwide.
Portal will retail for 19.99(US$) while HL2-ep2 and TF2 will go for 29.99(US$) each.
http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php ... 1486&cc=US
Every body get out on the dance floor and assume the party submission position!
Waw, cool. It makes only 13?, the price of a lunch. I wish the dollar could get even worse ! (just joking, i think)
Maybe I'm going to buy it, just for the box... at this price...
Talk about pointless.....
I really can't believe how valve can make any profits, they are practically giving their games away. The full orange box off steam is, what, $50... thats ?25. Thats 5 games for ?25.. pure insanity seeing as a new game on its own is usually ?30+
I really can't believe how valve can make any profits, they are practically giving their games away. The full orange box off steam is, what, $50... thats ?25. Thats 5 games for ?25.. pure insanity seeing as a new game on its own is usually ?30+
However, with selling games as downloads, there is no packaging to pay for, no box materials, no shipping, no need to buy storage space for all the games, etc. This will bring the cost down, just like how buying a single online is cheaper than buying in the shops.
gepy wrote:"The companion toilet cannot speak, however it can take your crap."Journey - no idea on length = don't know the % done
I think you forgot to include the cost of running Steam servers to serve online content worldwide. The brandwidth cost must be skyrocketing...
Just think about it, they've got 15 millions accounts. Imagine only 5 millions accounts are still alive, and that every account has one game (say Half-Life 2). That makes 5 millions times 850 MB (I assume that even if not everyone is not downloading the game, a lot of people are downloading it several times when reinstalling).
It makes a grand total of 4 millions of gigabytes.. and I think I'm far from reality, because every Steam user I know own at least 5 games... And besides of that, they also have to pay guys to monitor every servers, and pay for hardware... so... think about it twice.
I'm not sure it's way cheaper than box distribution. I'm not even sure it's cheaper.
I really can't believe how valve can make any profits, they are practically giving their games away. The full orange box off steam is, what, $50... thats ?25. Thats 5 games for ?25.. pure insanity seeing as a new game on its own is usually ?30+
you're forgetting that the majority of this content is basically just "mods" in that they run off the orriginal HL2 engine with only SLIGHT modifications. the big money cost was getting everything set up. the rest is just... design. (for the most part) HL2: EP2 isn't a NEW game, its an old game with new levels (again for the most part) and Portal isn't a NEW game, its HL2 with a different weapon. and some new ideas. but MOST of it just uses hl2 coding. with slight modifications. thats why its so easy to put the portal gun in regular hl2, and hl2 weapons in portal.
Bandwidth and server costs are an excellent example of economies of scale. If the marginal cost to a consumer were the same as the marginal cost to Google for all the bandwidth they used, they'd be in the red.
But where you or I buy the milk and Google buys the whole dairy farm.
The cost of gas alone to get one CD (750 MB) to the store is orders of magnitude greater than the cost to get that same CD's contents onto your hard drive in a steam FGD. Sure Valve has to hire IT guys to watch the servers, but a publisher has to pay truck drivers, their coordinators, truck maintenance, and so on.
The Orange Box is a very special case because they were able to release that much game for the price of one game, $50.
When a developer is arranging to have their game distributed, if they want to have it on Steam, the distributor won't sign any deals unless they are guaranteed to have the copies in stores the same price as the digital download, to prevent the game having to compete with itself.
(Of course, this ignores the fact that the non-monetary costs in terms of gas and time to go to the store to get it make the comparison non-existant.)
But Valve is at a place in the business, that it's a similar situation to when JK Rowling decided to put profanity into the later Harry Potter books. Sure the publisher didn't much like the idea, but what else are they going to do? Let her go to another publishing house and lose the biggest sale ever? (Incidentally, fun fact, the Harry Potter book publisher's stock took a dive the week after the final book came out because people figured they'll never have as big a hit. And they probably won't.)
Where was I?
Edit: Also, steam uses Bittorrent to distribute files. Makes it easier for releasing a file that tens of thousands of people want to download at once, like the Orange Box files. That'll put your bandwidth costs way down