As I said about a month ago, this is only going to get worse. All future EA, Activision, Ubisoft, Bethsoft ect games will now be $60 USD, thus $100 AUD or more on Steam.
They're not raising the price for any particular reason except that they feel they can get away with it. There's still zero licencing fees for releasing PC games unlike consoles games were Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo take a cut of each sale, require hefty developer licences and shaft developers with required "development boxes" that cost several hundred times their hardware value.
The QA and support requirements for PC games are also completly nonexistant - at least with a console the developers are forced to submit their games for arduios audit and QA checks (done by large teams Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo employ dedicated to auditing games) and have a massive list of minimum standards for everything - stuff like: whenever a player name is displayed in a multiplayer game, it must display all characters and not truncate it, you must be able to access/view the gamercard, all menu actions must have tool-tips/instructions - you can never force a player to wait for more than 15 seconds (this is generally why all modern games have loading screens that display random/dynamic tips that change every load time), if the game ever crashes it fails and has to be resubmitted (which costs another 10K or more for the QA process, not to mention a lot of extra development/testing time), the game can never enter a state where the player is forced to reload an automatic save to continue ect ect ect - each Console has it's own phonebook-thick document for all of these rules and requirements.
The PC however doesn't require any of this - they can ship the buggiest piece-of-shit build and not have to answer for it at all.
Last edited by Drac; 19th August 2011 at 11:02 AM.
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