| I see I'm the seventh reply, but I don't think anyone has yet correctly explained why Steam gets away with it. The reason Steam gets away with it is that their prices reflect the fact you can't sell the game. Watch any simultaneously Steam and console release you like, for a decent game that doesn't immediately crash in value everywhere because it stinks. Watch the prices over the course of the first six months. Watch them both start out at $60, but watch the Steam price come down first, and more often. It's the usual pattern. Watch Steam have their sales where something goes on sale for $5 or $10 while the consoles are still charging $25 on average. I played Mass Effect 2 for $5 on the PC, when it was still ~20$ on the consoles. At that price, I don't care that I can't sell it. The abstract ethical arguments still theoretically apply, but in practice it's not worth worrying about. That's already approximately the delta between buying and selling used anyhow. Based on history, Microsoft isn't going to work this way. For some reason, Steam is still the only digital retailer that has figured out the true supply/demand relationship and tweaked the price curves to maximize their returns, based an a rational model of the economy. Almost everyone else would seem to rather sell nothing at $20 than sell lots at $5. (Nintendo's even worse than Microsoft at this, actually. EA's Origin seems to have at least partially absorbed this lesson. What's really weird to me is that rationally, the lower prices almost certainly maximize revenue; holding on to higher prices is probably based more in politics than economics.) |