Starcraft 2 Special edition is a wee bit pricey.

[killermofo]

Question: does activision have to pay platform royalties to PC?

ps3/xbox yes but it seems to me that they found their $10 niche

normal pc game $50
platform game around $60
platform royalties according to pie chart $7

[newcomplex]

Question: does activision have to pay platform royalties to PC?

ps3/xbox yes but it seems to me that they found their $10 niche

normal pc game $50
platform game around $60
platform royalties according to pie chart $7

No, they do not, which is why a 60$ pricetag is unjustified. I am aware of this, I addressed it in that post. That 7$ is given to the publisher.

[Nicol Bolas]

Because blizzard is wholly funded, as a division of Activision-Blizzard, by Activision Blizzard. MW has sold 25 million copies have been sold.

So Blizzard and Activision have had some recent successful games. That means they should just give away games for free?

Every game should be profitable.

Sales projections for SC2 can't be possible lower then at least 3 million.

...

Development costs would need to exceed 150 million.

That's not how it works either. Just because a game retails for $50 doesn't mean that $50 is what Activision-Blizzard makes on that game. Once all of the appropriate middlemen have had their cut, the publisher is lucky to see half.

Because 50$ is a long established value for PC games.

That doesn't mean anything. Prices in reality aren't fixed. I know that's the bubble PC gamers have been living in, but that bubble is bursting.

In both directions.

The publisher is clearly taken the excess money (In this case, the ~7$ royalty). We don't know how much of that money goes back into blizzard salaries. Not a lot I'm willing to bet. We do know that the publisher claims 34$ per purchase. 10$ because of our extra 10$.

You don't think retailers are getting more money for each sale of SC2 at $60 than they would be at $50? If they weren't, they wouldn't sell it for $60.

You'd need to argue that a noticeable amount of that 10$ becomes directly reciprocated back towards the game developers themselves (ie: People who you have personal interest vested in).

It's the company around those people that allows them to do what it is that they do. So I have a vested interest in wanting that to stick around too.

What, exactly, are we getting with SC2? We're getting a 3D StarCraft that does not play vastly different from the first one (despite 10 years of development) and a game that has no support for LAN. How is this, at all, different from MW2?

Then be upset about that, not the price. Personally, I'd prefer that Blizzard actually made a proper sequel rather than a mild modification. But that's my value judgment. Just as it's my value judgment that I don't care about LAN. You're entitled to your values and you're entitled to wanting those features.

But that has nothing to do with the price.

If you follow industry standards (openGL, DX, to name a few) there is very little coding, if any, that you need to do to make a Windows product work on Intel versus AMD or nVidia versus ATi.

I can't believe you could actually write that with a straight face. If you do no hand-written assembly yes, you can avoid AMD/Intel issues. However, the OpenGL.org forums are practically littered with complaints about driver bugs. Actual, verifiable ones. Ones that are different for NVIDIA and ATI. Trusting your code to work, especially under Windows OpenGL, on both of their hardware is foolishness of the highest order. I've been an OpenGL programmer for over 11 years now, and there's no getting around that fact.

Things are better in Direct3D land. Except of course, for the D3D9/D3D10 divide. Microsoft decided that Vista and above would have D3D10, and WinXP couldn't. So not only can you not use D3D10 features even if the hardware supports them under XP, if you want to code D3D10, you have to have two renderers. One for D3D9 and one for D3D10. That requires testing on each of those OS's.

Which means if you want to do Windows/MacOSX development, you have two choices. Use D3D on Windows with two renderers or take your chances with OpenGL on both. Neither option allows you to avoid testing your code on these platforms.

It is a dozen times more difficult to try and make a PS3 game work on the X360 and on the PC than it is just to get it to work on PC/Mac.

While I won't disagree necessarily (because PS3 programming is absolute hell, and I can guarantee you have only touched the periphery of it. I do not blame Valve in the slightest for kicking that BS to the curb), I will say this: just wait until you start writing those GLSL shaders that just happen across some GLSL driver bug that is in ATI but not NVIDIA or vice versa. And I hope for your sake you're not doing OpenGL development on NVIDIA hardware; their GLSL compiler is notorious for accepting more than the GLSL specification allows. You can have a GLSL shader that runs just fine on NVIDIA hardware and it will have compiler errors according to the GLSL spec. ATi's compiler will catch these bugs.

So seriously, if you plan to release this game, do your testing.

Are you comfortable paying $60 for a PC game?

See, it's exactly this kind of thinking that's the problem. Because you fail to identify the most important issue of your question: Which PC game?

Here are some games and my answers:

Half-Life 3: Fuck yes!
Civilization V: Yes.
StarCraft II: Yes.
Torchlight: Hell no!
Diablo 3: After having played Torchlight, no!
Defense Grid: Not a chance.

The problem with your thinking is this fixed price structure. PC game = $50, end of story. However, I value different games differently. As such, I'm willing to pay more for better games, and less for less quality.

Take Torchlight. At $60, that's bullshit. At $20, it's agreeable. Same goes with Defense Grid. These are both decent games put together by decent game developers.

Torchlight is not worth what StarCraft II is worth. So why should both developers charge the same price? Having a standard price for all PC games is not helpful.

Having multi-tiered pricing is good. It means that you can get games like Defense Grid, a quality gaming experience for what it is. If it couldn't be sold at less than the "standard", then the developers couldn't have made it.

Where is the ceiling? The ceiling is at the best possible game, which doesn't exist. So likewise, the ceiling doesn't exist; it's an artificial construct created by people who have enjoyed fixed pricing for too long.

[killermofo]

The only standard is that there isn't one.. logical?

Maybe.. Given that blizzard did take a great length of time (resources, etc..) to develop sc2. Justifyibly how much to warrant the $10 hike to feed teh needy is unknown..

[Xyvik]

I can't believe you could actually write that with a straight face. If you do no hand-written assembly yes, you can avoid AMD/Intel issues. However, the OpenGL.org forums are practically littered with complaints about driver bugs. Actual, verifiable ones. Ones that are different for NVIDIA and ATI. Trusting your code to work, especially under Windows OpenGL, on both of their hardware is foolishness of the highest order. I've been an OpenGL programmer for over 11 years now, and there's no getting around that fact.

Ah, well in point of fact I've only used OpenGL twice and I didn't particular like it. I simply assumed it was a fluent standard. My bad!

So seriously, if you plan to release this game, do your testing.

I may appear to make it sound easy, but I do know the importance of testing hehe. Duly noted, however, from an experienced colleague =)

See, it's exactly this kind of thinking that's the problem. Because you fail to identify the most important issue of your question: Which PC game?

Hmm. I never quite thought of it that way. I will have to re-evaluate my stance on this issue. Thank you.

[Nicol Bolas]

I simply assumed it was a fluent standard.

Oh no; the standard is fine (relatively). It's conformance to it that's unreliable. Though it's slowly getting better.

[Alzarath]

Getting back on topic... the Special Edition imo seems worth it. That's quite a bit of extra stuff, I was actually more-so surprised it didn't cost more.

(...20 pages in 1/2 a day? (12 hours) wtf?)

[Xyvik]

(...20 pages in 1 day? wtf?)

It's Legacy. We're good at that.

I still think the dog-tags should be 4gb minimum, though. 2gb seems so...last decade.

[ArcherofAiur]

I kinda wish people wouldnt complain over things like this so that when Blizzardactivision DOES actually do something that warrants outrage it wont just be dismissed as "oh the fans always complain"

[newcomplex]

So Blizzard and Activision have had some recent successful games. That means they should just give away games for free?

Every game should be profitable.

I literally addressed that right after the quote you just posted. The only thing blizzard is striving for with SC2 is profitability, a significant return on investments, which I subsequently used several examples on why it is absurd to propose that a 60$ price tag was anything close to required in order to return investments.

That's not how it works either. Just because a game retails for $50 doesn't mean that $50 is what Activision-Blizzard makes on that game. Once all of the appropriate middlemen have had their cut, the publisher is lucky to see half.

I also addressed. Later in my post. I even had a pie chart.

That doesn't mean anything. Prices in reality aren't fixed. I know that's the bubble PC gamers have been living in, but that bubble is bursting.

And thats a bad thing. Generally, bursting bubbles tends to be a bad thing. Why are you argueing for bursting said bubble?

Also, the bubble isn't bursting in the other direction as far as major studio releases go. Its still firmly in Indie/Not Indie.

You don't think retailers are getting more money for each sale of SC2 at $60 than they would be at $50? If they weren't, they wouldn't sell it for $60.

Why is this a argument for selling it for sixty. I'm so confused. This is a bad thing.

It's the company around those people that allows them to do what it is that they do. So I have a vested interest in wanting that to stick around too.

Your argument is that if Starcraft 2 did not retail for 60$, blizzard would collapse?

Is that seriously your argument?

And you're asking me to cite evidence?


Simply put, SC2 does not need to be 60$ in order to be profitable and successful. Its 60$ because Activision execs want more money, which is a perfectly rationale desire. It isn't malicious. At the same time, we, as consumers, also need to defend our desire of a better value.

Its irrational to put corporate interests above your own. You don't need to defend them. They are acting against your interests of a cheaper product. That is reason enough, as a consumer, to oppose it. Unless the company was actually in financial trouble (ATVI isn't.), their is no reason to support them against your own personal interests as a consumer for their benefit.

I kinda wish people wouldnt complain over things like this so that when Blizzardactivision DOES actually do something that warrants outrage it wont just be dismissed as "oh the fans always complain"

You mean like setting the precedent for a 20% increase in computer games, releasing multiplayer PC games without basic functionality such text chat support (what the fuck), lack of dedicated servers, no modding support etc etc?

Blizzard certainly is less culpable, but they certainly have blame too. IE: Lack of lan.