Some interesting industry news for you here. Epic Games have announced a change to the revenue model of the Epic Games Store, as they try to pull in more developers and more gamers to actually purchase things.
Surely the sales are an equivalent there? Both ultimately mean the total price goes down and the store’s cut goes down accordingly.
Don’t get me wrong, they’re definitely profiting these days. $11bn is a massive amount of revenue* for a company with the number of staff they do. But Steam are going to have disproportionately high datacenter costs compared to most other companies. As a rough comparison: Watching an hour of netflix at HD quality is about 1GB of transfer or so, Call of Duty is something like a quarter of a terabyte. Someone who downloads call of duty once would have to watch 250h of netflix to cost them the same—and Netflix is funded by subscription.
Then remember they’re likely paying their staff very well, I would not be surprised at all if well over half of their revenue just goes to operational costs before any reinvestment.
Surely the sales are an equivalent there? Both ultimately mean the total price goes down and the store’s cut goes down accordingly.
Don’t get me wrong, they’re definitely profiting these days. $11bn is a massive amount of revenue* for a company with the number of staff they do. But Steam are going to have disproportionately high datacenter costs compared to most other companies. As a rough comparison: Watching an hour of netflix at HD quality is about 1GB of transfer or so, Call of Duty is something like a quarter of a terabyte. Someone who downloads call of duty once would have to watch 250h of netflix to cost them the same—and Netflix is funded by subscription.
Then remember they’re likely paying their staff very well, I would not be surprised at all if well over half of their revenue just goes to operational costs before any reinvestment.
*Checked the figure was revenue and not profit.