this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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Games on Steam are not usually recurring purchases, one person won't buy the same product over and over like they need to for food. This means the market of people willing to pay the full price gets saturated over time.
Sales are a way to increase the market size by lowering the "barrier to entry" (price). Sometimes a price will be permanently lowered, however usually not because a temporary sale encourages people to buy now instead of later.
Sounds like videogames sales are made to make money and the original price has not much to do with cover costs bur rather making as much profits as people are willing to pay
Of course they are made to cover costs and make money, but you can cover more costs for future games or ongoing development the game if more people are buying the game, even if it isn't at full price
yes you can also buy a billionare fleet of mega yachts
Yes famously all video game developers are billionaires
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yachts.php
Gabe Newell is not a video game developer
That's how sales of anything works. Everything is sold at the highest possible price that people are willing to pay.
That's not true, especially for software that has infinite supply
Basically nothing is sold to cover the cost. That's the basic of how making a profit works. So let's start from there. Second, when you make a digital product, you invest X and you have no idea how many copies you will sell. It's much harder to compute the marginal cost compared to a physical item. Videogames are a luxury item, they are by no means necessary. So there is no harm in letting demand and offer regulate the price. If you feel that paying a certain amount is not worth for a game, you don't pay it, or you wait until the price drops.