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It seems that industry-wide, PC revenue is on par with or surpassing consoles, though. [0] Completely anecdotally, in my experience as a consumer when games do

by Zikes 11y ago

It seems that industry-wide, PC revenue is on par with or surpassing consoles, though. [0] Completely anecdotally, in my experience as a consumer when games do better on consoles than on PC it's because they A) are poorly ported from consoles, often by a third-party developer, B) are poorly suited for PC, such as "party" type games better played with many friends in one room, or C) don't offer enough new or differentiated content to justify the purchase, since the PC platform has (nearly/theoretical) unlimited backwards compatibility. Sometimes the new Assassin's Creed just isn't a different enough experience from all the previous games to justify the purchase when you can just go back and play any of the others on the same platform. [0] http://hexus.net/gaming/news/industry/83972-pc-games-sales-eclipse-value-console-games-sales-2016/ http://hexus.net/gaming/news/industry/83972-pc-games-sales-e...

rodgerd 11y ago
> It seems that industry-wide, PC revenue is on par with or surpassing consoles, though. Revenue is not profitability, and there are much higher costs shipping a PC game.
- jsnell 11y ago
  Sure, you have to do a lot more QA and support than on consoles. And there will be some PC specific development, both for the engine and for amenities that PC players expect like keyboard+mouse support, graphics options, etc. But the biggest costs in AAA gamedev aren't going to be platform specific. The assets (textures, models, animations, sound fx, music, level designs) should just port over. Likewise most marketing will be platform agnostic; you don't have to triple your marketing budget when going from one platform to three. And art + marketing is probably like 70%-80% of the budget. The marginal profitability of a PC port should thus be extremely high. (Which is why pretty much every AAA game will launch on the PC too, not just on the consoles. If the PC really was a marginal and expensive platform, they wouldn't bother).
- ensignavenger 11y ago
  Interesting point- care to share any data? I know a PC game requires supporting a variety of hardware, but it also does not entail paying a licensing fee to a console maker... so it would be interesting to see which one is less expensive for a reasonably popular game.
- TheLalbadshah 11y ago
  Are you basing this on the fact that the overall profit to cost ratio for console games is really high compared to the same games on PC?
- yoklov 11y ago
  Depends. For indies it can be substantially less expensive. If you go early access you can skimp on QA, you don't need expensive (well, not that expensive) devkits, you might even only have one target platform, which has obvious benefits as well.
teamonkey 11y ago
Multiplatform games will still today almost always sell more and be considerably more profitable on console than PC. The industry wide figure comes from the fact that there's an order of magnitude more content on PC.

by Zikes 11y ago

rodgerd 11y ago

> It seems that industry-wide, PC revenue is on par with or surpassing consoles, though. Revenue is not profitability, and there are much higher costs shipping a PC game.

jsnell 11y ago
Sure, you have to do a lot more QA and support than on consoles. And there will be some PC specific development, both for the engine and for amenities that PC players expect like keyboard+mouse support, graphics options, etc. But the biggest costs in AAA gamedev aren't going to be platform specific. The assets (textures, models, animations, sound fx, music, level designs) should just port over. Likewise most marketing will be platform agnostic; you don't have to triple your marketing budget when going from one platform to three. And art + marketing is probably like 70%-80% of the budget. The marginal profitability of a PC port should thus be extremely high. (Which is why pretty much every AAA game will launch on the PC too, not just on the consoles. If the PC really was a marginal and expensive platform, they wouldn't bother).
ensignavenger 11y ago
Interesting point- care to share any data? I know a PC game requires supporting a variety of hardware, but it also does not entail paying a licensing fee to a console maker... so it would be interesting to see which one is less expensive for a reasonably popular game.
TheLalbadshah 11y ago
Are you basing this on the fact that the overall profit to cost ratio for console games is really high compared to the same games on PC?
yoklov 11y ago
Depends. For indies it can be substantially less expensive. If you go early access you can skimp on QA, you don't need expensive (well, not that expensive) devkits, you might even only have one target platform, which has obvious benefits as well.

teamonkey 11y ago

Multiplatform games will still today almost always sell more and be considerably more profitable on console than PC. The industry wide figure comes from the fact that there's an order of magnitude more content on PC.