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I think this misses a few key points:

1. Steam is digital, there is almost no cost associated with "selling" a game, almost everything you sell is profit. Thus, it is somewhat disconnected from standard sales where dropping price too much can hurt you.

2. Steam does not allow you to buy physical games, you can't take a game out of steam. What you are paying for is for game to be added to your digital collection. Collection is a key term here, that what steam sales are all about. In modern times nobody has enough time to play all the good games, but we still want to buy them. I know a bunch of people with huge digital collections on steam.

3. Author seems to be divorced from realities of economies of scale. As things get cheaper, the audience gets wider. Essentially this means putting game into hands of more people.

4. More players is good, steam trading cards means that more players = more sustained profit.



More users is not always a good thing. Support costs increase linearly for a while with the user base, and then I'd suppose superlinearly.

Apple has departments of people dedicated only to taking phone calls.

I would rather have 10 users at $10,000 each than 100,000 users at $1 each.


Games aren't business software. You had to fix the bugs anyway, but you don't have to add new features all the time after release.


and also, i don't see a game (even MMO style game) taking calls and operating a call center. At best there's some admin/moderating role, and it'd be asynchronous, and cookie cutter style responses.




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