I feel used - Volition design director Jameson Durall explores the pre-owned issue.

[hideinlight]

What I see what's happening with Steam is they are trying to sell as much copies of a game as possible in a short period of time. Instead of having to wait 1-2 year for a $60 to maybe drop in price, the price is dropped almost every month until it's $10 or less.

The traditional method is release a game for $60 and pray people will keep buying at $60 forever, which of course is failing. Because people are impatient and would end up selling older games to afford the new one (other devs end up loosing money, because John Joe didn't want to wait a year to be able to afford MW3)

[xeyne]

What I see what's happening with Steam is they are trying to sell as much copies of a game as possible in a short period of time. Instead of having to wait 1-2 year for a $60 to maybe drop in price, the price is dropped almost every month until it's $10 or less.

The traditional method is release a game for $60 and pray people will keep buying at $60 forever, which of course is failing. Because people are impatient and would end up selling older games to afford the new one (other devs end up loosing money, because John Joe didn't want to wait a year to be able to afford MW3)

The steam system really works (on me). I am likely to buy a bunch of games that might likely not play because it's cheap than buy a single game that's always been in the R300 - R500, no matter how many years it's been out. A good personal example is Mario Kart for Wii. It's great, fun game but it's never dropped below R500 since it was released how many years ago. For this reason I never bought it. I just borrowed friends copy.