Re: interesting interview with warren spector

"Ross Ridge" <rridge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
If Valve and a few other companies like it, come to dominate online
download distribution the same way traditional publishers dominate

Walter Mitty wrote:
Vale do dominate online distribution : the market that there is anyway.

If they dominated online distrubution they'ld be selling more than
their own products and a few small "independent titles". There's no
reason to think why any other big developer couldn't set up a similar
download service tommorrow and do the same thing. This much different
than iTunes, which has proven that it can stand up to competition from
companies much bigger than Apple.

retail sales why wouldn't they demand as big as cut? If you're a small
developer and you have the choice of going alone and taking a large
piece of a very tiny pie or signing up with Steam and taking a small
piece of a huge pie, which would you choose?

All hypothetical since Andrews statistics Valve are not taking huge cuts
compared to traditional distribution methods.

The question isn't whether today's immature online download market is
good for small independent developers, the question is whether a mature
online download market will be good for small developers. It doesn't
matter what cut Valve takes today, it matters what cut online
distributors in the future will be able to take.

Consider Apple iTunes, it dominates the online download market for
music, and as result Apple is the one calling the shots. The big music
publishers hate iTunes. They want Apple to charge more money for songs
so they can make more money, closer to what they make from retail
sales, but Apple has consistantly refused to do so. All the music

You think that the "per song" pricing is cheap? I dont.

That's irrelevent to this discussion, we're not talking about what's
good for consumers like you or me. What is relevent here is that Apple
is in a postion of power over the music companies, that it gets to set
a price that music companies don't like. If Apple can have that power
in the online music download market, then it's possible for a company
to gain that power in the online game download market. Valve doesn't
have the power today, but it or some other company might in the future.

The end result may be that
the online download sales model may not actually help small
developers.

In which case they can revert to traditional methods : nothing is for
free.

Which offers no advantage to small deveopers over what they have had in
the past.

It's important to understand that I'm only speculating on what might be
good or bad for small developers, not what would be good or bad for
consumers or for the market in general. The assumption has been that a
mature online download market would be a good thing for small
developers. Introversion Software's experience with Darwinia and Steam
suggests to me that assumption may not be true.

Ross Ridge

.

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