Oh crap, today is almost tomorrow and no blog post yet.

I almost went to bed without writing about something. Again, I am at a loss about what to write about… Games! Games will do nicely.

I am currently playing Might and Magic VIII Day of the Destroyer, a huge graphic improvement over MM7, but nothing that even comes close to pushing my machine. I went through my fairly large Gamersgate account, and I have nothing that I could use to really push my new machine with. There are games I want that could (like FEAR 3), but I’m not willing to pay $50 for a game. That’s not to say I won’t pay for a game at brand new prices, because I have with Mount and Blade: Warband and with M&B Fire and Sword. Personally I think that games bought digitally should be cheaper than at the retailer.

See if you take  $60 game and sell it at the retail stores the publisher gets about $27 per game to split up with development, marketing, other expenses. The rest goes to retailers, distribution, royalties, etc. Now that’s a rough estimate, but pretty accurate. If you are wondering where I got that info its here.

Where does this tie in with digital distribution? Well on a $60 game the digital distributer takes a 30% cut which is $18, leaving $42 to the publisher. Which is $15 per game more than retail. It would be easy to drop the price of new digital releases by $5-10 and they would still make more money. Do I see this going to change? No not really. Even if retail is totally gone except for the special editions with their ‘special’ items in the box, the execs at game companies will just look at it and say that people are used to paying those prices already, so why lower them? More profits for them is good company policy. I honestly cannot fault them for it, but I can certainly not buy their brand new product. I’m not so insane I HAVE to have a game. But that’s just me.

I also downloaded Star Control 1 & 2. I haven’t played them yet, but they are installed. Also Mount and Blade Warband is installed and I am just grabbing the Floris Expanded Mod Pack right now. So that one I’ll see how well it will push my system (probably not that much), once it gets modded up with some better graphics, we’ll see how that looks.