EarthboundX said:Phantom Deth said:EarthboundX said:Phantom Deth said:Another week another example of Xbox not listening to fans.. We want a big 360/original sale before the store closure.. There are loads of things there that have never seen a sale or hasn't for years and years..
What makes this so frustrating is that many of these games are on Steam and go on sale fairly regularly.. There are no excuses, Xbox is failing to provide sales we care about.
Others have mentioned it, but can they even legally do that? They can't just put whatever they want on sale, they need publishers to do that I believe. Some of these games are also 15+ year old, and no one has any idea who the rights holders currently are.
PC is massively different, and again I don't think Steam can just choose what they want to put on sale either. I just don't think console and PC store operators can just put whatever they want on sale at any moment, there's so many different laws and rights included. And honestly it makes sense. As a developer if I wanted a game I made to be a certain price, and I saw a store it was on marked it down to 99 cents without my permission I don't think I'd be happy. So yeah as a buyer I'd of course want to pay less, but we're only half of this whole thing.
See now I would have thought that to.. But I refuse to believe that devs/publishers are actively not putting things forward for sales on Xbox when they are elsewhere like Steam.
Plus if it was all just up to devs/publishers then we'd see the same IPs on sale on Xbox and PS.. There wouldn't be any differences outside of their own additions.. But they both have different things on their own sales.. So yes I do think it's the platform holder that gets to pick what's up for a sale.. I suspect that the publishers decide the level of that saving.
I suspect a lot of games do not sell well on Xbox at all, as some indie developers in the past have said. Steam is a much bigger audience, therefore they can make more new customers with sales.
Found a couple links where people asked the question, and the awnser seem to line up with no, MS Sony or Steam do not chose the sales, but possibly they could recommend sales. But no they cannot force a game to be on sale.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/u6d5r0/do_game_devel...https://www.quora.com/How-does-Steam-decide-which-games-get-...,their%20game%20is%20worth%20%2460.
I Googled the question many different ways, but surprisingly I barely got any answers at all, so I'm just gonna ask Reddit myself.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1cakf2v/do_console_... Here’s a few guesses and it you want to dig for answers, be my guest.
1) there’s a well known phenomenon on Steam sales that after the sale ends there’s a spike in purchases. Don’t ask me why this happens, because I don’t know, I just know it does (there’s numerous articles about it from 10+ years back). This same phenomenon may not exist on every platform. If it doesn’t exist on XBox then it’s possible there’s far less motivation for devs and publishers to engage in the effort to put their games on sale.
2) not every platform has equivalent tools. It’s possible that it’s simply way easier to list games for sale on Steam for anyone, while on XBox it’s hard or hard for anyone who isn’t big and doesn’t rate MS employee assistance (thus perhaps why Ubisoft titles frequently go on sale while many indies and AA games never or rarely do).
3) Steam actually has an achievement/badge system (or did for a long time, if it’s gone) for buying and gifting games during big sales. It’s scummy but it may affect the effectiveness of big event sales.
Again those are just ideas bordering on a few hypothesis. You may be able to find some information to prove or disprove them but I expect digging up actual information to be difficult and unrewarding, so I leave that to the reader.