At this point we can only speculate on the number of charts, studies and hard statistics that go into setting up a lot of these sales. Valve has all the sales numbers for full retail, as well as what time of the year people are willing to spend more money, and what percentage discount brings sales up by what percent. Essentially finding the sweet spot for profit when discounting games. Good god, now that I think about it that's probably their greatest tool. Just raw information and math.
That's EVERYBODY'S greatest tool in the new century. Valve's, Google's, Facebook's -- Amazon INVENTED this shit.
The issue isn't so much that it's on sale, it's that it's a first-party, major developer, primary mascot, as-good-as-main-series game going at a literal bin price two months after release. You'll never see that happen to fucking Mario
No, you'll see a port of a 20-year-old remake of 25-year-old Mario games go for $30.
Selling games for $10 when they should be $40 is pretty much the opposite of Nintendo's problem right now.
It makes SEGA's very best offerings look third-tier, and they needed to control that. It's the Dreamcast being outsold by FF8 all over again.
Mainly I'm worried that it's going to make developers even more nervous about supporting the PC platform, because at some point the distributors are going to seem like an even worse problem than the pirates.
Certainly this is a problem, particularly to Japanese developers who are wary of the PC in the first place. For customers, of course, $10 on a just-released game seems an awful lot like a Good Thing. And if the publishers look at the numbers and find they've made more money, then they should see it as a good thing too.
I don't see serious brand damage coming from a one-day sale (even if it's turning into something a bit longer on the Amazon end). Users understand "sale" as something separate from "remainder bin". This isn't a $10 game; it's a $30 game on sale for $10.
And PC gamers have different expectations. They expect more price competition, more frequent sales, and cheaper base prices -- as a tradeoff for a platform that is fiddlier and MUCH more expensive to maintain, not to mention DRM that is frequently worse than what they'd get on a console.
(Quick tangent: finding deals, collecting games, and getting them to run are, themselves, a sort of game. I've spent more time setting up XBMC/ROM Collection Browser, PPJoy/WiiMouse, and various emulators than I have actually using them, but getting them set up was a technical challenge that brought me satisfaction. Same with setting up my NES and Genesis/Sega CD on an old 21" tube, or my Dreamcast on my computer monitor because my TV doesn't have a VGA port. Hell, maybe one of these days I'll get around to injecting the driver for my graphics card so it'll work on OSX and not just Win/Lin. ...if nothing else, these rationalizations at least make me feel better about spending money on games I haven't played yet.)
The greatest risk is that publishers will see cases like this and the takeaway will be that they need to sell more $10 games. Far as that goes, I'm not sure it's a bad thing -- is there any reason Sonic 4 couldn't have been as good a game as Sonic Generations? I don't think it's their budgets that made the latter a better game than the former. If Sega decided the lesson was to make games that looked like Sonic 4 but played like the side-scrolling levels of Sonic Generations, well, there's probably a downside but I'm not seeing it.
