Post edited 11:07 – Feb 10th 2012 by Vimesy74

This question has been bugging me for ages so I'm hoping someone an shed some light on it for me.

How much money do Studios get back per sale? Does it change once the game drops in price? Currently games drop in price massively within weeks of release, so does hanging out for that sub-£20 deal "hurt" the Studio at all. Do they just sell the game to distributors for,say, £10 per unit or is it worked on a percentage scale?

Obviously there's the fact that all Studios want a strong set of launch figures to impress their publishers but, from a pure profit point of view, will they still get the same amount of my cash no matter how much I hand over at the til?

Slightly awkward way of explaining my question, sorry.

It should be remembered that none of the money brick and mortar stores make on used games goes back to the developers. frankly stores like game have slightly shady business practices when it comes to used games with them really pushing used copy's of brand new titles at tills when you go to buy. Now as consumers that is good for us but it really is biting the hand that feeds them in terms of pissing off developers and publishers. Who now are all looking at ways to digital distributional in a serious way in the future. Lets just hope our bandwidth is good enough.

Going back to my time in retail with Electronics Boutique, the shop floor price was dictated by the unit cost price of the distributer.  The cost price to the distributer was dictated by the publisher.

There would be occassions when we would reduce the shop floor sale price of a game by anything 50% because the publisher wanted to move large amounts of unsold units, given a rebate per unit to the distributer for his existing stock and reduced the cost price of new stock who then passed on a percentage of the rebate to us in retail.  This was even more prevelent in hardware sales, I remember Sony and Sega rebating us tens of thousands every time the PS1 and Saturn had a price cut for units we held in stock.

The percentage of the the sale price which goes to the developer varies depending on whether they have simply been paid a one off fee by the publisher to produce the game (in which case they recieve nothing), whether they are in house (Gears of War on the 360 etc) and whether they have a contract which pays a fixed royalty amount paid per unit sold, I think a developer actualy recieveing a percentage of the sale price is quite rare, its usualy a royalty (ie. £1 per unit sold rather than 10% of the sale price).

Ultimately though the in store price is a percentage mark up on the price the stock is bought from the distributer.

I dont think anyone sells games at a loss in this climate with the exception of supermarkets who do it in the hope of getting additional sales from you whilst your instore. 

Having said all that, its been many years since I was in retail so I may be talking utter bum juice