I was more or less saying that it's not so much absorbing, when digital distribution is concerned, because servers become how the product is delivered. The price of server maintenance becomes an actual expense of the game price.
Admittedly, this doesn't make an actual difference.
Well even if we assume they're paying Australian consumer level prices for quotas which includes the line rental at 9-80c/GB it's still a fairly trivial number. It'll probably be less than 9c/GB for such a large volume service so lets just say it is 9c/GB. Add to that the consumer cost of keeping 10GB of storage on 24/7 (let's be very unrealistic and overestimate it at 30W for 2TB at say 25c/kwh which is $3.25/game/month) divided by the number of people who'd buy the game per month over the life of the product.
So if you're the only one who buys the game in a month they could deliver it with consumer level non-bulk prices for $4.15AU. If the game moves on average about 1000/mo (72k over a console life) the storage cost per-unit basically vanishes and the price drops under $1AU. Well short of the apparently $32AU they apparently pay now to distribute the game. Again this is with Australian prices and with some very ungenerous assumptions and I'm still coming out with numbers that are comparatively so low that they're basically negligible. Then there's the VC in Nintendo's case where they're paying small fractions of cents to distribute SNES games and charging $10.40AU. There's money in them digitial distributions.
Also remember that bandwidth and storage are continually getting cheaper whereas wages, power, fuel and other components of the physical copy are going up. So this gap is only going to get wider.
Forums
Topic: Nintendo Network's greatest asset (no paywall) is under-utilized.
Posts 41 to 41 of 41
This topic has been archived, no further posts can be added.