At the same time, focusing on the hypothetical is like focusing on "WHAT IF THE WORLD WAS GOING TO END TOMORROW".Adon Cabre said:
1. Its not going to happen.
2. You'd need more context than that to be able to make any meaningful arguments or judgements.
Whilst I skirted around that specific point, as it is rather impossible to know what the market would be like if there was only the PC, I did argue against your predictions on that point, which you claim work off economics but honestly sound a lot like paranoia or a superiority complex for consoles.
You'll find I quoted your numbers, and us PC enthusiasts can and do imagine the influence of consoles in the industry. They're the reason exclusives exist, they're the reason games cost $60, they're the reason companies like Microsoft tried to force paid multiplayer into their games with GFWL, and they're the reason for a lot of the industry's business practices, most of which a lot of us are against.
And this is the point; What you perceive. The PC market is not the wild-west. Its more akin to Tokyo, or what Tokyo is stereotypically perceived as anyway; beautiful, technologically forward, and very different to its counterparts in the western [Or for the PC-Console debate, console] world. There are definitely dangers there, but there are also dangers in the console market. Neither is inherently more dangerous than the other, and honestly I'm more inclined to say the PC market is at less of a risk because of pirates and crackers - Companies can't try serious BS as they know the game won't be bought, it'll be cracked and downloaded instead. This is the centrepoint of Steam's approach; Don't get in the consumer's way, be a necessity that they want to use by offering a better service than the pirates, and most people will use you instead of the pirates. And it works.
And this is where your argument and economics talk falls apart, as I pointed out.
Sales are not done because a company has earned enough money on consoles. A company doesn't want "Enough" money. It wants as much money as it can get its hands on. Rule 1 of economics.
As such, if they would lose money from these sales, publishers wouldn't allow it. However, they don't lose money at all on these sales. They gain a load. As I pointed out in the last post, the games on Steam cost NOTHING to distribute at all. If they sell the game for 50c, its a profit. Most of the time they sell for more than that, and they sell by the truckload, because people see they're cheap and buy them. It exploits people's impulse buying weakness, and earns a load of cash. This is why publishers allow it to happen. Even after the sales end and the prices return to full, the publicity increases the sales of their games, earning them bucket loads more money. It has nothing to do with having made their money on the console, its them milking every last cent out of the PC audience that does the trick.
And publishers already are selective about who sells their games; Brick and mortar stores, or Steam - sometimes with their own platform included if they have one. Steam has integrated itself as an excellent option for most publishers to publish through for the PC as it is their DRM, so they don't have to spend money on that, it distributes the game itself, so they need no money for that, it handles patches for the games and updates and DLC, so no money needs to be spent on that, and the don't need to pay to run Steam's servers. They just let Steam take some of their profits, and half their expenses disappear. This is why there would not be an individual platform for each publisher. Steam just makes things easier.
And this is where you are wrong.
PC has its benefits because of its own environment;
As digital distribution is very strong on the PC, publishers can sell games with no overhead on distribution, and earn a profit from 50c. Or they can sell them for $60 and earn a lot more profit, and drop it down to $10 for a sale to bring in a boat load of additional customers when it starts to sell poorly. You can't do that on a console because of the physical medium. Physical disks cost money to transport, make, store and sell. That is added onto console game costs. As is a 'tax' for when that game is sold second hand - its factored into the original game's price whereas PC doesn't have to worry about that. Why do console digital downloads not have outrageous sales? Because Gamestop would stop selling new console games, only second hand, and cut publishers completely out of the deal there, cutting their profits massively. This doesn't happen on PC as the PC gamestop section sells 80% Steam vouchers, and is small anyway - PC is mostly DD. This is why there are cheap games and sales on PC, not because consoles earn enough money for publishers.
DRM policies are not worse than they are currently as publishers know PC players will not buy their games if they make them worse. Diablo III, Sim City - sold well initially on hype, now they'll be crashing and burning with few sales thanks to their DRM and poor quality. Bioshock Infinite? Sold well initially on hype, and will continue to sell fairly well and be able to sell DLC effectively thanks to its only DRM being Steam. If publishers put terrible DRM on their games, gamers will just buy other games - whether from other major publishers, or from indie developers, or they may even illegally acquire them if possible. This is why PC games rarely have terrible DRM - they wouldn't sell, and Steam does DRM that consumers accept too, so no need to pump more money into DRM when there's another viable option.
Modding, Unique genres of games, better performance and graphics - none of these are affected by consoles either. You claim to talk about a hypothetical PC only world, but you don't seem to understand the PC world as it is at the moment. Honestly, I'd be more scared about a console-only world where MS and Sony control everything and can milk consumers for every last cent if they want than a PC only world where there is always another option available. Of course, such a dystopian gaming future would never actually occur as publishers would quickly realise that they were on their way to another great crash like that in '83 when people stopped buying their games.
