Exactly. Games are just software, there's no real unit cost to factor in when setting minimum prices, just market strategy. Running sales with different levels of discounts is as close to optimal as possible $/customer without doing stuff like individualized pricing (which surely requires a vast amount of computing power and human effort to do at scale). Only the truly penniless or retro-game fans need to pirate nowadays.
The real unit cost is worker development cost. Like any other tech company, this cost gets muddied in the platform/framework development costs versus more product focused costs.
Yeah, because rather than pirating from cracxxxed.warez I can buy the game on Steam/GoG sale for $1.4.
Exactly. Games are just software, there's no real unit cost to factor in when setting minimum prices, just market strategy. Running sales with different levels of discounts is as close to optimal as possible $/customer without doing stuff like individualized pricing (which surely requires a vast amount of computing power and human effort to do at scale). Only the truly penniless or retro-game fans need to pirate nowadays.
The real unit cost is worker development cost. Like any other tech company, this cost gets muddied in the platform/framework development costs versus more product focused costs.