Shoggoth2588 said:
I always assumed that when you buy a game (quick note: these are my thoughts covering physical purchases) it goes to the store. I could be way way off about this but it's the shops who pay for the games form the companies who make said game. The longer those games sit on the shelf the lower the price (in theory) and should the company that makes that game dies (like the people who made Kingdoms of Amalur) the money stays in the store...let me back up...I'm assuming here that individual stores order X number of game Y from company Z once the stock runs out so that is good...unless the game doesn't sell...
I think I may be a bit too tired to post efficiently...
That sounds about right. Except that's only really valid for physical stock. For digital distribution it makes little sense, because there's no stock to speak of.
But for physical stock it's easy:
1. Developer makes game
2. Publisher pays developer
3. Publisher creates X copies of game.
4. Shops buy Y copies of game to sell. (Publisher gets the money for the Y copies sold)
5. Shops sell Z copies. (Hopefully for more than they paid for them.)
So... If it's a physical copy of a game, then the shop gets the money, because they already paid the publisher when they first got the stock. (Thus the publisher got paid before the game was actually sold.)
There's more to it than that ultimately, because retailers can return unsold stock, or buy stock on credit, or whatever.
But for digital sales, the logistics are quite different.
Also, for sales of games whose creators went out of business ages ago, it's also pretty confusing.
It's a known issue though that part of the problem with old copyrighted works is tracking down the current owners.
Since you can get in legal trouble for distributing copyrighted works, you want to make a deal with the owner before you do so. But if what you want to distribute is old, it can get very difficult at times to find the owner... And that's caused more headaches than you might expect.
