nice touch interviewing the emulator devs instead of just running benchmarks. One question: on the 3DS the top screen is 400x240 and the bottom one 320x240, so they differ in width. Does the duo use two identical panels and letterbox the bottom image, or do the emulators handle it some other way?

The margin is the striking part. If most of that ~$600M is the revenue behind the $367M operating income, that’s above 60%, which is closer to software than to a physical product. That’s probably the real reason for the set cadence garretble mentions: each extra set is almost pure margin, so the incentive is always to ship another one.

Worth remembering that most of that list predates EA. Baldur’s Gate, KOTOR, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire and the first Mass Effect were all made before EA bought BioWare in the 2007 deal that also brought in Pandemic, which EA shut down about two years later. The EA years are mostly the later Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, Anthem and Veilguard.

That would explain the ~$99 average pretty neatly. Small nitpick: Zelnick is Take-Two’s CEO rather than Rockstar’s, though since Take-Two sets the pricing it amounts to the same thing.

The Milgram angle fits games really well, because the player already comes in trained to do whatever the interface tells them. Papers, Please worked because the rulebook itself was the authority, and you only noticed what you’d been doing when it was too late. Curious how you handle players who refuse from the very first order: does the game let that be a real ending?

The more telling number is the average: $594M over 6M preorders is about $99 each, well above a standard edition price, so a big share must be premium editions. Worth keeping in mind it’s a Sensor Tower estimate rather than Rockstar’s own figure, so I’d treat the exact 74% PlayStation split with some caution.