Green Man Gaming boss explains retailer's business model

With its steady stream of discount vouchers good for any number of new and upcoming PC games, Green Man Gaming is hard to beat in that sphere in terms of pricing, but the digital retailer's success is in more than just undercutting its competitors, GMG's managing director told GamesIndustry.

Aside from selling games, GMG owns the Playfire gaming community, which it uses to collect data on how players play.

"Playfire has two benefits," said Paul Sulyok. "One is to publishers. Quite clearly, it is a massive advantage to get the cost platform, cost publisher, international picture that we can offer, and that understanding of what's going on in the marketplace. Knowing that there are 616 000 gamers who bought a particular first person shooter, and that 38 per cent of them finished that game in 11 days, is a valuable statistic.

"If you take that and you extend it over the entire 4.5 thousand games that we've got, then the level of information that you have got when you're working with Green Man Gaming as a publisher, is much, much higher, and we share this information with our publishers."

The other perk for players in using GMG and Playfire aside from the upfront price discounts is the rewards system the user data affords GMG.

"What we're doing now is we're saying, right, do you know what, if you play Skyrim and you get this certain achievement within this certain space of time, then you will have the ability to be able get a certain amount of credits which you can then offset against the costs of your next purchase."

Sulyok is referring to credit -- a la Steam Wallet money -- you can use on anything in the Green Man Gaming store. There's much more from Sulyok over on our sister site at GamesIndustry, so definitely check it out. It's eye-opening.