Heh, nice rant.
I kinda agree with the notion that Steam sale prices and bundles (or prices on the appstore) have greatly diminished the value of any individual customer to the developer. That’s kind of a given.
BUT there are a few … err … buts.
First of all, I think only a minority of folks that purchases bundles or deeply discounted games ever bother to play the games in earnest. Maybe a select few, maybe a specific title that prompted them to pick up the bundle in the first place, but I’d wager a LOT of those games go straigth to the backlog, where they rot.
Because, dear developers, just like a $1 customer holds little value to a developer, a $1 game holds little value to the person that picked it up. I must have a hundred or more tiny games on Desura that I have never even downloaded. (I’d probably have even more on Steam by now, but I make a point of only ever registering games there I want to actually play.) There are a few titles I have paid a pittance for and that I spent hours and hours playing, but these are huge exceptions.
Of those people actually playing a game, I bet only a very VERY small minority would contact support if something went wrong. Over the years, I posted in a couple of support forums - mostly for big games - but never did I even write an eMail (as far as I remember).
I also have to say I never really got valuable support, only dismissive responses ala “reinstall your audio drivers”. That hardly counts as fixing my computer, or does it?
Also, in all cases, I did have a computer that was able to run a dozen or more other installed games without any issue, so if some mystical driver issue causes that one other game to fail, is my computer broken or did those other dozen game developers do something right this particular developer did wrong? As a user, I reserve my judgement.
I have worked in first level support and know how hard it can be to deal with such issues (and the customers that have them), because often enough, you’d have to go there and do the tweaking yourself, and some issues couldn’t be resolved by anything short of a windows reinstall. That’s just the reality of IT and it’s hard to blame the users for it.
Anyway, I feel the “you’re a loss to us because we have to fix your computer for you” issue is blown way out of proportion in this rant.
Then, especially for Puppygames and many of the developers whose games appear in bundles, I feel that in the good old days where you charged $20 for a game, such games would have been FREEWARE to begin with. For those too young to remember, freeware was a sort of distribution model similar to F2P, only without IAPs. Developers cranking out their first game(s) to gain experience and/or those developing games in their spare time out of passion would just give away their creations for free. Outrageous, I know, but there were people like that back in the day.
So, while I understand the whole bread-on-the-table issue very well, I feel a vast majority of the games sold for $1 or less are just not worth money to begin with. They would not be worth much to me, anyway.
That said, I feel the entire race-to-the-bottom pricing schemes are not sustainable - especially not on the appstore and in bundles.
The latter already kinds “settled in”, you see the “usual suspects” (always the same games) appearing in various bundles, along with some crap old games that have been written off a decade ago. There’s still the occasional “highlight”, but more often than not, it’s a “$15 minimum” affair or something (which is totally understandable).
The former … I think I read 75% of all apps on the appstore make little to no money, and only the top 1% scores BIG money. That’s great news if you’re in that last group, but not so great if you’re below or even in the 75%.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think both in the AppStore and on Steam, the time of the gold rush is over, so I assume the market will somehow sort itself out at some point. We’ll see how it goes in the long run.
I didn’t know previously about their financial problems, but I think it’s quite obvious that something like that would prompt them to write such a rant. Like I hinted at above, I never particularly cared for any PuppyGames title, and it looks like there were too many people like me in that regard. Maybe they just don’t make games that are worth $20 to folks? I mean, I used to dream of making games for a living too (that was when the C64 was still around, mind you), but in the end, I had to accept that to get bread on my table, I’d better do something else for a living.
rezaf
