Forget the man behind the curtain of this blog…this is worth discussion, for indie games are dOmed.
There is a lot that does not make sense in indie gaming from a financial perspective. Winning the lottery requires less effort.
I don’t think the article is talking about all indie games, just about those who devaluate their product racing to the bottom.
That was a good article, btw.
While I don’t really have much to say about the post you linked to, I do thank you for turning me on to his blog in general, which I have spent the last two hours reading. Some really thought-provoking stuff there. As Cliffski has been posting good stuff on Qt3 for years, I’m just amazed I haven’t bothered to check out his blog until just now. I’ve still got a lot of reading to do.
I don’t know. I’ve purchased a couple of game bundles, usually for around 10-15 not a dollar,… for one or two games out of ten. It was less expensive than buying it full price somewhere else, and I wasn’t wiling to pay full price to begin with. If someone got a dollar for a game I’ll never play, so be it. It doesn’t mean I value that game for a dollar. Chances are… I don’t value that game at all aside form appreciation from the effort into it because I never wanted it in the first place… but a CK 2 bundle that came with it that’s what I wanted.
Now there have been some games that I bought the first one in a bundle for for less than five dollars… guess what I bought the sequel for more than that. Is there any value in having some players enter the genre or get exposed to a dev at a cheap price so they feel like they’re taking less of a risk in the future when they do buy a game at a full price? I think there’s value in that, but that’s just me.
One of the developers of Brigador explain to the Steam community why $20 is not too much for their game.
We have spent 5 years making Brigador, if you include when we started building the engine.
5 years.
Much of that has been working full time, 6-7 days a week, 8+ hours a day. Even at a very conservative estimate that’s over 10,000 hours of work per person, and there are 4 of us. We did not do a kickstarter, we do not have a publisher. We have funded this entire project out of pocket.
Brigador was made almost entirely from scratch, and when it ships will contain 2 hours of original music, over 100 different enemy units, a story campaign, a free play mode, and a playable landmass of ~2 mi² (split between 20 maps) – roughly the size of downtown Chicago or the urban area in GTA III – hand detailed all the way down to street lamps, trash cans, stop signs, etc.
For this we kindly ask that you pay $20.
It’s bad enough there’s a Nickelback poster worth more than the game we’ve spent the last 5 years building, worse still to have people come along and announce that in fact our game is only worth about as much as this other more common Nickelback poster. I hope you can understand the frustration this inspires.
I don’t want to pay more than $9 for a game I will only play 1 day. I don’t pay 19$ for a game that don’t entertain me a full week. If you game is 29$, it must be fun for a month. A game asking 40$ must be fun for a serius long time, or get all my friends togueter in a single game.
I am not your father or your girlfriend. I will not pay for your rent, your fast food or your taxes. Sorry. If that don’t work for you, tough luck.
1$ is probably good enough for a joke game I can play one hour.
I suppose you’ll only pay $40 on a meal if you don’t need to eat anything else for the remainder of the week, then? Regardless of how it tasted, or how good it looked before you ate it?
Got it.
The point is that everyone has a subjective and personal reason for why they might pay a certain price for a given game.
$20 is a perfectly reasonable price to charge for Brigador, and anyone who suggests it “should be” cheaper is probably an asshole if not just completely naive.
As the developer explains, maybe $20 is more than some people want to spend, but that doesn’t mean the developer should charge less. It also doesn’t mean that those people are entitled to pirate the game. It means they should wait until the game is on sale for what they feel like spending.
As The Witness showed, this idea of games having some price that they “should” cost because <reasons> is probably bullshit.
I’ll pay 3 ducats for a car if I can use it every other day, except on Sundays, but always if it’s overcast outside.
What this has to do with the price someone is willing to pay for a videogame I’m not entirely sure.
I’m just applying the same way of thinking to a different situation to show how arbitrary (and possibly nonsensical) it is.
Look, anyone will have their subjective reasons to judge if something is worth a certain value or not. Those reasons are nearly always arbitrary and often nonsensical, but that’s OK. Similarly, devs will have subjective reasons to price the games they make. Those reasons are nearly always arbitrary and often nonsensical (because, like gamers, they’re people), but that’s OK.
However, dismissing the dev’s needs and their reasons to set a certain price is not OK. You think the price is not fair? Move along. Done. Why not make it all simpler? Guy puts price. Find it too expensive? Don’t buy it. You think the price is fair? Buy it. Done.
But don’t pretend you’re the sensible one if your reasons are ultimately arbitrary and often nonsensical. That’s all.
Except Teiman didn’t say anything about the guy’s price being wrong, he was just saying in the general sense how he estimates game value. And hell, even people in that Steam thread saying “Well it should probably be $10” aren’t being unreasonable. If anything bitching about the price is useful, because then he can gauge how the game actually sells compared to the amount of bitching about the price and adjust (Or not) accordingly. People complaining about the price are presumably still interested in the game since they’re bothering to post about it, but without the price complaints if the game doesn’t sell well he may just throw his arms up and decide there’s no interest.
Dunno, both sides seem perfectly in the right to me.
Yea, everyone can ask whatever they want. I am not telling people what they can ask. Only what I am going to pay.
Edit: nothing new said by me really…
Pretty sure Teimen’s point is that from a consumer’s standpoint, the game is worth what someone is willing to pay, not how much time and effort was put into it. Sure they can price the game based on whatever criteria they want and the devs shouldn’t have to justify their price every yahoo that objects. If enough people think it is a fair price then the devs will sell copies.
Correct.
I feel for the developers, being a programmer myself, but… I have too many games already, TV is going through a golden age, there are loads of awesome books to read and movies I enjoy come out pretty much every month. Nobody has time for everything cool that’s going on.
Even if I didn’t already have more games than what I can play, games are coming out so quickly now that I can’t even keep up with what I should be playing to be one of the cognoscenti. And to help the entire thing, there’s a huge backlog of awesome older games to play that are quite easy to get, and cheaper than 20€ (just wait for a sale).
Should the developers be well compensated? Sure. Is a race to the bottom the way to go? No. But let’s be realistic here, when players can get Skyrim Legendary Edition for less than half of what you’re asking for your game, you’re usually going to lose the value for money race…
I value Early Access games a lot less than I would value them if they were released. That’s just my general approach. I will not pay you what you think the game is worth in EA status. I might have consider a higher price for a game that’s actually complete and released though.
Well, the devs did make a dramatic defense of their $20 price point, which to me says “indie game of reasonable length and entertainment value.” But it might have been a mistake to engage with the price trolls, because at some point it started to sound like whining about being rewarded for all their hard work.
Well, that brings us back to the old joke with the punch line “what, and leave show business?” Entertainment is different. Those products don’t necessarily get to establish prices based on hard work, the ability to demand money depends on other factors, such as the presence of competing products (was the indie game market as glutted as it is now 5 years ago?), the sales potential of the genre, and yes, the inherent quality of the product. But there’s often no connection at all between labor and reward, as illustrated by a game not being able to demand a price premium simply because the developer decided to delay release to work on the game another year.
[off topic meandering]You break from your price point at your own risk, I think a lot of otherwise good games disappointed when they asked for the full retail price point for a limited amount of content. Yes, you, Star Wars Battlefront. And don’t think I don’t see you back there, Evolve. Can’t sell season passes when you can’t move units in the first place.
But hey, that’s the price of chasing the dream. For every success story there’s got to be a dozen stories of disappointment and heartbreak that nobody notices. Me, I gave up the dream to earn the equivalent of lots of Nickleback posters for the family. When did that become a benchmark?
Yeah doesn’t make sense to criticize someone for their value assignments. For some people Star Wars Battlefront was worth between $60-$120. I wouldn’t pay more than 50 cents. :-)
-Todd
And then there is always Flappy Bird…
Yeah, I’m very much in the “charge what you feel is fair, people will judge what they want to pay for it and if the two aren’t in sync they’ll wait” camp. But “I would buy your game if it were $X or less” is a data point that might have some value if expressed. “You should price your game according to the arbitrary value I have personally assigned it” is entitled and silly. In my book, at least.
And being a value conscious consumer with an enormous backlog of stuff competing for my time, the price I want to pay for most games (and DLC even more so) is usually well below what devs want to charge, for what it’s worth. But I just wait until they’re more in line.