Should Good Indie Games Be More Expensive? 150
spidweb writes "Indie gaming blog The Bottom Feeder has an article on why independent games should be more expensive. The enforced low prices on XBox Live, Amazon, and iTunes might feel good now, but they'll kill off the variety and depth gamers are hoping indie developers can provide. From the article: 'Every year, life is getting more and more expensive. Insurance. Rent. Food. And, at the same time, games are getting cheaper and cheaper, sometimes as cheap as a dollar, as we engage in a full speed race to the bottom. This is not going to help developers stay in business. This is not how a healthy industry is maintained.'"
Enforced low prices? (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong question... (Score:5, Informative)
It should be "Should expensive games be better".
FYI: Indie =/= Good
This is also an example of a "indie game". [fugly.com]
Re:Economies of Scale (Score:3, Informative)
I think the point is that low prices stop the creation of games that might be good, because only large sales cover costs.
What do you mean by "large sales"? Wouldn't a higher price lead to less sales?
Of course, it doesn't exactly work like that. Games with a high price often enjoy massive sales, but usually only when they are accompanied by a massive marketing campaign, or pre-existing expectations.
"Indie" games are in a different boat altogether. They usually don't enjoy such marketing hype, although some do. Ultimately, linking "good game" with "high price" is an exercise in futility. Sometimes that correlates, sometimes it doesn't. And any given person's definition of "good game" varies from another's.
Re:Economies of Scale (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, indeed, advertising and shelf space and maintaining stock gets expensive: so does paying for insurance plans for vice presidents, making fancy PowerPoint presentations to investors, and showing up at trade shows to showcase your games.
For an example of how modest, "indie" games can work well, take a look at http://www.cheapass.com/ [cheapass.com]. These guys make small, funny as all heck, modest board games that spend their efforts on making the game fun, not on fancy graphics. They're the "Kingdom of Loathing" of the board game world. And speaking of Kingdom of Loathing, there's an example of awfully fun computer gaming with minimal hardware requirements, modest infrastructure needs, and a well-earned fanbase for a game run on donations and buying in-game items.
Re:Recession (Score:3, Informative)
He states that some games are worth more than others and that his problem has to do with companies like Amazon not caring about that and instead trying to force all indie titles to be cheap.
He is right. He should be able to test the market and adjust the price as he wants rather than Amazon dictating to him that it has to be cheap.
The recession isn't an excuse for everything to be cheap no more than the inflation we're experiencing is an excuse for companies to raise prices.
Re:Economies of Scale (Score:3, Informative)
One could just as easily say...
"If your game is really good, then won't people be willing to pay more money for it, making you more money?"
The problem is, no matter how little the game is sold for, there is still only a certain number of people that will buy it. Obviously if only 10,000 people will buy your game if you sell it for $1, but 9,000 will still buy it if you sell it for $10, choosing between $1 and $10 is a no-brainer. The hard part is finding the sweet spot that gives you the most profit. If your game is good enough, it's possible that you will still sell 8,000 copies of it at $40, which again would make the price increase decision an easy one to make. But of course, no one can know for sure exactly what the results will be until after the fact. And then you still don't know what the results would have been if you had started with a different price. So most publishers set the price high to begin with, and hope they can make up most of the lost sales by reducing the price later. So maybe you only got 1,500 sales at $40, but if you can reduce the price to $10 later and pick up another 5,000 sales, you're still doing better than the original hypothetical 9,000 sales at $10 from the get-go... except of course, at this point for all you know you may have actually gotten 20,000 sales if you had set the price at $10 initially.
It's just really hard to establish causation in this type of thing. So the large publishers set the price high because they know they'll sell a lot of copies initially regardless (which is great for them, because then even if the game is a stinker, they might still get a good return on it before word-of-mouth kicks in), and the indie's set them low because if they don't, their game might not get purchased at all no matter how good it is. For them, by the time word-of-mouth kicks in the game might already be too outdated to be worth buying.
Re:Just like how software should be... (Score:2, Informative)
Careful pointing at WZ2100, that one was commercial before it got opened up so they had professionals doing the work for money before it was given to the community. Spring's biggest mods operate on pirated content too (yes, there are legal mods but they're getting little attention from the playerbase as the primary sales pitch is still "we stole TA"). Organizing free contributors into anything that can produce a coherent game is extremely difficult and so far the results tend to be mostly coder art or just verbatim ripoffs of commercial games.