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.'"
Re:Economies of Scale (Score:4, Interesting)
No, but there is one in selling more copies. It's called marketing and advertising. You can make the best game of all times, if nobody knows it exists you won't sell it.
What rock have these guys been living under? (Score:5, Interesting)
At twenty to twentyfive bucks, an indy game that isn't going to have the exposure a triple A game has is going to alienate shoppers that would have otherwise bought it just for the hell of it. It's going to have to be pretty damn good and get a lot of word of mouth exposure in order to be able to reign back in lost potential customers.
Re:More expensive? You mean LESS expensive (Score:4, Interesting)
Look... I'm sorry but 15 years ago games were $10-$15.
No, they were not. $50 was the standard price for new console games since at least the mid-1980s, and still is on the Wii.
Most developers use other engines to produce their games so don't give me the BS about how much a game costs to make.
You'd be surprised at just how little difference this makes. It has been a very long time since the majority of a game's development budget went into its code.
in fact ALL games should cost a LOT less.
The last few games I've bought were all PC games off of steam because they were reasonably priced. If it's more than $30... you're over charging. Period. You can try to argue this with me... but everything past that mark is greed pure and simple.
In other words, you're just being cheap. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, as long as you're not using that as an argument to steal games, which I suspect you probably are.
If you absolutely must pay less, buy used. This will not kill you, make you any less of a gamer, or shrink your genitals.
flamebait blog post is flamebait (Score:3, Interesting)
Search for 'indie game' on Google. 19 million hits. Now search for free game. 96 million hits. How much spare time do you have to play these games? Hello Mr Supply and Demand.
I don't have a clever search term for this one, but I can count on two hands every game in the last 10 years that has held my attention for more than 30 minutes. I'm including big studios here. If you'd like to earn money, earn it. If not, here's a styrofoam cup. There's the street corner.
Now, let's compare one entertainment medium to another. You can read short stories for free online or you can pay for print magazines or anthologies of known good authors. You can read comics online for free or you can pay for prints or anthologies of known good authors. You can view photos online for free or you can pay for collections from known good photographers. Sense a theme? Indie developers are, by their nature, relatively unknown. If they can peddle their wares for any amount I'd call that a winning situation.
However, the blogger is right. This is no way to maintain a healthy industry. What we don't need right now is more of these healthy industries. Not every single source of income needs to be neatly packaged and protected as an industry from now until the end of time. It's bad enough we've got ISP monopolies gouging customers, investment companies begging for CEO bonuses, an auto manufacturing industry threatening to blow itself up if it doesn't get bailed out for its screw-ups (so it can screw up some more!), and an airline industry that's beyond reproach. The industrial revolution is over. Let's come up with something better.
Re:Just like how software should be... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Just like how software should be... (Score:3, Interesting)
Braid (Score:2, Interesting)
As someone who just purchased (and finished) Braid this weekend, I feel that game was worth FAR more than $15. I agree though that the price point for a lot of "indie" games are about right. I don't think I'd have payed more for Audiosurf, or Peggle, or the Penny-Arcade games.
Re:Economies of Scale (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh yeah, that works great. So far I still didn't see a single case of true grassroots movement that didn't at some sort gain a lot weight either by media coverage (ya know, the kind that the real people out there watch and read, like newspapers or even TV) or by being picked up by someone who has a lot of media presence.
Word of mouth is fine and nice, if you want to get famous inside a certain circle. It works very well if you're, say, a scientist and want to be known amongst your peers, it works to some degree for underground bands. It fails when your audience does not really "hunt" for what you offer but needs to be told that it's there.
The average ("casual") gamer doesn't read game mags, and he certainly doesn't dig through blogs and game pages. I have to admit, I turned "casual" not long ago, lacking the time I had during my college days when I did actually spend some time on such pages. You know where casual games get my attention? Steam. Steam offers World of Goo for (IIRC) 15 bucks, I heard somewhere something about it and I dimly remember it was positive for some reason (it was on TV, a show about the indie game market), so I thought what the heck, 15 bucks, no loss, buy. Flock was offered, it looked cute, 10 bucks, what the heck... bought. And so on.
Word of mouth would have never told me that those games even existed. First, few of my "gamer friends" play indie. There's the FPS crowd that plays CoD and L4D, there's the MMO people with their WoW and EvE, but the people that I'd call my friends and that I'd put in the "casual" or "indie game" area rarely if ever talk about computers. Why? Because computer games aren't an important part of their life. They play them, they don't talk about them.
So word of mouth, while free and the best kind of ad, does not really work for Indie games IMO. Simply because those that play them the most talk the least about them.
Mathematics (Score:3, Interesting)
What most of the commenters seem to be ignoring is the evidence that the author is doing perfectly well selling his game for $28.
Having played (and paid for) one of them, given it took me dozens of (entertaining) hours to complete, I don't have much of a problem with that price.
I think what the post really boiled down to was:
Expect high ($30 - $60) prices for big commercial titles because they cost millions. Huge development costs divided by lots of customers result in high prices.
Expect low prices ($1 - $10) for indie games in popular genres (puzzle, etc) because there is lots of competition. Low development costs divided by lots of customers result in low prices.
But expect highish ($10 - $30) prices for indie games in niche genres, because there are simply fewer potential customers. Low(ish) development costs divided by few customers must result in highish prices, or you lose money.
Yes, there are free flash games, but point me at a free flash game in the same genre and of the depth of the author's games?
Re:Enforced low prices? (Score:1, Interesting)
Apple has in fact rejected many submissions because they arbitrarily didn't like the price.
Re:Just like how software should be... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you would like to play only completely free games, you're certainly welcome to. I'm willing to pay for games that I want to play, and hopefully that will encourage the developers to make more games I like.
My point is that your examples are of games that don't need to make money, which completely ignores the entire indie games market. Don't devalue games because free ones exist; examine the quality and decide if it's worth paying for.
In response to the GP, Ubuntu makes money on service contracts, Firefox on donations and corporate partnerships, and Gmail from ad impressions - analogous to micropayments, donations, and ads in games.
Re:Evidence of the contrary (Score:3, Interesting)
I absolutely agree. In fact, if you're going to point out indie games that are doing well at a higher than "normal" price point, I'd have to mention Illwinter's Dominions 3. You might say that it's something of a niche game, in that it'd probably only appeal to people who already like turn-based strategy games. But within that niche, I wouldn't hesitate to say that this is the single best game I have ever played. And it's going for $55 at the moment. The game is several years old now, and they've successfully maintained sales at that price point, because, quite simply, the game really is worth it.
Most other indie games, I would never consider paying that much for. Even the ones that are fun, if they don't have any depth of gameplay or replayability value then they're not going to be worth much more than $10, maybe $15. That's why all these publishers are aiming for that low price point - because it's a reasonable one for the quality of games they sell. The games that actually are high quality will sell for what they're worth.
Re:More expensive? You mean LESS expensive (Score:3, Interesting)
Some games are niche (Score:5, Interesting)
It is not at all that simple.
My best selling game is this one:
http://www.positech.co.uk/democracy2 [positech.co.uk]
It's a very complex and in-depth political simulation game based around the idea of the interconnectedness of all aspects of government policy, and modelled using a custom-written neural network. It assumes a decent understanding of modern political issues and a willingness to not be put off by what appears (at first glance ) to be a VERY complex interface (it's actually not that complex).
In short, the game appeals to politics junkies, political science students, and people who enjoy chaos theory and complexity.
It doesn't matter HOW good it is, how polished it is, or how well I market it...if your idea of games is Halo, you will NOT enjoy it, and NOT buy it.
Many games exist in a very small, specific niche, a niche where the developer can make a living selling $22.95 games like that one. A lot of those niches are already on the borderline (mine is). Unless I can actually generate a worldwide greater interest in playing political strategy games, I can't expand my sales. So a drop in prices just means less overall revenue, and thus makes it less viable to make games like that.
If all you want is 'mainstream' games that appeal to everyone, why bother with indie games anyway? we make games for specific groups of players, not the whole market.
Re:are new games too expensive? (Score:3, Interesting)
That depends, if you buy a new game for $54 and play it for 54 hours, that $1 an hour. Compare that with going bowling/drinking/skating/movies/anythingelsewhatsoever.
gaming is a dirt cheap past-time.
Re:Just like how software should be... (Score:3, Interesting)
As a further point, almost all the games given as examples of free games are clones or derivatives of previous games. One of the things that makes a good indie game stand out is interesting, new types of gameplay or new takes on existing gameplay. Not to say that games like FreeCol are bad, but comparing an after-work project cloning an existing commercial game and someone trying to create new types of games from the ground up for a living and then wondering why they both can't be free seems a bit silly.