Letting Customers Decide Pricing On Game DLC

An anonymous reader writes "How much should game developers be charging for DLC? It seems that one indie dev has decided to carry out a unique experiment. The latest expansion pack for Gratuitous Space Battles is priced at $5.99 — or is it? It turns out there is both a standard ($5.99) version and a discount version ($2.99). And the difference between them is... nothing. The buyers have been left to make their own decisions on whether or not they should pay full price, and send more money to the developer, or treat themselves to a deserved discount. The buy page even lists comparisons of national incomes, average salaries and even the price of sausages to help buyers make up their minds. Will this catch on? Will Microsoft start asking us whether or not we should get a discount and trust us to answer honestly?"

How is this unique?

[Hadlock]

There have been multiple cases of "pay what you want" in the last year alone.
 
Hell, even Slashdot ran an article about this back in march: http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/05/11/1932233/Indie-Pay-What-You-Want-Bundle-Reaches-1-Million [slashdot.org]
 
They concluded that after removing those that paid less than five cents, the average price was around $9.20 [wolfire.com]. Hell, they even break it down by OS for you.

Re:Start by not calling it DLC

[WhitetailKitten]

It's a content pack with a new race and 10 new ships for that new race, and the ships apparently have a different loadout configuration compared to the existing ships. Whether this is worth paying anything for is subjective. However, consider: This is an indie developer, not a major game studio with a multi-million-dollar budget. He doesn't just have a vault of cash sitting around to lay on after he's done tweaking the textures and packing them up for a free release.

I think the idea of giving the choice of paying normal price or on-sale price allows him to collect right away instead of getting the (potentially minimal) normal-price sales now and then getting a bigger volume of sales five or six months down the road when it goes on sale on Steam.

Disclosure: I'm buying the full $5.99 because I like this game and want to support the dev. I also didn't even know that the new content was released before this story was posted, so... it sure might be a slashvertisement, but it's at least for what I would consider one of the "good guys" (no, not you, Ubisoft).

Re:Start by not calling it DLC

[ledow]

"Positech Games is an indie video game developer from the UK. Owned by ex-Lionhead Studios programmer Cliff Harris, the company was formed in 1997..."

This is not a "guy in the backroom" kind of indie. This is a "breakaway from the large publisher's" indie. This guy used to work on The Sims and things like that. There is, incidentally, no such thing as a one-man company in the UK (as it claims on the website). You must, by law, have at least a Company Secretary as well - and they can't be the same person. It's probably his wife or something but still, it's misleading to claim a "one-man company", especially when he's hired people to do all sorts of work on those games.

"Cliffski, of Positech Games, made $189,423 in 2008 from direct sales."

That means he is way within the professional games league, and way within the scope of hiring, say, accountants, artists, programmers, and anything else, even if they don't work for his "company" (which is actually just a liability-sink for anything he does wrong).

"As with many indie video game projects, development cost was a significant issue. After an initial experiment spending several hundred dollars to purchase stock spaceship models, Harris eventually solicited quotes from 3 different artists and selected the most expensive one. The user interface was constructed by Chris Hildenbrand, a UI expert, leaving Harris to do his own special effect and user module graphics."

Thus, it's still not a one-man operation and actually he *did* hire texture artists to do all these things way before he even made a penny on it. So I'd personally expect a DLC to be a bit more than a couple of textures and some datafiles.

I played GSB. It was a little bit like Critical Mass (http://www.windowsgames.co.uk/ - another indie developer) but with fancy graphics that killed my laptop, and a very boring, very un-interactive, main game. I'm not sure the DLC would be worth anything at all, considering the game barely qualified its purchase price for me.

This is really just a PR stunt - I noticed Steam deals on the same things only the other day. This is just a way to get free publicity and, to be honest, this guy can afford to buy his own. I don't begrudge him a successful game, or a wage from paying customers, but to claim it's a one-man operation is a BIG stretch of the definition and there are thousands of others like him out there that don't need free advertising posing as a "unique event" that's happened many times in the past, especially for a very, very basic DLC add-on that could probably be knocked up in a matter of hours.

As a former subscriber who has disabled adverts on this site, I'm more pissed off with Slashdot for posting this "event" than I am the developer trying to get some free press for his game, even if I don't like his game.

Re:How is this unique?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think your cynicism is unwarranted. Maybe the majority of these pay-variation trials are being done to garner free advertising, but to say all of them are is absurd. Business tactics constantly adjust and run experiments. Before this was free-with-advertising, before that was optional DLC, before that was timecards, and so on.... It's a measurement of effectiveness, it is competition, and yes sometimes it is to make headlines. Mostly it is none of them, or more precisely, mostly the objective is all three.

Re:Expansion packs I'll pay for

[Rayonic]

My personal pet peeve is games with a dozen little pieces of DLC, which get released but never get reduced in price (aside from the odd sale once in a blue moon.) My personal policy has been to wait for the "ultimate" or "game of the year" edition which has all the DLC bundled in. Because unless I'm playing with other people, there's no pressure on me to play a game right away. It's not like there's a shortage of games to play in the meantime.

As for specific types of DLC, I'll give my takes on them:

1. Expansion Pack - Great! A full-length or half-length expansion of the regular game is usually welcome.
2. Mini Expansion - Good! The ones that act as an extension of the main game are better than the ones that are like side quests.
3. Micro Expansion - Bad. By "micro", I mean a single extra quest or average dungeon, tacked on somewhere in the game world.
4. Song Tracks - Fair game, as long as the original Guitar Hero/Rock Band game came with a good song selection.
5. Extra Cars - Also fair, as long as they're not unbalanced in online play.
6. Map Packs - Lame. Plus it divides the community between the people who bought it and those who haven't.
7. Extra Items - Usually lame. Like a special weapon or armor that you're given early in the game. Often unbalanced.
8. Cheats/Unlocks - Terrible. Paying for stuff that really should be free. Like paying to unlock all the fighting game's characters.
9. Cosmetic Enhancements - Mixed bag. Harmless or cool in multiplayer games, pointless in single player games.
10. New character - Wildly mixed. Maybe it means you can play through the game again in a whole new way. Or maybe he/she makes little difference. Or maybe they suck, like a really cheap or bad character in an online game.

Re:How is this unique?

[Roman Coder]

Guys, the parent post is NOT a troll. It may or may not be correct, but its definitely not trolling.