John Watson, one of the developers of The Banner Saga, had this to say about iOS pricing:
Apple is frustrated, along with everybody else, about the mentality that’s gone rampant in mobile app markets, where people don’t want to pay anything… They want to pay as little as possible. They think that four dollars is an exorbitant amount to pay for a game, which is very illogical considering most people’s lifestyles. They’ll spend $600 on an iPad, and $4 on a coffee, drop $20 on lunch, but when it comes to spending four or five dollars on a game, it’s this life-altering decision. I’m frustrated with that too.
Personally, I understand where he’s coming from, and I’m not even a game developer. It’s absurd to me that people call out things like Monument Valley at $4 as “expensive”. Taking it up a bit, we have Chrono Trigger at $10. Chrono Trigger is generally considered to be one of the best RPGs ever, and I’m personally glad that Square keeps re-releasing it for people to play that missed it the first time around (or the second or third at this point). Currently, the ways you can play chrono trigger are in a super nintendo, assuming you still have one. this’ll run you over $100 now, and it would have been about $80 then, not adjusted for inflation. It’s on the Wii’s Virtual Console for $8. The next version was for the Playstation, and that one can be had for $10 on PSN. When it came out, it was a full-priced release ($40-50) packaged with Final Fantasy 4. Up next was the version I played, on the DS. This one had some additional content, and was again a full-priced game ($35), this time by itself. If you want this one now, it’s still about $30.
The iOS version has the expanded content of the DS version, and is still $10. in terms of value per dollar (if you think that way), it beats probably every AAA release of the past 2-3 years. It’s certainly longer lasting than a trip to the movies, and costs less, to boot.
For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative. For an alternate opinion about this in particular, see Doone’s post about retro games.
Thats a valid criticism by the dev and your own position. Can’t argue that. But I think it’s a different day and age. These aren’t the days of captive audiences any more, where I buy maybe 3 games a year. People buy a game a day — just like coffee and lunch and other examples given. To expect people to want to pay more than that for a 20 year old game is a joke. I admit, I’m one of those people that believes that once a product has been on the market after a certain amount of time, profits on it should cease. This idea that we can reap eternal profits from making any particular thing seems ludicrous to me. And as I pointed out in the comments on my blog, we already agree as a society that this idea *is* ludicrous. This is why things like patents expire.
Chrono may be a legend for gamers like us, but it’s just another retro-pixel title for people who’ve never heard of it.
At the same time, I’ve paid $10 for mobile games. I’ve spent $10 on F2P mobile games. I don’t like the idea that my technology is being used as a slot machine against me. So I guess that influences my thoughts on game pricing.
Generally I feel like the “slot machine” thing applies far more to games that are “freemium” or “$0.99 with IAP”. Square tried this approach too, and it was moderately successful with the iOS version of Theatrythm. All told, it would cost about $80 to get it to parity with the $40 3DS game of the same name. That’s when I feel publishers are taking us for a ride.
I guess I don’t have a problem for people making money off of a thing people want to buy, no matter how old it is. I’m happy that abandonware-type games exist on the PC, but it’s not something I expect. You still can’t get Super Mario Bros for free anywhere, after all.
When company after company closes or has massive layoffs because they can’t make back the cost of development, and the success rate of indie devs is as dismally low as it is, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the “games are too expensive” mindset, particularly when the cost of games has remained stable or gone down over the last decade, rising only once in that time, regardless of the rate of inflation.
If something is available to you, it cost money to get there. If you know that it’s available, it cost money for that to occur. A company that puts something up for “free” isn’t putting it up there out of the kindness of their hearts; game development is a business and the money lost from that is being made up for elsewhere (read: it’s marketing).
If you make something so great that people still want it ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred years later, and you’re still in a position to make it available to them, more power to you. You have created a cultural icon, and that’s worth rewarding, I think.
But your rationale is the same that’s used to abuse people It goes like this: “if a person will allow themselves to be abused, then they deserve it/we ought to abuse them since it benefits us”. This is the Consenting Adults argument, that this is a transaction between equals and which is in everyones best interest. It’s an argument that says that the person doing the selling isn’t responsible for the sale or anything else. They’re merely offering something that people are free to turn down, and if people will buy it then it’s right.
This is the same thing as saying that we should profit off of people that will buy any given product, regardless of any other factor. It’s a very dishonest approach on the part of publishers/devs because they disown any responsibility for the ramifications or consequences.
@Tam I think we were typing at the same time, hehe. You’re also making the “infinite rewards” argument. For humans, there’s no such thing as infinity. There’s a finite quantity of everything, including games and including money. It’s unsustainable to infinitely reward a game dev for a great game. Rewards also have limits, just like everything else. So my question is why do you believe in infinite rewards for any given deed?
I’m not really sure where the dishonesty or the “abuse” comes in.
If I put the time and effort of a number of people into the creation or maintenance of something, is that effort not worth anything*? Ensuring that a cartridge-based game for an obsolete piece of hardware that uses a specific input device works on a modern piece of technology with an entirely different interface is a nonzero amount of work/effort.
Is it better for the only available copies of Chrono Trigger to be the original SNES versions for $100+ on eBay, rather than available to anyone who wants to play it for a fraction of that price?
It sounds like you’re saying it’s abusive to charge money for work; I would put forth that it’s only abusive when you’re charging an inordinate amount. No objective measure will ever tell you what “an inordinate amount” is, it will differ every month for every company and every product– the closest we get to an objective measure is what people are willing to pay, and since that’s a sliding scale, there will always be people who are willing to shell out $100 or $1000 or $10000 for a pristine copy of SNES Chrono Trigger and people who firmly believe that every video game should be provided to them free of charge.
The real answer lies somewhere in the middle, where the cost is enough to support the efforts of the people putting forth the effort.
*Potentially, it isn’t worth anything, as it’s possible no one would buy it.
@Doone
Museums and history books exist as a form of pseudo-infinite reward for deeds. They last as long as the people who benefit from the reward are able to maintain them. Eventually, they vanish into history; as you said, everything is finite.
Games are no different. If a painting can have value hundreds of years after the death of the artist, why can a game not have value ten years after its creation — particularly considering that its creators may yet still reap the benefits of its popularity?
There are games created a thousand years ago that no one knows about because they weren’t enough of a cultural touchstone to maintain, and there are games that are hundreds or thousands of years old that are still highly valued. The same will be true a thousand years from now. If a game does manage to survive that long, it will be worthy of history.
You seem to suggest that a game creator should make a game and then immediately forget about it, reaping the profits from the initial sale and then never again — making games disposable and ephemeral, and thus never cultural touchstones or art. I see the result of that, and it’s lots of people out of jobs, or scrambling to stay afloat between layoffs.