Compulsion decided they have something to announce that will justify a $50 price tag for an In Dev game, but that doesn't mean whatever they announce will make me (and many others, mind you) feel the game is worth $50. I honestly can't think of anything that would make me go "oh, wow, they are right, We Happy Few *really* is worth fifty bucks, now".

I welcome and appreciate the studio's transparency and willingness to engage with us in conversation, at least based on what I've experienced in this thread, but that's not reason enough for me to look at the game and suddenly realize it's more than worth the $50 asking price. I'm not trying to be mean, like I said, I literally can't think of a single argument that would make me believe $50 is a fair price for this game -- or even most games, as I definitely don't think €50-€60 for a contemporary "AAA" title is fair. Far from it, actually. That's mostly the main reason I can't congratulate Ninja Theory enough for selling their AAA-level game, Hellblade, for $30, even if it's not my kind of game at all. Hopefully they're setting a trend with this move.

I agree. I paid approximately €50 for Dying Light when it released here on GOG. To this day, I don't regret that purchase, the game exceeded my expectations. Others, though, are more than entitled to feel that asking price is a rip-off. Maybe a huge chunk of gamers would buy Dying Light for, say, €20, but €40 already feels too much. I understand what you're saying, and I concur.

But I'm still comparing a 1.0 "Gold" version of a game costing €50 to an unfinished Early Access title asking for roughly the same amount. It doesn't really seem fair to judge both those cases on equal grounds.

As far as the whole "game value = game length" discussion, I'll politely excuse myself from it, since Tacoma just recently released and apparently I'm one of the three or four people on GOG who thinks the price Fullbright is asking for it is more than fair, while the vast majority just can't understand why is a game that can be "finished" in just a bit over an hour being sold for $20.

I'm on the fence about (aboot) the whole thing.

1. Not sure why it matters if the company is Indie or Slave to Publisher. Quality is Quality and Crap is Crap. If Christie Brinkley takes a dump, there's still a turd. Of course, she probably looks fantastic doing it - pinched face and all - but there's still a stinky turd at the end of it. If people can't think of any AAA fuckups then they aren't trying very hard. It works the other way, too.

2. So if an Indie group puts out something that rivals output from a big Slave developer, then fantastic. Not sure why price depends on the source of the product, so long as the product lives up to the price expectations.

3. Says you announced back in 2015 that this would happen eventually. So it doesn't sound to me like content was ADDED that would justify the bump. More like the content, etc., was planned all along (else why tell people two years prior that the price would go up?). So I guess $30 was the half-done price but the plan was to be a AAA title all along?

I see why people are all "WTF?" about (aboot) it but ultimately it comes down to the released product. For the developer's sake I hope this doesn't have shades of NMS, where at release the price / hype didn't match what showed up in the stores. So long as Compulsion release something really damn good then all the rest doesn't really matter. "Except for that bottle of Mezcal and front row seats at the donkey show, this is the best damn $51 I ever spent!". We'll see...

For me, having as much information as I can to make an informed decision is valuable. That's why I shared this information, so everyone can make their own mind while there's still an option. And since the price difference is not negligible, it might be helpful for some people.

As for me, pre-ordering and In Dev are a gamble I don't want to take. I prefer to wait for a more final state of the game (where what I buy is what I get). At 30$ We Happy Few was a "wait and see" for me, wait for reviews and then make up my mind. At 50$, with the information I have now and bearing no discounts will happen near the release, it's a "I know I'll wait some years before playing it... if the reviews are good".

Still, thanks to the developers for sharing their plan (and sorry for splitting your attention to yet another thread).

I guess the part I found interesting was this:

You gladly and happily payed $50 for Yet Another Zombie Game AKA Dying Light*, but when a developer comes out with something a little unique, in your mind, there is no possible way it could ever be worth $50, and the fact that the developer has the gall to ask $50 for it means that you'll never buy it at any price, because that would support the dev.

* as a Linux user, my opinion of Dying Light might not be as favourable as yours. Kind of a fun game ... when it worked. And Techland wasn't so great at speedy support for Linux.

I was just trying to agree with Manywhelps regarding the fact a game's price value is subjective. Yes, Dying Light isn't worth $50 to a lot of people, but it is to me. But Dying Light didn't also suddenly go from $30 to $50 while still in Early Access, now, did it? When I paid $50 for Dying Light, the game was out, it was finished. Sure, it got some paid DLC after release, but the main game itself is a self-contained product that's finished and released; for lack of a better term, we were always paying $50 for a 1.0 version of Dying Light, which never went through a price hike of $20, and Compulsion is trying to pull that move with an Early Access title. I don't think it's fair to compare both situations because of this.

Plus, like others have said before me, at $50 you're no longer competing with the indies, you're basically admitting you're taking a shot at the big boys, and whether or not the $50 price tag for We Happy Few ends up being fair to a lot of people, or not (hopefully, it will), the fact still stands that it's a value where people expect levels of production Compulsion Games simply can't provide, being a small studio (unless my prediction that We Happy Few is being picked up by one of the major studios comes true, and that turns out to be their "great announcement" on the 16th).

We can argue all day long about what's fair in terms of pricing when it comes to video games, especially when we're talking digital-only, and I guess we'll never reach any conclusion.

And, yes, Dying Light may have been "Yet Another Zombie Game" (which I don't think it is, but it definitely has zombies in it), but it could also be said that We Happy Few is Yet Another Survival Game In A Procedural Generated World, and there isn't any shortage of those, either.

As for the Linux part, I'll hold my peace on that. My opinion of the Linux community is far from being the best around. I guess the Linux community is, to me, what the GOG community must feel like, right now, to the Compulsion Games people.

I´ll be honest here. If a game developer asks a price of 50 bucks for a game, I expect at least the following features:

1. planetary landing
2. fully customizable character
3. full modding support, so that I can mod in some b00bs

For every point missing, I have to take 10 bucks off the price, sorry ;)

Problems with this argument:

* Dying Light might have been "yet another zombie game", but it was "yet another zombie game" that had already been finished and released, had countless rave reviews, had a robust fan following and came from an established developer (albeit one with a spotty track record).

* You dismiss Dying Light as "yet another zombie game", yet there are countless comments out there about We Happy Few about it being "yet another survival/stealth game". Personally, I find the premise of WHF intriguing, but it comes into a genre that is very saturated on PC right now.

* Don't dismiss the value of established gameplay conventions. Steam is full of "unique" stuff. Said "unique" stuff also tends to be very janky, buggy and incomplete because ambition ended up outgrowing capability.

* Nobody's said that it can never be worth $50. I've said that the developer has done a very poor job in convincing us that it is worth being situated in the high-end price segment. He says that all will be revealed on 16 August, which screams "contractual obligation" to me. It can't be due to a retail release because WHF isn't available for pre-order anyway, and besides, many console indie titles sell at a markup of $5-$10 at most over the digital price. Maybe they've taken on Microsoft as a publisher and one of their conditions was that the game be sold at $50? Who knows?

At the end of the day, gaming is a business, developers treat it as a business and gamers/customers should act accordingly. Feel free to support customer-friendly practices, by all means, but taken in isolation, "supporting independent devs" and "giving AAA the finger" are not adequate reasons for buying a $50 game.

Now I´m curious. I hope that´s not a new No Man´s Hype :) They priced it 60$, but I think the most customers buy it only with a huge discount.