that's a very... technical way of quantifyring value of a game. may I ask - what is A-grade gameplay? and it is only something AAA games have?

Yes, that's true, a game that was harder to make should cost more.What I tried to say is that maybe indie games generally don't cost $5 because the price is not only decided by the content and quality of a game, but also by the time and effort spent by the developers. And I guess that indie developers have a harder time because of their limited budget. But that's only what I imgaine, I'm not and indie developer nor I know one, so I could be completely wrong.

The thing is, I would expect indies to be less marketing-oriented and less worried about pricing theory and simply put a fair price to their games. And, why not?, just do not participate on sales.

I guess I could be wrong about the 2D vs. 3D thing, but, in general, indies just do not cost that much to produce and tend to be lacking on their offer (technical problems, rushed narrative, etc.). Look at the Kickstarter goals, for example, even if those goals where just half of the real cost, the typical indie rarely cost more than a very few $100k. I'm sure that those numbers are still financially terrifying for the average indie developer, but those budgets are objectively very small budget. That gives them the opportunity to avoid the typical marketing vs. consumer dynamics of the bigger games, they could offer a reasonable price from the start and we all could enjoy the interesting games they offer from the start without having to feel like a fool after finishing the game.

They could try, and I would congratulate them for it, but I very much doubt it'd work. Now, I haven't seen any study on this, but I'm fairly certain that a given game with a base price of $20 and a 75% reduction would sell better than the same game with a $10 base price and 50% reduction.

There's a certain amount of subjectivity as these terms have no official go-to definitions, but an AAA game and an indie game generally have a wide enough margin of difference between who develops them, the budget they have, the scope of the game, and the popularity of the end results and profitability. I refer to AAA game in the traditional sense of a big budget game published by one of the industry giants. I use the term "grade B/C" loosely in a manner similar to what people mean when they refer to "B movies" when they speak of movies. A "B game" if you will. Now a B movie or a B game can be a fantastic game that is very fun and has a lot of entertainment value to it, and a big budget movie/game can totally flop too.

What I'm saying, is that if there are games that if a game is an AAA game or I personally perceive a game to be such using my own definition, or I consider a game to be a "classic" (proper dictionary definition of classic referring to quality not age or other factors", and I can buy any of these games from my wishlist for $5, then I'm going to be much much higher than likely to spend the money on them than on a lesser title which I personally perceive to be of lower quality, lower gameplay value in terms of hours to complete or other factors of my own choosing/definition, and that in many cases big name AAA titles tend to have more hours of gaming value to me as a player than small indie titles do. These are generalizations and there would obviously be exceptions that someone could point out from their own perception of value of a given game or number of games. But when I am going to consider spending my own money on games for me, it is my own perception of these things that matters rather than on concensus with other people of what "AAA" means or what "big name" means, or "gaming value" or "hours of entertainment" or any other metric. I wont spend $20 on a game that has 5 hours of gaming in it with no replay value even if it makes me orgasm twice. :) That $20 would probably be spent on 5 games that I personally perceive to be AAA must-haves for myself based on my own criterion, each of which has probably 40-100 hours of gameplay. That is a better value to me personally.

Other people have different tastes in games, different expectations, and are likely to attribute value in ways that differ from me and will naturally choose differently than I as a result. One's own perceptions of value for $ whatever it may be is ultimately far more important to that individual than what anyone else's are of course.

I enjoy a wide variety of genres of games, both AAA and indie and in between, but the games that I've enjoyed the most and spent the greatest amount of time in as a result, tend to be AAA games from big name publishing houses more often than not. One notable exception is Torchlight and Torchlight 2, but while Runic is an indie developer they're more of a "big" one in my eyes as being the former main developers of the Diablo franchise - which makes them a bit of a middle-ground exception of sorts. :)

why? is that not just a bit silly? If an indie developer wants to live by making games, should they also not also have an understanding of the market they are in?

Sure, and then take the few $100k figure you quoted. Lets be nice and say 300k? this means that to go exactly on the line, they need to sell 30.000 copies of the game at $10.... at 30.000 units sold they are not making any profits yet, just recouped the cost. Not many games manage to get 30.000 units sold.

Also consider that it is most units sold is in the tail end, while a lot of the profit is in the day 1 sales (something like a 1/3 or 1/4 of total income). reducing the day 1 sales reduces the total income (the tail end sales will be the same), not to mention that it is in the Day 1 sales that the income is most crucial. It is at this stage the developer will have the least amount of monies and need the instant injection of cash to (most likely) repay debtors. If they do not get enough amount of cash fast enough from day 1 sales, it then tends to not matter as the new license holders will be any debtors who have collected the IP as collateral. The only way to avoid it is by be totally self-funded (having a day job) or releasing a game which do not cost anything to make. Reducing the day 1 income does make such a scenario more likely, and it is just one of the reasons why developers also must be a bit business savvy (if they want to stay in the business...)

Hmmm, games are to expensive you say?

Let us make some assumptions:
One person works for one year at a game with eight hours a day. And because he is not living by air and love alone, let us assume he wants to get 10 Dollars/Euros/whatever per hour.
That would be:
[8 * 365 * 10]$ = 29200$
That is just without profit, taxes, etc.

The finished game costs 20$. To only pay him for his work, he has to sell the game 29200 / 20 = 1460 times.

The only real numbers of sold games I can remember are for Race the Sun. According to their postmortem they sold 771 pieces. And the game costs only 10$. And that are two developers.

I guess that there are still mistakes in my calculations but would you still say that Indiegames are too expensive?

This kind of argument is often made, but it can never hold up - the cost of a product has nothing to do with the value to the customer

and the competition is not only between games, they also compete with all other forms of entertainment for money and the customers time. Anyone making a game in the hope of a good profit should probably see a psychiatrist first!

Many make games for profit, few don't.

that's all fair enough, and not everyone do like indie games (though it is difficult to say what an indie game actually is...)

but I am still curious though. Does the same apply to other cultural/leisure products, or only games?

The word you were looking for was not "silly", but "naive" because the world is very business-oriented and whoever does not play game is passed over by the rest and blahblahblah. But I think indies are a good place to start asking for higher standards. Obviously, they have to understand the market and make an assessment of viability of the projects they embark in, but at the time they release the game and start dealing with their potential audience maybe they could tone down the marketing and try to be as honest as possible. After all, we live in a period in which people would finance a whole game only on its concept and author alone, maybe "the market" is ready to back up those developers who show disregard for maximizing sales.

Besides, according to marketing logic, wouldn't an initial low price result in more initial sales, anyway?

(In all fairness, let me start by saying that I am myself an aspirant indie developer, so my perspective here is somewhat biased. Nevertheless, I'm attempting to speak as a potential consumer of such games, albeit one with knowledge of what goes into game development.)

As others have said, I think that it's easy to overlook the amount of time--remember that one year is a short development time--effort, and, in some cases, at least, creativity and passion that can go into game development, even of a short, slightly unpolished game.

However, I feel that what one considers a work--especially with regards to artistic works--is a matter of individual assessment. For myself, I believe that there have been indie games that, whether short or not, have shown enough of interest to me that I'd consider twenty dollars to be a good--even cheap--price, while others I might prefer at sale prices, or leave entirely.

Finally, given that AAA titles can cost as much as sixty dollars, it seems to me that twenty dollars is in fact pretty modest.

I think it is more of a matter of an individual deciding what they are willing to spend on a given game or other piece of entertainment to receive a certain amount of perceived value from the exchange of money for goods, and whether a given product meets the individual's own personal criterion or not. That isn't exclusive to indie games, it applies to anything in life that isn't a necessity to sustain survival really. :)

Putting the indie game example aside for a second, lets say that a big huge publisher spends $500 million developing a new amazing AAA game, and that game turns out to be a huge smash hit. Let's also say that it gets a 99 rating on metacritic and people just can't get enough of the game and think it is awesome as hell. Let's also say that that game is $60 at launch and stays in the top 10 most played games on Steam week after week for 2 years and the game price never drops below $30 for 2 years.

I go watch the trailers for that game and think "wow, that looks amazing, I'd love to play that". I bookmark it, or add it to my wishlist or whatever, and then I go to http://www.isthereanydeal.com and set a waitlist target price notification on the game for whatever I have decided is the maximum price I am willing to spend on it for how bad I decide that I absolutely have to play the game. Obviously the more badly I want to play the game sooner rather than later, I am going to have to value the game in dollars higher than if I can and am willing to wait for a lot longer to play the game.

What is the game worth? There is no fixed value. It's whatever any particular person is willing to spend on it for their own unique criteria in deciding on whether or not to buy it really. Every person decides their own price, either equal to what someone is offering it for right now and they buy it, or lower and they wait for it to hit their price target.

For me, that $40-60 game might be The Witcher 3 and I might decide I'm happy as hell to pay the $47 preorder, or even the full $50+ for it for reasons of my own at the time. Or, it might be some other game I'm excited about and want to play eventually but have no internal drive to get it immediately. Personally, my default price limit for games right now is $3. In order for me to pay more than that for a single game it has to be one that I really want badly and actually plan on installing it and playing it once the credit card payment completes and it is available for download, or perhaps even play it sometime in the next few days. If I don't want the game bad enough to play it immediately like that, then I probably wont pay more than $3 for it because I own several hundred games I've bought that I have never installed yet. My logic is why pay more for a game now that I might not play for 1-5 years if I can just wishlist it and buy it 1-5 years from now for $2 or so?

Occasionally a game will come up that I feel more strongly about or have some kind of emotional connection with, such as The Witcher 3 and wanting to support CD Projekt RED more strongly and directly. I don't usually feel such emotional connections to games, game developers or publishers though so a game like that is a rare exception for me.

So if a game hits the price point that causes me to spring for it, when I probably don't even need the game and probably wont play it for ages to come, I might buy it. If it doesn't, I might not buy it right away or at all even until it does hit my price, and of course I'm under no obligation to ever buy any game ever so the price I set for buying a game is a combination of what I think a game is worth, how badly and how soon I need to own it, with very few games being emotional immediate "must haves".

That doesn't mean that that same $20/30/40/50 game isn't worth the price a developer is asking for it though. It just means that I'm under no obligation to ever even buy the game, and that if I decide I want to buy it sometime, I am free to choose either the price I'll pay maximum and wait it out, or the timeframe in which I'm willing to wait and find the best price available to get it in that timeframe.

So a game is ultimately worth whatever one single individual is willing to actually spend on it at a given point in time, without any obligation to ever buy it. Developers have no more entitlement to receiving a particular price or higher for their game than a consumer has any entitlement to get a game at or below a certain price. It's just an open market and when the two sides of the deal can meet on a price in the middle somewhere that meets both of their criteria, a purchase might occur. :)