Come on. He never said that hours vs. price was governed by some linear formula.

no, he just said that "a 2 hour game had better cost me less than $10 at launch", so I was just extrapolating - It is always fun. which is also why it is phrased as a question. It is to highlight what I think is silly about putting a price tag on game time.

I think a game should be priced pretty much however the developers want to price it for the most part because I believe that the free market system works fairly well overall and that prices adjust to fit supply and demand over time, so if a game is priced in such a way that it doesn't actually generate cashflow because the market considers it too highly priced, it will either stop selling, or the publisher will have to lower the price to stimulate the market for their game again. So even if I look at a game and think to myself "that price is too high for that game", that isn't necessarily true in the market as a whole. What I'd really be meaning if I were to say that is "that price is too high for me to consider buying that game personally", but hoards of other people might disagree and be buying it off the shelves like nobody's business and justifying the price on a large scale. The particular game might be 3 hours of gameplay or 300 hours, and that may affect some people's decisions on the pricing and not others, depending on what each person is looking for in the particular game. Some people might be looking more for lengthy game play, others might be looking for a strong storyline and compelling characters or other aspects and the length of play isn't as important to them.

For example, the game Dear Esther is rather short - about 60-90 minutes, and it isn't really a game per se so much as it is a visual narrative story and artistic expression medium. I went through it in about 90 minutes start to finish and thought the artwork was very beautiful, and the atmosphere of the island was a nice setting. I can see how certain people could really enjoy that type of entertainment experience, especially people who have a high artistic flair or artistic appreciation for both literary and graphic art and story telling and I respect it for that. At the same time, that's not really my type of game/experience personally. I'm much more of a Postal 2 type person and would have enjoyed meeting people on the island in Dear Esther and setting them on fire and putting them out by peeing on them. Sadly, they didn't incorporate such features into the game. ;oP

So the price really is about how one perceives their entire experience will be I believe, and that's really something unique to the individual and what they hope to get from a given game. If a game delivers that to the right audience, it could be 3 hours long or 300 hours long and justify any particular price if enough people are willing to pay it in the end.

Even though I generally don't spend much per-game on my games, I think publishers should charge as much as they feel they can get for their games and profit from their hard work according to what the market overall will pay. All the power to them.

Yes, but if I'm going to be spending more money per hour than for a movie, I might as well just go out to the movies.

Time is certainly not the only factor, but when I'm being asked to shell out more than what I would pay for a comparable amount of time spent watching movies that requires some justification.

FO:NV and the AC games, as an example, are a substantially less expensive way of spending time than going to the movies, but they also have other game play elements that are of interest.

Personally, I'd much rather play a shorter game that costs less these days, just because I have other things that I want to be doing.

If a 4 hour game is really $20 then fuck that game. That is paying $5 for a bottle of American tap water. But with the way things are today in the world of gaming, most $20 games are not really $20 but $5 or less every time there are 75% off sales or bundles... And I don't think, $5 or less for a 4 hour game is too much to ask considering the level of inflation today. $5 or less today is peanuts. You can't even buy a fast food meal today with $5 or less.

I like to buy games that have a certain degree of quality to them, but also a decent amount of content that can be unlocked or is immediately accessible.

The majority of the indie games I have played, are very focused on a particular gameplay element or they try to fit within a particular niche. Therefore they tend to lack the essential variety which keeps me interested.

I find that any indie priced above $15 is a tough sell. At the same time, I wouldn't pay more than $30 for any video game, triple A or not.

And that is the whole point. While you may not think that Dear Esther is worth the asking price at day 1, there are plenty others who did (I'm one of them :)). Those who do then pay what they think it is worth, those who do not wait for a sale. However, if we go by the OP's suggestion, The Chinese Room will make less monies, as he want to aim the initial price point towards the latter group and not take advantage of the former.

Length is a factor if a game has absolutely no replay value. I'd pay 20 bucks for any of the Telltale adventures. They're about 10 hours long and offer absolutely no replay value. But 20 bucks for a three hour game? No... I don't think so.

Yes, you're right, indie devs put a lot of time in their work. I wouldn't call myself an indie dev, but I bought RPG Maker VX Ace some months ago and haven't done a lot more than a few maps. I always get stuck with drawing new characters, portraits and tilesets. Since I'm not planning to sell the potential result, I could use the stock chars and tiles. But I'm trying to make a film noir adventure game, so... Let's just say the colorful fantasy tilesets aren't exactly compatible. Again, I wouldn't call myself an indie dev... I just do this as a hobby. But I have a slight idea on how much time it takes to accomplish something. And with RPG Maker I don't even have to do any programing. Events can get complicated enough, because I have lots of switches for lots of choices, but it's all logic and not programing.

Let's say I would finish the game some day in the distant future. And let's say I decide to sell it. What price should I ask? I think it'll be just two and a half or three hours long. My event chart (I planned out choices and consequences in yEd) is a HUGE branching tree, but almost all branches are dead ends. They have local consequences (for example: map turning a bit more colorful because you made this a "happier place"). They don't affect the rest of the game. It all boils down to three possible endings with minor differences. And every ending is just about three minutes long. Which ending you'll see, is decided during the game. Every evidence/clue/witness statement is triggering a switch. Some switches trigger a counter. The counter decides what "main-ending" you'll see. Other switches enable or disable an additional scene or line of dialogue during the ending. But the endings will be very similar, so there's not a lot of replay value. Can I ask 20 bucks for this? Hell, no!

Yes, it'll probably take me two years to finish this. But that's not the fault of my imaginary customers. It's not their fault that I'm a one man "indie studio" and that everything takes a lot of time. The value isn't created by the time I put into the game. The value is created by the finished product. If it is a short game with almost no replay value, I have to adapt the price. I can't make a good return with a price of 7 or 8 bucks? Again, not the fault of my customers. It's my problem that I'm not a great artist who does a whole bunch of character portraits on one day. I can't raise the price just because I'm not so good at what I'm doing ;) I'm not entitled to make a good living with my game. If the asking price can't return me enough for a living, I have to work more profitable or find something I'm good at. Or do this video game thing as a hobby. That's our economy.

People go insane without entertainment as well. Why do you think it is such important factor that entertainment be mandatory?
As for death, that's one thing I can absolutely promise will happen to all of us, regardless of how rich or poor you are. Mandatory indeed, though I wouldn't be sure if anyone is mandating it...

You see, and this is thread sniping based on other stuff you posted - but I'm lazy and opportunistic ;) - the thing about a world view where the victim or the downtrodden is worth more than the oppressor and privileged, is that it is as discriminatory as the opposite flavor of arrogance. This applies to Indie versus AAA, as it does to minorities vs manjorities, as it does to children vs adults. - economy and politics intersect, as you very well know.

So do morals intersect. We are all equal value, which is somewhere between zero and infinite depending on your philosophical bent. Such equality is precisely why we must discriminate each other based on actions and factual empirical observation - which is the only thing that should allow to categorize someone as victim or oppressor - their observed actions. To do which, while being humans and obviously fallible, we all often take shortcuts and risk being wrong in judgement - why do you "mandate" this to be evil?

Anyway, this is an invitation for reflection - do enjoy your life milestone this afternoon - and relax it's only one moment in time, like tears in the rain. ;)
You want to "naively" or was it "sillily" believe that convenience - or to put in my words: survival and practical considerations - is divorced from ethics and moral behavior considerations.

I could say politics is precisely the art of balancing these two factors between their individual and social dynamics. Individually what is practical is subjectively more important (like for you paying less for indie games immediatey when they are published) whereas ethically one subordinates his will to the will of others (they set the price and don't force you to pay for it).

You may disagree with capitalist ethics - they are still ethics.

Ethics that aren't grounded in practical reality tend to gravitate toward theology and dogma.

My views concerning ethics is that you should always try to predict the consequences of your ethics and if you don't like them, then change your ethics.

Whether the end justifies the means is a matter of some debate (I think it does as the meaning that people tend to attribute to the saying could more accurately be worded as whether the ends justifies side-effects which are essentially other ends and hence could ultimately be worded as: Does the ends justify other ends?), but the means never justify the means. That's just circular logic.

In this case, the consequences are sound: Indie developers make more money on release from those willing to fork it, increasing the range of Indie projects that are viable (if they can sell copies at a higher price range around release time, they need to sell fewer copies to be in the green), and those with a more modest budget (or who are on the fence) get the game in their price range later.

But they OBJECTIVELY don't put that much time and money. Indie developers work a lot, I'm sure of that, but they are typically 100 times smaller in number of professionals and in the budgets they manage.

Lifeless Planet was made mostly by a single guy and it had a Kickstarter project of ~$8,000 (obviously, it cost more in total, but probably no more than, say, $50,000). The result? A very good game with an important lack of unpolish, very basic animations, relatively basic graphics, incoherent level transitions, a few poor gameplay choices. I loved it, but the low budget was showing all over.

Yes, but you have to become a sales-hunter. I don't want to be treated as a consumer, I want to be treated as audience of a cultural medium. I don't want to fight with them for my wallet because I would be happy to pay a fair price for a game that is worth it. Instead of going through marketing analyses to build a pricing strategy to maximize profit, it would be more ethical of them to be fair from the start and maybe lower the price much, much later on (years later) as the game loses relevance naturally.

I'm sorry if I expressed myself wrong, I never wanted to put the focus only on the length.

When I say that they should be modest with the prices it is because I do not believe that they believe those prices to be fair, but that they followed the typical unethical pricing strategy of squeezeing all the money you can from early adopters thanks to the initial public exposition and interest and sweep everyone else through sales later on.

Lifeless Planet: Clearly unpolished game made by a single guy on a Kickstarter budget of ~$8,000 (obviously the total cost was more, but surely still very modest).
Among the Sleep: 2-3 hour game that conveys very poorly the symbolism it is trying to convey.
Little Inferno: A game with a single game mechanic.

I don't see how these developers can believe that $20 is a fair price for their games even taking into account all the subjectivity that may go into that number.

I genuinely believe that even games with modest production budgets have trouble recouping their costs, when you factor in a living hourly wage for the developers.

Anyway, nobody owes you their game for $5 - they can charge what they want and see if you will pay it. Obviously there are people who think it's worth $20 to have a game in its release month and they're welcome to it IMO.
On the other hand, there are also people who think it's worth having uPlay on their computers in order to play Ubisoft's latest games, and those people are obviously wrong, so perhaps that's not a strong argument...

I've seen some numbers in this thread but I would like to go deeper...

Let's take a 10$ game on GOG from the viewpoint of an European independant worker in the sense of the law (meaning a "one-man business")

=> 10$ equals 7.5€ for the moment

=> GOG takes a share of 30% so that leaves 5,25€

=> I don't know the nature of the contract between developers and GOG but let's take the worst scenario and says the developer has to pay the VAT (that's 21% for this type of product in Belgium), now we only get 4,1475€

=> I won't count the global costs of being indie (like paying 600€ every quarters for the first 3 years) and let's go the directly to the annual income tax which is 25% if you've earn under 8.350€ this year so in the scale of one game, the dev earns only 3,11€ on it...Ugh..... :(

My business maths aren't necessarly correct but you get the picture for an Western European indie (and the living costs that implies). I'm not surprised when I see that Nerdook can release Vertical Drop Heroes HD (cool game by the way) at 5$ at launch because he lives in Malaysia and can afford that price.

So yeah, sometimes indies seems overpriced (Redshirt at launch for example) but you can understand the reasons behind it even if you don't agree with the price point.