I think what he wants to say with duration is that SOME (not all) indie games really are way to short.
I mean really now for an example i can give the game "Thirty Flights of Loving" which is sold on steam for 5 dollars.

Now dont fall from your chairs when u hear the game duration (without any replay value) is roughly 5-6 minutes.

I bet everyone will put that duration of the game in their mind when deciding to buy that game or not. So you can see that in some extreme cases the duration of the game can be a huge deciding factor.

Part of the problem I see with some of your answers is that you believe that indie studios will have a hard time if they do not maximize profit. That is not necessarily true and, therefore, the ethics I ask for can be perfectly grounded in practical reality.

My point of view is that, with indies, the opportunity exists for taking away most marketing vs. consumer dynamics between developers and their audience. I think that a developer that respects its audience is a developer that should leave marketing considerations away when treating them and pricing strategies to maximize profit is one of these considerations. The proof I use is Kickstarter: people keep giving money out of love for video games to people they perceive love and respect video games at least as much as they do. Therefore, gamers are willing to support those developers who respect what they do and treat their audience as audience, not consumers. And, therefore, I believe many indies could do away with the marketing safe-net they are trained to believe they need and still be perfectly sustainable.
Then they should be more modest about it, which is the title of this topic, ;)

Krillebit Studio consist of 11 people(I think). The game has been in production since 2011 (2010?). Consider that those 11 people needs to be paid (we only talk people here, not rent of offices, software / hardware costs, promotional costs etc.) and assume what? $20.000 per year for each? (considering it is in Norway, that is barely being able to survive....). This means that the cost for these people to survive during production is: 11*4*20.000 = $880000

selling a game for $ 10, means that after store cut they get $7 (ignoring taxes). Which means they need to sell ~125.700 units just to survive, and then not even able to pay production costs.

Right, my point is pretty much that I think a game is worth whatever a company charges for it and the market will pay which sustains an accepted level of profit for the studio that produced it. The market sets the value of things, not me or any one other person's thought of what we individually value the game at and are willing to pay. So when I put a dollar value on a game as a price that I am personally willing to pay, it's important to note that I am absolutely not in any way saying that I think the price I am willing to pay should be the absolute maximum price that the company should be charging the world for the game. Not at all! They should charge $10/20/50/whatever for their game to the world, not what skeletonbow is willing to pay. If they do happen to price it ether regular price or on sale somewhere in a manner where what they're willing to sell it for at that moment happens to overlap with what I'm willing to pay for it then I might buy it also and we're both happy. But my personal thoughts about how much I would be willing to spend is not a reflection of what any game's market value is or should be of course. I don't think game developers should sell their game at a price which is not profitable to them, but rather at a price that maximizes their profit, wherever that particular point is on the bell curve at any given point in time, and adjust it as the point moves around. Sales of course are used to stimulate interest and get the flow of money moving again as well, and that helps them to be able to maintain a higher overall regular price.

Don't forget that they achieved free financing over $500,000 between Kickstarter and Norway public funding. Not sure if they have to give the public funding back, but I'm sure they would not have to return it if they do not break even.

In any case, at some point of the discussion we should also accept that, if you need three years to make a three hours game and the game is unable to convey the narrative theme properly until it hits you all of a sudden at the very end, they a have an important problem of talent in that studio. Either they screw up and had to rebuild the game at some point or they were working two jobs at the same time, but neither case justify the overprice.

and that is where you need to make a decision - do I want to pay the initial asking price for this game? if the answer is no, then you need to wait until it goes on sale.

if they did not have enough talent to create a good game, the initial period will be shorter and the developers will not get back the cost of the game. However, if the game is well made, the initial period will be longer and the developers can recoup the costs. But this is how the market regulates itself - if it is overpriced it will not sell. However, if it sells for the asking price for a good initial period, then the price was right.

Not accepting this is more of an rant of "I do not want to wait, and I want the games cheap!"

and the market will set the fair price for the product, not you. If it sells at initial price, then the market had decided that this is its worth for now. If it do not, it will be going for a reduced at a price point the market deems it is worth (case in point here, I think, is Ethan Meteor Hunter).

This is fair, as the price and value of the game is governed by the market (i.e. the buying masses), not by whether you think the game's worth is. For you then, is again just the matter of do I want it at this price, or do I wait a bit more. This is actually a very democratic process.

I look at price in relation to the number of hours I get from a game (not to be understood as the number of hours it takes to complete it, as if I uninstall it after two hours it doesn't matter if I could have played a 100 hours).

Mount & Blade Warband I played for 400 hours or so. I think I paid $50 or so for it, but it was obviously well worth it to me.

That's a good point you make here also on the number of hours front which I don't think has been mentioned above. Total hours of entertainment isn't necessarily just "time to complete", but also takes into account things like replay value, multiplayer, bonus goodies and extras, community created content and mods and other factors. And as you say it could work the other way around where a game has 100 hours to offer but a particular player may only find 5 hours of interest out of it or something. It's hard to measure all of these things ahead of time mind you, and it will vary greatly from game to game as well.

While my own perception of "game play hours" I might get from a game is usually a valuable part of my own decision to buy a game, it is not the only factor that is important to me, and a game that is low on the number of perceived hours but is high in some other area that I perceive as exciting/entertaining in some way, then the total hours a game offers might weigh a lot less in my purchasing decision too.

Evaluating games is a personal thing which includes a number of variables ultimately, and doesn't come down to a single factor like total game hours necessarily. A very good point to make indeed! :)

I looked over my game list and while I do value perceived hours of entertainment higher up on my decision making list, I notice quite a handful of titles that I have purchased for other reasons that don't particularly have a lot of man-hours of play or replay to them. I dig point-n-click adventure games for example, but most of them tend to have anywhere from 4 to 12 hours or so of gameplay, most have little replay value, and probably none of them have multi-player capabilities, and modding and other things don't make sense with them. They're essentially "choose your own adventure" type stories, some of which have a defined path, others have different endings depending on the choices you make. I play these games I suppose more for the story, puzzle solving challenges, and artistry than hours of gameplay. In fact, I don't really even consider game play hours much at all with these type of games, it's all about the other factors.

Look at the Blackwell games for example - they're all super short, but they're a fun little point-n-click series nonetheless. Then there are games like the Tex Murphy titles which are a fair bit longer, but most of which have a variety of different endings depending on the choices you make during play.

I think the thing to take from this is that there probably isn't any one golden rule or set of rules that can be codified without exceptions, but rather that it is "a process" that one goes through to decide these things, some of it being purely practical and/or logical, while there is also an emotional aspect to the decision making process as well, and some pure gut instinct to boot. :)

There are people actually buying those short games for 20$?
I thought it's just an imaginary price used to let special sales stand out more as real bargains.

(To start with, my apologies for the length of this post--a fair bit was said while I was away from the forum, it seems! ^^; )

And that's fair enough--I'm not at all inclined to say that you shouldn't feel so, nor that you should be willing to pay twenty dollars--or fifteen, or ten, or whatever--for a given game, of any given length. I'm simply arguing against the suggestion that everyone should value games in the same way, that no-one--consumer or developer--should be allowed to feel that a game is worth twenty dollars.

If I feel that a three-hour game is worth twenty dollars to me--perhaps it has some gameplay element that I find fascinating; or an intriguing setting that I want to explore; or an excellent, moving story--am I wrong to feel so?

That's fair enough, and there is a way to make that work, I believe: change the model of payment between you and the developers. Specifically, instead of the current capitalist model in which you pay once for a single game, switch to a model like patronage, in which you pay the developers over time, they work on their games, and you get to play whatever final products they produce (and perhaps have your name in the credits, too). In order to make this viable (I'm presuming that you're not filthy rich :P), you might want to attract a large group of patrons for a given studio.

Crowdfunding is similar to this--and indeed, some crowdfunding projects to provide their games to backers of a certain tier or above.

Of course, there are others who seem to be happy to stick with the purchasing model, so a hybrid system might be a good idea, in which a developer has a steady income from patrons (who get all games from that developer), and sells their games, perhaps at a reduced price, to non-patrons.

Ah, no, I should apologise, I feel: that was, as I recall, not directed at you specifically, but at others who have, I think, stated that duration is indeed the most important determinant of acceptable price to them. I should perhaps have searched through the thread for a relevant post to quote, but didn't, for which I again apologise. ^^;

What makes you say that? Specifically, why do you think they the developers don't believe twenty dollars to be a reasonable price? For the sake of clarity, I'm asking this honestly, not simply for rhetorical effect: I have some idea of why you feel twenty dollars to be too much, but I don't know why you think that they feel the same.

It could simply be that they weigh various issues and advantages differently to you. From what I've gathered, and speaking as a consumer, I feel differently to you: the sorts of issues that you've raised have seemed relatively minor to me.

In all fairness--again, as a potential consumer--I'll probably not buy either Lifeless Planet or Among the Sleep, but my reasons are different to yours (it's mainly a matter of taste in gameplay), and the issues that you've raised have generally seemed fairly minor to me.

In fact, I'm somewhat tempted to get Lifeless Planet; I was so before knowing its length, I think, and reports of it being short don't seem to have changed that. This seems to be the point that you're missing in my arguments: based on your posts, you seem to feel that the problems that you cite are inherently or universally important--that is, that those issues are important to everyone, or should be.

Since others have expressed disagreement with that, are you telling us what we should consider important? Because that's the implication--otherwise, if someone else feels that those issues aren't important, and that Lifeless Planet offers enough value in whatever fashion they consider important to be worth twenty dollars to them, why should the developers not be allowed to ask that much of them?

I don't see how you can leave market consideration aside IF you want to know how others value anything you have created.

This applies as much to selling a videogame as it does to something where your creation is subtler, like finding a romantic partner where you are marketing your character and/or physique.

However, why don't we take it closer to your experiences. What do you produce professionally? I want to argue that whatever it is you should be honest about its value and provide it cheaper - ergo be paid less for it. :)

That's actually quite an interesting point and it reveals yet another motivation for high release prices on some games. Lots of Kickstarter projects sell themselves as a pre-order system, saying if you pay for the game early they'll put your money in to make the game better at release time. The developers will have done their sums and decided that, say, $20 per backer is the best price point for their campaign.

If you pre-order a game at $20 and then find it's $5 on release day, you're going to be a bit miffed. So Kickstarted games owe it to their backers to charge the backer price *at least* on release day.

Kickstarte != preorder.