Edit, *bah,, you can't edit titles.. curses!



I've been noticing in many of the 10 dollar games people are ripping them for being over priced. So much to the effect that they give them a 1 or two star rating, or even go as far as saying don’t even bother.. I remember 5-10 years ago, the bargain bin was basically 10 dollar games. And really was as cheap as you could find anything in a box in stores 99% of the time.

I always loved the 10 dollar bin was just great. Even games that ya considered kinda crappy, were bought cause, hey, its only 10 bucks. (cost of lunch, a movie, couple beers at happy hour, a couple gallons of gas, what ever, you were not getting much for it most of the time)

But a game, for 10 bucks, I always thought of that as a steal. You know your gonna have at least an evening of fun, and often many.. and if its a good game then 100's of hours over the coarse of the next 10 years is not uncommon. even the short games that last a couple hours, if ya go back again and again are worth that and more.

But recently i have noticed a huge portion of people act almost as if it is a crime to charge some money for a game. Almost how dare they make you pay for something? I notice it with the FTP games very often, the whole pay to win argument.. (Though in most cases i find that shelling out the typical cost of a game gets you more than enough to play with and have fun and “win”) But even the single player games, it is as if people ask for a few bucks, or add a DLC a month down the road, or even at launch, it is as if your trying to take someone’s first born. How dare they charge me XXXXX. Even though every gamer knows that a PC games price drops a lot down the road, and adding gold editions and such that include everything for just 20-30 bucks will be released if only you could wait a year or two.. (is that some how so wrong?)


Even indy games, that are charging 10-20 bucks, people rage. The nerve of charging 20 dollars on a game that only lasts 10 hours! Or doesn’t have life like graphics, or is a bit more shallow than a game that cost 100m to produce.

I say this cause I really wonder why is it, that 10 bucks is some how no longer a great deal.. Especially in an age that 10 bucks doesn’t buy half of what it did 5 years ago. But for some reason because they are just not giving them away at a dollar each, people must rage about it constantly.

So please, can someone enlighten me?

Since Steam implemented the stupid sales that ruined games' prices.

Yeah, paying less is so ruining. Are you kiddin me? If you want to pay more for games - send a check to developer right away. And the bad part of this is...?

I don't get this. Everyone always uses Ubisoft as the prime example of publishers setting outrageous prices... but are they really that overpriced? Prince of Persia and Beyond Good and Evil sell for $15 on the Xbox and PS3, and on Steam it's the same price. Everything else seems pretty reasonable. Raymans are $5.99 each, most others are scattered between 9.99 and 5.99 based on age.

The one exception is HoMM1 and 2, which definitely need to be less than ten dollars each. But aside from that, they're really no worse than any other publisher on GOG. So why are they the go to example over, say, Nordic, or Activision, or Strategy First. All three of those have plenty of questionable $10 games.

Why do you say so, though? I'm not being confrontational, I'm as earnestly confused about the subject as the OP, so I'm curious why $10 is too much for these games.

Looking at Ubisoft's catalog in particular, the only one that I think is not deserving of the higher of two options (leaving the actual dollar amount aside) is Driver: Parallel lines. All of the other $10 Ubi games are either AAA quality or provide hours and hours of content, or both.

It's great for the consumer, but it's pretty bad for developers, especially indie ones. When people refuse to pay more than a dollar for yours and four other games in a bundle, the perceived value of your game is basically in the toilet.

Read it, just a little example.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2583838 Worse of all, they're going to start trash talking you about how you're not helping them play the game correctly or supporting the game properly through updates and additional content.

And when you try to release a DLC that is more expensive than the main game (since they got the main game very cheap), you'll get even more trash talked.

Maybe it's because they are not worth more than one dollar?

GOOD indie games, like Terraria, Braid, SMB, sell well at regular price. Increased amounts of sales, increased amount of MONEY, but they bitch about they have more tech support tickets? (Invest some profit to tech support, bitches!) And what's the problem to set "troll / spam / abuse filter on tech support ? NONE.
You think EA has less problem with trolls on tech support?

The main problem is, many indie devs don't know how to make business. Maybe if they spent their profit to expand the company rather than buying a new car, they wouldn't have such problems.

LOL.

10$ is certainly not overpriced. But why buy something for 10$ when you can find it for 3$ a couple of months later?

Exactly.

There are too many games now - the market, for me, is saturated. I'm drowning in games that I have to play, so there's little to no reason for me to buy a new game, let alone a higher price. My abundance of games has caused me, apart from a few notable releases, to wait until games reach a point where I feel that it's a non-consequential cost to purchase them.

Now, I'm not one of the ones complaining on the forums about game prices, but do I think that $10 is overpriced for a 15 year old game? Probably. You can't expect people to pay too much for a game that has already been on the market for over ten years because it's a reasonable expectation for games to go down in price over time.

Your expectations and patience level inflate or deflate the price in your eyes. Simple really: if you can't wait to play the game, you'll have no problems paying the price. If the game is good, but you aren't exactly killing yourself for not playing it, you'll pass until a sale or similar. If the game doesn't strike your fancy even after heavily discounted, then it's overpriced no matter what. If you're vocally complaining that a game is overpriced, that's your opinion and it's fine. But everyone should understand that there are other factors behind this, not just because other outlets are doing their best to be your competition.

wait... have we really gotten to the point where we're criticising Steam for its LOW PRICES??

I mean, I can see what you're saying... but come on.

The point is, people buying for close-to-zero prices should not expect ANY technical support whatsoever.

And, actually, the support phase of a software product's lifetime is the most costly phase. Development of the said product is actually a lot cheaper than providing support for the product after it is released.
I'm only looking from one side, the devs' side. Ungrateful bastards will always be ungrateful, and they will always want to buy a product for less, no matter what happens to the company.

I understand that most people don't care about supporting developers, but games and developers shouldn't be turned off just because a similar game was 50% cheaper or something similar.