I tend to base it on the cost of where the game is available elsewhere as well and how well it's aged. Thief, Deus Ex & Hitman 2 being released at $9.99 were all disappointments for me. GoG also has to remember that the more popular a game was the more likely the majority of us are to have it. I won't pay $9.99 to buy any of the games on GOG that I already own.


Ok GOG has the whole compatibility benefit etc but usually there are third party no-cd cracks that can leave me with a copy I can save and duplicate anywhere & GOG using DOSBOX for a lot of older games is something I can easily do myself. They also take the easy route a bit where they've released inferior DOS versions just so they don't have to struggle to get the windows code working. (Dungeon Keeper is a prime example of this.)

The normal prices might be similar, but steam and other distributors have much better sales and offers. I picked up Deus Ex just the other day from gamersgate for $2.50 worth of blue coins that I'd gotten for free :)

I don't necessarily see this different from e.g. how call and data transfer costs have dropped. I remember the times when even local landline calls here were so costly that my parents used to call only very late, because night calls were more affordable. Not to mention what calling abroad used to cost.

Neither do I forget the anger of my parents when they got a HUUUGE phone bill because I had been online with my computer using "broadband" ISDN.

Nowadays everything is so much cheaper, you can call abroad for a wooden nickel with something like VoipDiscount or Skype (or for "free" if the other party is using the same client and not a phone), you can get a mobile unlimited highspeed net connection for 10€/month etc.

That means this call/data transfer market is much less profitable to ISPs and phone operators which had local monopoly before in many countries (just like big publishers had the "monopoly" to get their games to stores all over the world), but should I really care?

What should be most telling (and possibly reason for concern) is do people use less/same/more money on their games nowadays, irrespective to how many games they get for that money? If they use about the same, then they are just dispersing the same money to more companies than before. Whether that is good or bad depends which company you are asking.

Well if you read the next paragraph : ... His final stance, at the end of the post, is more : If you want to game cheap then buy it on Steam but if you want to really support me then buy it for twice the price on my own website.

It's a way too big over simplification to say : "cheap games sell more so in the end you make more money." it's only true if the extra sales manage to really compensate the price drop also "selling more" is a relative thing. If peoples weren't expecting your game to cost only 10$ or less and refuses to buy it for 20$, then you would maybe you would have been able to sell a lot more 20$ copies and in the end make more money.

Also like he mention it depends of the type of game: niche games remain niche games even when sold cheap, they are not going to sell as well as the 10 billionth other Bejeweled and tower defense clone available on the indy market.

Personally I see one problem with some digital markets, like Android Market. It would seem to me that when people look for a new little game or app to buy for 99 cents, they primarily look at the most popular games, because the market tends to show those on top.

So, as soon as some game takes one of the top positions in sales chart, more and more people flock to it just because others have done so before. That is probably one of the reasons why e.g. Angry Birds have stayed so high in download charts for many months, until pretty much every Android/IOS gamer has downloaded it..

Steam and GOG don't appear to present games quite the same way, but even promote many times some less known games. I think that is quite a good approach. I guess Android market has also "Editor's choices" etc., but it isn't quite the same as finding out about an unknown game because it is promoted in discount.

Of course, but they mostly do.

Valve once published their statement, where they said dropping the price -75% mostly guarantees 10 times more sales. for bigger hits, even 30 times. It's win-win most of the times.

And gaming industry is making more money than ever. World-wide supply of games in one of the factors that made this possible.

By the way, the view "if you want to support me, buy it for 20 bucks instead of 10 on steam" is rather shallow.

Who supports SpiderWeb more: hundred people who bought the game on their site, or thousand people who bought it on steam? From which sales company received more money? The money from their site goes to them directly, that's the only difference.

It's the money from steam sales that gives such companies opportunity to grow. (most of the time)

Profit from individual copy is not important in the end. 20 bucks is 20 bucks, no matter if it comes from one sale on spiderweb store and two sales on steam store. But in reality it looks rather like this: 1 sold copy on individual store vs. 1 000 copies sold on steam store.

"Mostly" is the key word, if you are selling a popular enough game then maybe it could "guarantee" a 10/30 times increase in sale, but depending of the game genre, market state, time of the year, etc... the difference might be much smaller. And like I mentioned the reason for this number of sales increase might also simply come from the fact that peoples didn't buy your game for it's "real" price because of all the other cheaper games, it also don't means that the increased sales will result in you actually making profit.

Once again you are basing all this on the premise that lowering price always guarantee a significant enough increase in sales if that was true most new AAA games would be sold for 5$ and he wouldn't have the game being sold twice the Steam price on his own website.

The question might also be : who support more Spiderweb ? 100 who buy the game 20$ from the site or 150 who buy the game 10$ from Steam (with the risk that among those 150 some sizable portion would have bought the game for 20$ if they didn't had the choice).

Ok, not every time dropping the price will bring significant increase of sales. But what does it mean? Maybe the game isn't good enough? Or it's so niche that any price wouldn't be low enough to encourage the masses to buy it?

I can agree that niche stuff should have rather higher price than usual game to maximize the profit. Like Railworks 3 and it's riddiculously high prices on DLCs, for example.

I won't derail the thread too much with discussions about that movie.

Suffice to say that I liked the villains (in particular, Cate Blanchet was a slap in the face of the usually very photogenic Hollywood style as she presented herself very attractively at first glance, but a longer look showed a very messed up character, starting with the moment she brushed up her teeth until her gums were a bloody mess) as well as some of the metaphors present in the movie (the main one being a coming of age of sorts as the previously sheltered protagonist is let loose into the world), not to mention the fact that they had the guts to put a teenage girl in a character type normally reserved to adult men.

SRP? Gimme some context pls :P.

I don't think movies and games fill the same needs.

People watch movies to be entertained by a visual story.

They're happy to take the role of the silent observer and let the character be characters.

Games take a move hands on approach and the gamer wants to interact more directly with the world the game presents and affect it.

I guess a decent analogy for kids would be read a comic book or play with your toys.

Depends on how you function.

In the good old fashioned business model, you have the investors on top taking their share and then you have the labor.

When things get tough, the labor is where the money gets squeezed out.

When you think about it, most of the need for the game to make crazy money comes from the top.

In a regular studio, the labor might get paid a couple of millions (or tens of millions in a bigger studio), but the top might still consider the game a failure if they don't make several times that amount.

In many areas of the economy, this is unavoidable because you can't get anything done without a big chunk of capital (in pharmaceutical research for example).

In games however, the main cost is not the material, but the labor.

So if you remove the investors from the equation (who might expect to earn several times what the labor is earning) and just factor in the labor, then it's not so bad.

I mean, 2 guys making a game over the course of 3 years expecting a 50k+ yearly wage would need to sell 100k games to make it worth their while if they charge a paltry 3$ for the game.

Sure, you got a strong incentive to minimize the size of the labor to the strict minimum (without a big chunk of initial capital, you don't have a lot of leeway there), but I think it makes for a more efficient procedure anyways.

You can get back to the essentials and ask yourself what you really need to make a good game and what is just fluff.

Steam did not start its super sales until there was actual competition. Steam's sales the past couple of years outside of the random publisher sale or random daily deal have sucked compared to its hayday of 2008-2010. The only sales you can reliably expect your game you're waiting for to be on sale at 75% are the holiday sales.

Amazon, GG, etc competing? That's all corporate competition to earn your dollars. Do you think they would put games on sale for $2-$10 if they thought they would make more money keeping it full (or close to full) price? Nope. Look at Activision and its COD franchise. It will deduct $10 off its games but usually no more, and games take years to drop it prices. Yet they still sell multiple copies of the games.

The problem isn't self-entitlement feelings or Steam. The problem is most games released nowadays are buggy pieces of shit at launch and require several months of patches or workaround findings to get to function properly. I don't know about you, but I only paid full price for one buggy game at launch and that was F:NV because I wanted to support the dev.

Most devs treat us like criminals, why should we pay full price for their game? You want to make it so your game's securom rootkit tells you every time I go to youporn? Fine, but I'm not paying more than $10 for it. That's just the way it is.

I don't expect any game to go on sale for 75% off within 2 months. Recently, the games that HAVE been doing that are the ones that were launched to much criticism.

I read through three pages of this thread until skipping to the last one. The original question was "Why do people think $10 is too expensive on GOG?" and somehow it devolved into blaming steam, and in a few cases, blaming gamers for not wanting to pay full price for crap games. And, in most people's minds, indie games are crap games, because why else would the indie bundles sell for so low? ;)

I take it the term "fallacy of composition" doesn't mean anything to you.

The major studios are probably making more money than they ever did before, but if we want any meaningful innovation, our best bet is to be nice to indie developers. Being unwilling to pay $20 for an indie title because we're waiting for a better price or assume that it's overpriced is not going to help in the long term.

If they know they have to price at $5 or $10 to get any sales, that drastically reduces the amount of money they can lower the price if people aren't buying. Which adds up to an increase in risk as they can count even less on initial sales to pay for the development cost.

Admittedly, I have been guilty of that in the past, but it's only because I haven't had huge amounts of money to spend on gaming.

I wasn't analogizing. Quite the opposite, that comparison was used because it zooms in on price versus the quantity of entertainment hours. I was pointing out that one can't just say people don't want to spend $10 on a game because they're stingy. "Stingy" makes it sound like all the different commodities can be easily broken down into identical micro-bits to determine how much satisfaction one gets from each. It doesn't work this way because comparing price and entertainment hours is not mapped 1:1.

The only games I feel are truly overpriced are the Tom Clancy ones.

And it frequently has a negative connotation to it, similar to being miserly. We're descending into an argument on semantics now, but the way I see it, being stingy means not wanting to pay for an item even if you value it at that amount. There's a difference between that and considering buying an item if it goes on sale because that's when its value meets what you think its worth. I'm sorry to hear that; regardless, not everyone matches the value of a game vis-a-vis the effort put in by workers in the game development industry. And why should they, if gaming only takes up a fraction of their lives?