Haha, how ironic.

This too ^

Were piracy organizations of yesteryear like Hybrid truly hardcore software hackers or might they have been a sub organization of game developers who felt the best way to get their games sampled and mentioned was by distribution to a small minority of taboo-challenging rebellious teens who were not old enough to work and afford them anyway?

Yes, this is another of the tangential benefits he didn't even attempt to consider. The more people that play your game, the more people there are talking about your game. It's like free advertising, and again, it translates into real sales and dollars even if it is hard to quantify.

I read it rather quickly and I may have missed something but... from what I see the guy is making a huge mistake. When he mentioned that barely anyone bought his game after the release week and outside of sales it occurred to me that the guy is missing something important that many indies seem not to get. It's not just about the price and sales aren't just about price reduction. When a game goes on sale it gets a massive boost in visibility and indies tend to suck at marketing - many seem to have a weird philosophy like "okay, the game is out there, job's done, now I just have to wait". I haven't ever heard about his game and looking at his sales figures so has barely anyone else except those people who saw it pop up on Steam when it was released or went on sale.

He mentions Minecraft and well, Minecraft was a phenomenon that spread virally. Millions of people heard about it, they actively looked the game up and bought it because they wanted it. But he focuses on the pricing model. Also, Dungeon Keeper recently climbed GOG's best seller list despite not being on sale. Why? Because suddenly many more people became aware of the game and just *wanted* it after the iOS fiasco and the reactions by popular YT personalities. Starbound seems to be selling insanely well despite being quite expensive - it has had a lot of very positive coverage, though.

All I get from this guy's post/article is that indies really need a lesson or two in marketing, think more about their product identity and work more actively to get visibility.

If the game is good it will sell good regardless of sales or not, isn't this where talent and "job well done" come to play?

Indeed. ne_zavarj, don't you feel a little silly saying this after your giveaway forum drama last summer?

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If he means Castle Doctrine.....it's Multi-player only. You depend on other live players to attempt the traps you set and create traps for you.

When spending effort on MMO or Multi-Player Only developers need to begin considering how heavily over-saturated the market is with those games....If I'm playing X amount of MP only games already, there's a good chance that I won't have the free time to even sniff at yours.

No, a game needs visibility and has to make people wanna play or at least try it - a game doesn't need to be "good" to attract people and sell well. Surgeon Simulator is probably a perfect example of this.

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Even very high quality games from legendary developers are getting ignored due to the vast number of games currently available....Metal Gear Solid Uprising wha?

While I think that many of the author's concerns are legitimate, there are also some counterpoints that I would make:

1. A lot of the fun in consuming something new (whether it be a game, a movie, a book, or whatever) is that it's one of the few times when "everyone is talking about it". There's an emotional reward in getting to participate in those conversations that mark a shared cultural experience. If you wait a year or two, you missed it - even though you played the same game, you "weren't there when it happened", and everyone else has moved on to talking about other things.

Now, this isn't going to be a concern for everyone. (We're on a classic gaming forum, after all, so I'm guessing we tend on average to be less concerned with "the hot new thing" than the population at large.) But I'm willing to bet that for a lot of people, the "added value" that makes them willing to pay full price at launch is that they get to participate in the carnival atmosphere. That's got a pretty short half-life, though, after which the game simply becomes high-priced.

2. As a consumer, there's a definite benefit to me in the prevalence of ultra-low sale pricing, beyond the benefits to my wallet. I basically foreswore gaming back in the mid-2000s, because back then the price of a new game was usually $60-80.00, and I just got burned one too many times by a game they'd sexed up with slick marketing and hype that then turned out to be a soulless turd. (You couldn't even rely on word-of-mouth, because everyone else was still so buzzed by the hype that they'd praise anything.) I decided that from then on, I was just going to wait a generation to see which games from the previous gen stood the test of time, and then go back and play those. Clearly not an ideal situation for publishers.

What steep sale discounts have allowed me to do is to once again be more experimental in my gaming purchases. I'll give a game a chance if it looks potentially interesting, instead of waiting five years and playing only the "true classics". I'm only risking a couple of bucks, so if only one in ten purchases pans out, I'm still getting much better value per dollar than I got under the old system. And if I start playing a game and don't like it, I don't feel any "obligation" to suffer through it because I paid sixty bucks for it - I just toss it aside with a shrug and reach for the next one on the pile.

3. I think the author is wrong that people "won't feel burned" by a higher price if they come to the game later. It's not like it's hard to find out what a game used to cost, and there's a psychological tendency to feel like if you're not getting something for the best deal possible, you're a chump. (And so since the "best deal possible" will never come again, buying the game at full price involves swallowing your pride, which may be a bigger sticking-point for some people than the price tag itself.) Even when you buy a game and it goes on sale a week later, you can at least pat yourself on the back that you made the right choice "at the time" and can't be blamed for it. Again, I'm not so much describing myself as just noting what I see as a trend that might bite this dev in the ass.

Still, I'll be interested to see how the experiment works out in the long run.

So what shall it be. Will you join the unity or will you die here? Join...CRY...Join FLY!!!

Listen here ya little mug, I've had enough of you eyeballin my shit. Will you join the unity or will the world completely totaltarianly exsanguinate my shit.

Heh. I thought you'd say that.

Even now I'm finding old purchases that I had issues with or wanted keys for to a more legitimate site and never heard back from the developers.

Full Bore & Ethan Meteor Hunter to name a couple - I got 'em packaged dirty cheap in a bundle but what had I taken either game seriously enough to have shelled out over $5 each?

I glanced through the article, and he made good points (which have been discussed before too), but he didn't clearly point out one major difference between the old retail times and the current gaming market: there is much more competition now. As in, thousands (especially when counting also mobile game sales) of hopeful indie developers competing from the same dollars, compared to the old times where only selected few got their game through some publisher to retail shelves. Online shareware sales were quite small in comparison.

So if we went back to the "good old times" where people paid more per game, maybe the author could not have released his game at all back then because of not being able to strike a deal with a publisher. Now anyone can release a game for sale in various digital stores some with very low entry criteria (like Humble Widget Store), or if for some reason failing that, release it on your own web page instead.

But overall I agree with him, the current market situation is maybe oversaturated. I chuckled at his comment how some people have many as 50 games in their gaming backlog. LOL, I think I have well over 1000 (well over 600 in GOG, around 250 on Steam, maybe a couple hundred retail games (PC and older consoles, dozens upon dozens from other digital stores...). But it is not a backlog, it is my gaming library, and so far it has not stopped me from buying more games, also outside sales when I see fit.