Comments on: Why People Buy Games

By: Sargon

Sargon — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 09:06:38 +0000

Its the experience.
People buy an experience, not a product.
They like the experience of buying the product, of drolling on the product until they will get it.
They like the pictures, if there are good pictures of characters of your product, it stimulates their imagination about how great is the product.
All this is before they even get the product.
It would be easier to think about cars.
People enjoy tjeir cars even when they are not driving it, only the fact that you have an expensive car in your garage make them feel good.
I am sure you can figure out more why people like to buy stuff, if you think about it more. But thats what I thought about for now.

By: GameProducer.Net » Archive » Don’t Hide the Buy Button

GameProducer.Net » Archive » Don’t Hide the Buy Button — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 08:00:53 +0000

[...] Hiding the buy button In the past Reflexive – a great game portal and makers of some fine games – didn’t have a direct buy button (at least not one that could be easily spotted!) in their website. I once actually had to ask one friend of mine where the buy link it is located? He said that “you first need to download the game, and then the buy button is inside the game”. How some player who wants directly buy some game can know or remember that? I personally think there should be a buy link anyway – and by looking at their website today, you can see the direct buy link for each product (after clicking “more info”). When I was searching for one DVD I googled for “buy [product name] extended edition DVD”. I was actually looking for a buy link. Now, if the website misses a buy link – they probably miss some sales. [...]

By: ZeHa

ZeHa — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 17:32:05 +0000

“The way the spines of some DVD series will form a continuous picture when side by side on your shelf”

Yes that’s a good argument / example. Perhaps if you build up a cool image of your game company, and then add something continuous into your products that thrills the player so he MUST have it in order to complete the collection, that would be great.

It could also help to have some “limited editions”, so there’s the “rare” attribute ;)

By: Patrick

Patrick — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 03:42:11 +0000

In LotR’s case its all about tiering content and having a lot of it. Indie producers don’t have 300 million to make content with, so we have to make up for it with procedural depth.

By: Gavin Bowman

Gavin Bowman — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 11:01:36 +0000

You would probably need to create a checklist or collectable mentality, somehow. People like to complete collections, that’s the compulsion behind buying DVDs or CDs, and many retro games. It’s easier when there’s something tangible, or when there’s some easy way to see the current state of the collection (eg. The way the spines of some DVD series will form a continuous picture when side by side on your shelf). Maybe the indie games industry is just too dispersed and intangible to tap into that?

If a high quality portal (or even an indie developer with a few good games to their name) had a checklist or percentage of games owned measurement built into a membership system, you’d probably find a few extra games being sold just to build up the collection and check something off a list. It’s similar to what drives people to want 100% completion of a game, even when they’ve already seen almost everything, only with a collection it’s easier to get the extra percentage points, you just have to pay for them.

By: Arto Ruotsalainen

Arto Ruotsalainen — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 09:12:41 +0000

By greating a game that they really really like? :)

I’m really a programmer, not a business dude, but as far as I’m know it really isn’t any magic to sell stuff to people, you just need to find the right people who like the product and they’ll buy it. Same with you : the Lord of the Rings products found you, then you read the first book / watched the first movie, after that you were hooked.

Of course, if you find a way to get people buying any kind of indie game only because they want to have the largest collection of indie games..