You’re looking at a cost for a US team of around $200,000 to $300,000 for such a quality title, lets if you can do it in eastern europe or south-east asia.

It may be possible to earn that money back at $1, but it seems unlikely. Remember that Big Fish takes their cut, and the developer only sees part of that sales price. That doesn’t mean that discounting has no place. If Big Fish can sell 4x the games at $7 as at $19 then discount away, but there is a sweet spot, and nobody understands that better than the portals. Remember, they want to make money too, and they’re not going to shoot themselves in the foot.

So why would they sell Azada for 99 cents? First, it may be a marketing thing. Second Azada has been out for just over a year, and it hasn’t seen even a glimpse of the top 10 at BFG since march. It’s sales window is over. Why not crank out some more sales at a very discounted rate. I’d be happy if they did that with my games that have left the top 100.

Agreed that Indie “authors” don’t get paid a salary because you just get royalties once the game is released (I’ve done this multiple times so I know about it). But it’s still fun to look at your royalties over time and work out what you were paid per hour/day/week/month whatever for making that game. It’s not good business sense to say “OK I’ll make a game it’ll cost $5000 and I hope I make that money back” without factoring in some kind of approximate salary for your programming time.

But yes (jumping to a different part of your post), there is a problem of to many people involved in making a game (we’re talking about games at casual-download level here, most of which are clones of simple ideas that could be done by one person within a month, plus QA, although the problem itself stretches further up). As I said, I exclude higher profile games, Braid being a recent example of a high-profile game (in terms of content complexity) for the download market. Ironically, Braid was basically done by two guys with the help of a few licenses, though I don’t know how long it took them.

To make $10,000 you would need to sell maybe minimum of 20 000 copies – or even more (take away costs to market, hosting fees, payment processing fees) and increased customer support needs.

I suppose there’s nothing that prevents people trying… but there indeed is tests made earlier. I remember one indie reporting that using price $10 or $20 didn’t cause much difference in terms of profits.

When people spend $1 on a game they still have to go through the payment and unlock process and this all takes a bit of time and many of those people would still buy it at $5 or $10 simply because they want it. There’s plenty of research done on this. Sure you might get some extra sales at $1 but all those extra sales would not make up for the drop in price from say $10 or $20. There’s a bell curve for all products where there’s an optimum price point which balances number of sales and unit price.

Can games really be made for $1000-5000? Well perhaps you could spend that little on art/music assets (but it might not look/sound very good) but what about your salary for making the game? Surely you want to be paid more than $100 or whatever per month for making a game that takes 6 months? Most half-decent casual games cost considerable more than $5000 to make even if you don’t factor in a programmer salary.

Everyone and their dogs know about this since they also did the same deal for MCF3 just before MCF4′s release.

Are you really that ignorant of the PC casual games market? Do you know how many people are laughing at you and this blog right now?

JC