Comments on: How Much Games Should Cost, What You Think?

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:44:03 +0000

From personal experience price has no bearing on my enjoyment of a game.

Something I always think of in these cases is my experience of buying Mass Effect. I bought the first game for £5 second hand, and really enjoyed it, but because I’d really enjoyed the first I was totally pumped for the second and bought it the moment it was released at £27 (so more than 5x the cost that I got the first one.)

I guess what I’m saying is that people are bound to pay more if they have an emotional attachment to a developer or series. Most of the time this is from users buying an older game from the developer at a cheaper price and enjoying it. This works well for Bioware, SquareEnix, Valve and for more independent peeps positech, popcap, and so on.

Building a good brand is better than building a great game in terms of what you can sell your next title for. In my opinion anyway ^_^

By: Lumooja

Lumooja — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 21:03:28 +0000

I voted $50 because most games in Finland cost around that, and I only buy games which are worth that. Sometimes there are also classic games which cost around $14, but that is a special case.

By: Juuso

Juuso — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 17:11:10 +0000

Good points Jake. That last statement is so true. I’m saying that I like $10 price point, but you can see me spending donuts on much higher prices… :)

By: Jake Birkett

Jake Birkett — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 16:20:17 +0000

Yes but there is a distribution curve with a sweet spot of around $15. Of course money is left on the table for customers who’d pay more so that’s why you have special editions and extra content, and for those who’d pay less you release a discounted version later on. That captures moreorless the max revenue. With social games powered by micro-transactions you also max out the possible revenue and have some customer spending hundreds, and sometimes thousands of dollars.

Another thing to consider: what people say they would spend is never the same as what they actually DO spend :-)

By: Juuso

Juuso — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 15:06:12 +0000

Quite a bit of variation in the vote results.

By: Juuso

Juuso — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 07:53:42 +0000

I’d say: “If my $10 helps these indie devs to make this possible then great!”

o:)

By: Dave Toulouse

Dave Toulouse — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 02:43:02 +0000

First no offense to anyone …

Second anyone that thinks what games should be sold for just doesn’t get it.

I’ve paid $10 for games I didn’t like and paid $70 for games I enjoyed a lot (canadian dollar was worth next to nothing back then and the game was Phantasmagoria).

If you don’t like the price of a game keep it for yourself and just don’t buy it. Buying a game is not a right it’s a choice. If the price is too high then it’s the dev’s problem and not yours. Someone that feels betrayed over and over about games’ price should just stick to free Flash game. Whining about price just doesn’t achieve anything. If a game is indeed too costly for what it’s worth then it will fail by itself.

We all know we’re all cheap bastards. Why try to make a point about that …

I’ve seen people complain about a $20 game from an indie game developer just trying to make a living. It’s of course easy to to pretend that by lowering the price this dev would have make x10 more sells but then those people rarely have released a game themselves …

Bottom line? I don’t have any pity for someone that have money to spend on games. Some people just don’t know the value of money …

By: Jerrac

Jerrac — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 18:26:33 +0000

Brand new releases should cost $20. I’d buy a lot more games as soon as they come out if that was the price.

6 months to a year after, the price should drop to $10.

If they did that, the used game market would go away. Which would mean more money for the actual developers.