Track this topic | Email this topic | Print this topic

New article that talks about game pricing, specifically with regards to Steam sales and small developers:

http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-a...evelopers-and-p

It's a little harsh to hear things like “Someone lamented that gamers weren’t willing to pay enough to support us game developers, and my response was, ‘So what? That’s not their job,’" but the article offers some developer perspective on how cheap pricing is really a good thing. I dunno I thought it applied

--------------------

"We're not tools of the government or anyone else. Fighting... fighting was the only thing I was ever good at, but at least I always fought for what I believed in." - Frank Yeager (a.k.a. Grey Fox)

The comments are also worth reading. This one was particularly insightful:

Quote

I think they also score a very solid balance with their timing for the sales as well, splitting the potential markets into several groups:

Early adopters: these are the folks who are picking it up Day 1. They don't care that it might go 33% off in 3-4 months; they want the game, and the extra cost is worthwhile.

Interested but not sold (or understand sales will be forthcoming: though the knowledge of a potential sale might knock a few of the early adopters down to this one, I'd wager it's fewer than people might expect. These are the people who are definitely interested but may not have the means/desire to pay top dollar. They're willing to wait.

Vague Interest: This is a massive group which will jump at the chance to snag the product at 75% off. They might not play it at all (pure impulse buy!), or it might take them 2 years to get around to it. This is the best group to really milk because they're essentially comprised of non-customers converted into customers. They're a large group upon which no money could or would have been made, which is why they seem to see such dramatic results from these big sales.

My first thought after reading this is that these groupings also roughly indicate the economic situation of different gamers. I'd expect early adopters to predominantly be people with the disposable incomes to spend on games at full (or nearly full) price, while budget gamers would almost certainly be thinking hard about their more constrained choices.

----

I also just realized that the base (full) prices of games on Steam seems to be the sorts of prices I'd expect to see for retail hard copies of games. A little casual game might be $4.99 or $9.99, while a top-of-the-line big-budget game usually does go for around $59.99 (give or take ten or twenty bucks).

So, are Steam prices, as some people say, set way higher than they need to be?

Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that these games are not hard copies, but digital copies, that have far lower per-unit costs of distribution. No, in the sense that that's how games have been priced anyway, albeit for a different form of ownership.

This post has been edited by Glenn Magus Harvey on 17th April 2012 04:19

--------------------

Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )

This link is relevant to the discu---

Damn you FallingHeart! Daaaaamn yooooooou!

I will point out for myself that I have upwards of a hundred games on my steam list and have so far played...about a dozen.

This post has been edited by Narratorway on 18th April 2012 14:58

--------------------

Arts

Farts

Twarts