BRAVO AND CONGRATS, REFLEXIVE AND AMAZON! This indie developer and former publisher thanks you! It's about damn time!!! Ever since $1 iTunes songs, my friend Jeff Tunnell has been preaching the gospel (or rather predicting the future) of $1 games. The comparison he makes is a good one: a game dev team is not unlike a small band, and a single small game (Flash-sized) is not unlike a song, both in what it offers (a quick enjoyable replayable experience) and what it takes to create (a few people and a few months). Most casual games are more than Flash-sized / "song-sized" games, but they are also well short of being an "album" worth $20. With casual games it's like you get one song (one level / central game mechanic), then a bunch of "re-mixes" of that song (further levels with small variations, like a euro-mix variation of a song). So $10 is a great price point to go - more than a song, less than an album of unique songs. To go outside of gaming and compare to other forms of entertainment (a point we sometimes forget!), it seems like DVD's are at about that $10 price-point, and a casual game definitely doesn't have the production value and quality of a multimillion dollar Hollywood movie (even the indie movies are MM's), so it's a good price. Casual games at $20 are selling at a price higher than many Hollywood DVD's! As for price tests, the problem with those of us who've tested the "reduce prices by half" theory is that it takes massive traffic to work. If you cut prices on your small indie game site to all few-thousand of your visitors for all half-dozen of your games, you're not going to have enough throughput to leverage the benefits of the price cut. But to a huge portal - Amazon (bigger than Reflexive) - with millions of visitors and hundreds of games, all adopting the same below-ten price point, it's a completely different story. This is TNT, and it's about time someone blew up the $20 price point. It needed not just someone brave to do it - anyone can be brave. It needed someone with tons of traffic to pull it off. And that's exactly what Amazon has. So again I say bravo. The industry has turned a page. Let's all grow with it.
Uh ...? did you play any casual game recently or read any budget for recent game releases? SMALL size? FEW people? FEW months?? we're not talking about flash games here...! I think what you say could be offensive for many devs here (eternal eden, 4000 hours of work, scharlo, over 200k budget for home sweet home, and many others). If you have to justify the price drop please use another, more solid, argument.
Incidentally, a day before the whole thing started I interviewed cliffski and just a short excerpt from our interview: So you don't need one price point to maximise your revenue. Anyway, if you're interested here is the full interview: Interview with Cliff Harris (cliffski) from Positech Games cheers Roman
30+ things you can buy with $10 in 2009: (off the top of my head / prices are approximate) A first-run movie A dollar-theater movie with popcorn and soda A bottle of wine A case of beer A box of chocolate truffles A printed t-shirt A CD from Wal-mart 10 songs off of iTunes A DVD from Wal-mart A month of Netflix rentals A month's subscription to an MMO A year's subscription to a Flash Virtual World Two/three movie rentals at Blockbuster A couple of coloring / activity books and crayons A paperback novel A nice lunch A trip for ice cream cones for you and friends A couple pints of gourmet ice cream A couple packs of cigarettes A couple of fat joints 10 scrunchies at a dollar each A pair of sunglasses A bunch of gallons of gas to take a day trip somewhere Admission to a play, ballet, art gallery, or museum Day use fee for a state park or wildlife area Two pairs of cute socks A cake from a bakery or deli A few used console video games A used computer monitor or TV A basketball or soccer ball A quarter-year of issues of your favorite magazine Ten bucks worth of virtual goods in a microtransaction game A couple of cell phone games An XBLA / WiiWare game An iPhone game And now, thanks to Reflexive / Amazon, we can add to the list... Any casual download game Hooray! All the above things are about the same value in my opinion. Casual games were never worth twice the amount of all the other things in the above list. The recession only underscores the need to price things at a point that is competitive with other things that consumers can do with their $10 as they'll be far more choosy how they spend their money now that they have less of it.
Sod it, I'm releasing my games at 100 quid. You'll have to have an invite to buy them and you will get content personally from me. Doesnt anyone else see all this as a dilution of thier efforts? I mean sure this is great for amazon and reflexive, but is it actually good for developers? You're all assuming that somehow magically if reflexive/amazon sell more games you will make more money. But is that really true? Isnt it just that we will see a few "blockbuster" games make money and everyone else is going to get even less of a return? We're talking about making this a mass-market product, when it really actually isnt. I would never expect my games to make it into the hands of a mass market consumer, much like you wouldnt expect really hardcore wargames do the same. The really niche titles simply cannot stand up at this price point. I'd rather charge a smaller group more money but actually support and be supported by them than have a mass market that doesnt actually care about the title shell over pocket money to blast through my "content" as quickly as possible. Am I alone in thinking this belittle's the creative process a bit? Josh: Your point about small shallow games is exactly the kind of thing that flash games are doing, but theyre doing it for free, not $1 or $10 or $20. Sure you could poop out a match-3 in a month, but for anything even remotely complex you have to give it time. Time that you cant afford if your product is being priced at 5.99 to compete with "mainstream" media. All we're going to get here, is a reduction in quality and a few breakout "blockbuster" games.
Please re-read my statement, you have grossly misunderstood. I'm talking about flash games in that part of the argument. The second paragraph states "Most casual games are more than Flash-sized / song-sized games." I'm comparing a single level in a casual game to the size of a Flash game, not an entire casual game to the size of a Flash game. That's why $1 for a casual game (song price) is too little. But $20 for essentially a whole album of that first level re-mixed, is too much.
I sharply disagree. Give indies some credit. Instead of a reduction of quality, why can't we have an increase in innovation? Hard times force innovation. At $20 we've gotten lazy. The feeling of entitlement is high. Instead of feeling entitled to certain prices and profits, we should be bootstrapping and shooting for the best designed content (good game design does not cost money), best development practices (reducing inefficiencies saves money), and being more competitive with other forms of media entertainment and diversion. At a minimum, let's take a wait and see approach. I'm optimistic, and I'd put my money on Amazon / Reflexive that they've done their homework on this one. When Microsoft XBLA introduced the $5, $10, $15 game model, they did so after spending millions on market research that basically boiled down to the fact that consumers wanted to buy games at those prices. It's a good study, it's years old, and it's about time this young casual industry has caught up.
The problem I have, is that you're comparing games to films, where as some games you should compare to books. And not just trashy pulp romance either (which is kind of what casual stuff is), but hardcore technical or philosophy books. My games are far more like a deep technical book, which is only going to attract a niche audience no matter what I put on the front cover. I really wouldnt want to be put on the same shelves as the romantic fiction pulp because I would never attract that audience and I would never want to lower my price to the same level (why would someone expect to sell two entirely different things for the same price?). And yet, it would be nice to have a store in which to sell my products, alongside all the other books. Because it is after all still a book. Which I hope is what amazon ends up doing. It really doesnt bother me, because I intend to sell direct. But I've been saying for years that the portals are being far too specific in thier catalogues. Much like you wouldnt expect a book store to only stock romantic fiction, you wouldnt expect a game portal to only stock hidden object games, yet there you are. You also wouldnt expect all books to be the same price, yet here we have the notion that all games should be that same lower price, no matter thier origins or content. The whole "work smarter not harder" thing doesnt really count here. Some things ARE hard. Its not like we have the game development equivalent of a camera where we can naturally use it without any training (who cant operate a camera?) or a music package that generates actual music rather than loops that other musicians made? Your notion of innovation would basically be embodied by the game-maker community, where they are incredibly prolific, but how many of those games do you really want to play? Its a moot point, but I for one, do NOT welcome our amazon overlords.
As wikipedia would say, citation needed. Again, apples and oranges, XBLA is a closed system with decent DRM, helped by being a closed system. Comparing music is also retarded, while singles maybe cheap, you can also hear them free on air, but wait, airplay costs the station, music peeps also gigg etc etc yadda yadda. TBH, the people who seem to be pro this idea don't seem to the ones making a living from creating the games themselves full time, or have some other hidden agenda, that's what I see anyways, otherwise they must be stuck in trala land with the magic pixies. I could go on, but like others say let see how this pans out.. the winners are consumers and distributors I reckon.
Pfftt.. this is just a temporary phenomenon. I give it 2 years before games will overshoot 100 usd per title. HyperInflation anyone ?
Ouch, let's hope the US dollar doesn't lose that much value within 2 years. $100 will have the buying power of what $10 can buy now? It would be kind of funny to joke about, if the actual possibility of it happening wasn't there.
Not a joke. If you've been following financial news, most likely the FED is going to print their way out of debt. That is a very likely scenario because no one can keep lending USA the money when they themselves are in trouble with the economy. Nobody wants to keep financing American debt to expand their military empire. Even the Japanese are tired of the looting by American financial institutions. The Fed is going to print more money and the Chinese and Japanese would have to dump some dollars/treasuries to lighten the burden the global financial crisis that is affecting their economy. The chances of 100 usd CASUAL games are pretty real. Those portals are just killing themselves by setting prices at this level now. Wait and see how it all goes.
Completely agree. The trend towards games as a commodity is really discouraging to me. (Trend? Too late. It's not trending, it already arrived years ago.) Inevitable? Mere falling into line with other forms of entertainment? Perhaps. But while it's still possible to attract a niche following of loyal fans and do well simply by selling them the kind of games they like - and heck, this is the internet, it's made of niches - I for one will be continuing to steer clear of the commodity games industry. (As for whether this new price point will shower millions of dollars of cash onto casual devs or doom them to eternal oblivion working in coal mines or something... without hard data I don't dare to form a solid opinion. I do note that my direct sales quantity did not budge an inch when I quietly put the price down from $19.99 USD to $9.99 USD for a week or so. Of course, my pricing experiment may have absolutely no relevance to Reflexive, and presumably they've done their maths.)
Maybe not, China (the big global player) has just signaled her willingness to "cooperate" with the global community to ensure financial stability. 20 millions people has lost their jobs in China since the beginning of credit crunch and that's size of our national population. Have you ever wondered why China has not let Yuan hyper-appreciated against the dollars and other currencies? That's because such an act would instantly kill the highly interconnected global economy (Ie : US buys cheap goods from China - China buys resources from Australia and so forth). Haha..... .. At the end of the day, It's all about getting people employed. No job = Riot = revolution = civil war = nation collapses. 1.3 billion (+another 1 billion in India ) population can safely absorb trillion of inflationary easy dollars created for "quite a number of years" (Gulping) . A high end innovation (Ie : Quality Casual games at 6.99 ???? ) the size of internet revolution can also help reversing the trade imbalance that USA has with others and ease the dollar pressure. That's just my personal opinion.
Well just a thought but if the distributors are insistent on selling games at a low $10 price point, then perhaps in the future we need to be making games for that price point. Just to clarify that, if you've made a game with $20 worth of content in, then in the future commodotize your games, i.e. make games with only half the content, possibly even episodic. Previously it's been a worry that by selling games at $10 you'd lose out to richer $20 games, now everyone is on the same level. I think part of the problem is that games are often compared to films especially be game devs, so that's crept into the general (non-game playing) public imagination who then compare the cost of films to the cost of a game and decide games are overpriced. Hence that's what their market-research found. Plus, of course, Amazon is using the age old tactic of going in low to break into an existing market, so it's not entirely unexpected. I'm am quite hopefully that Amazon coming into the market will bring a lot more customers our way, and I hope that soon enough we'll see the equivalent of hard and paperback books where the "paperback" games are the $10 content games and the hardback are the $20 ones. Commoditization of games has been on the cards for a long time, especially once the mass-market aimed casual games started to become popular. It was only a matter of time I think. Plus of course, you don't have to sell through the portals. Time will tell what happens next, Iain
I need to put a nail in this coffin. I'm pro-$10 and I'm a full time indie -- I have no day job or second job, this is all I do and my livelihood depends on it. I struggle financially and am barely getting by, but I'm doing it. I have no agenda other than to be successful and see other indies be successful. I'm about to release my casual game Dragon Hatchery that I've worked on for the last year and have spent thousands of my own dollars on. Whether the game makes it or not will vastly determine my future as I have no other game in development at the moment and need it to be successful to continue developing further games. So I am hugely invested in indie casual game development and its future -- this is not an idle hobby or "beer money" for me (though nothing wrong with either). As someone invested, I see no reason to believe my game will be any more or less successful than if it was released a month ago at $20. I see this price reduction as nothing but opportunity. Opportunity for new customers, broader reach, greater acceptance... heck, if casual game budgets have been spiraling out of control (following a parallel path to their AAA big budget counterparts, now up to $60 a game retail), maybe this will put a check on that, reducing budgets, which put indies more in the game and more competitive with the big studios. That's a small speculative point about all this, but it's a possibility nonetheless. Invested in the success of the industry, yes. Hidden agenda, no. Must be the magic pixies then. Or my 5 years experience developing, funding, and publishing games for the download market.
One last point, this one regarding global markets. The US is not the only country buying and playing games -- ok, it's one of the biggest markets, but there's still a whole huge world of people out there, and casual games more than most are "games for everyone." Consider that here in South Africa, the largest bill is 200 Rand, or $20. To put that into context, we were previously selling casual games at such a high price that you have to use the biggest bank note in South Africa to buy one. That's expensive. Maybe not to a US audience, but certainly to a South African audience, and to a global audience whose pockets are not as rich as American ones. Consider yet another side effect of the price drop is an increase in the adoption of the market to worldwide markets. 200 Rand can buy a lot of food here. It should be able to buy more than one downloaded Diner Dash.
Who knows, if everyone drops to $9.99 it could all just work out, with more sales for everyone. In the short term though I'm left with a difficult decision. I woke up this morning and my games are now $6.99 on 100's of game sites. So I have two options, I can reduce my own pricing to $6.99 or I can remove the games from the catalogue. The thing is, if I reduce my pricing then I can hardly ask other portals/sites to keep the games at $19.99 : ( Can anyone spot a 3rd option? George