Should Good Indie Games Be More Expensive?

spidweb writes "Indie gaming blog The Bottom Feeder has an article on why independent games should be more expensive. The enforced low prices on XBox Live, Amazon, and iTunes might feel good now, but they'll kill off the variety and depth gamers are hoping indie developers can provide. From the article: 'Every year, life is getting more and more expensive. Insurance. Rent. Food. And, at the same time, games are getting cheaper and cheaper, sometimes as cheap as a dollar, as we engage in a full speed race to the bottom. This is not going to help developers stay in business. This is not how a healthy industry is maintained.'"

Comments

Economies of Scale

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

If your game is really good, then won't it sell more copies, making you more money?

Is there some hidden cost in producing more copies of a binary file?

Re:Economies of Scale

[Yvanhoe]

Somehow, I feel that if a game is good enough to make me go through the process of grabbing my credit card, going to the website, checking for traps, entering the number, etc... a price of 1$ or 15$ doesn't really make a difference.

10-15 is probably the good price range to maximize the number of copies sold. Lower won't make more under our current distribution methods.

Re:Economies of Scale

[Opportunist]

No, but there is one in selling more copies. It's called marketing and advertising. You can make the best game of all times, if nobody knows it exists you won't sell it.

Re:Economies of Scale

[dangitman]

I think the point is that low prices stop the creation of games that might be good, because only large sales cover costs.

What do you mean by "large sales"? Wouldn't a higher price lead to less sales?

Of course, it doesn't exactly work like that. Games with a high price often enjoy massive sales, but usually only when they are accompanied by a massive marketing campaign, or pre-existing expectations.

"Indie" games are in a different boat altogether. They usually don't enjoy such marketing hype, although some do. Ultimately, linking "good game" with "high price" is an exercise in futility. Sometimes that correlates, sometimes it doesn't. And any given person's definition of "good game" varies from another's.

Re:Economies of Scale

[thetoadwarrior]

Clearly you didn't read the article or lack comprehension because that was the whole point in that having to worry about selling the maximum number of copies will mean a lack of variety and experimentation which is exactly what's happening with normal disc based games.

Being a good game does not equal good sales otherwise companies would make good games and not rubbish like baby and cooking sims on the DS.

But perhaps you're not bothered and eagerly await to but Baby-Momma on the DS.

Re:Economies of Scale

[Antique Geekmeister]

Yes, indeed, advertising and shelf space and maintaining stock gets expensive: so does paying for insurance plans for vice presidents, making fancy PowerPoint presentations to investors, and showing up at trade shows to showcase your games.

For an example of how modest, "indie" games can work well, take a look at http://www.cheapass.com/. These guys make small, funny as all heck, modest board games that spend their efforts on making the game fun, not on fancy graphics. They're the "Kingdom of Loathing" of the board game world. And speaking of Kingdom of Loathing, there's an example of awfully fun computer gaming with minimal hardware requirements, modest infrastructure needs, and a well-earned fanbase for a game run on donations and buying in-game items.

Re:Economies of Scale

[Opportunist]

Oh yeah, that works great. So far I still didn't see a single case of true grassroots movement that didn't at some sort gain a lot weight either by media coverage (ya know, the kind that the real people out there watch and read, like newspapers or even TV) or by being picked up by someone who has a lot of media presence.

Word of mouth is fine and nice, if you want to get famous inside a certain circle. It works very well if you're, say, a scientist and want to be known amongst your peers, it works to some degree for underground bands. It fails when your audience does not really "hunt" for what you offer but needs to be told that it's there.

The average ("casual") gamer doesn't read game mags, and he certainly doesn't dig through blogs and game pages. I have to admit, I turned "casual" not long ago, lacking the time I had during my college days when I did actually spend some time on such pages. You know where casual games get my attention? Steam. Steam offers World of Goo for (IIRC) 15 bucks, I heard somewhere something about it and I dimly remember it was positive for some reason (it was on TV, a show about the indie game market), so I thought what the heck, 15 bucks, no loss, buy. Flock was offered, it looked cute, 10 bucks, what the heck... bought. And so on.

Word of mouth would have never told me that those games even existed. First, few of my "gamer friends" play indie. There's the FPS crowd that plays CoD and L4D, there's the MMO people with their WoW and EvE, but the people that I'd call my friends and that I'd put in the "casual" or "indie game" area rarely if ever talk about computers. Why? Because computer games aren't an important part of their life. They play them, they don't talk about them.

So word of mouth, while free and the best kind of ad, does not really work for Indie games IMO. Simply because those that play them the most talk the least about them.

Re:Economies of Scale

[samkass]

Of course, with iTunes you're already visiting a trusted site and they already have your credit card. It's just a matter of clicking on "Buy" and typing it your password. And getting people to click "Buy" for $10 is a lot harder than $1, assuming they've even found your app in the near-30,000 app marketplace. Thus, I think the iPhone/iTunes is a fundamentally different marketing model than putting up your own website and asking for credit card numbers yourself.

Re:Economies of Scale

[Endo13]

One could just as easily say...

"If your game is really good, then won't people be willing to pay more money for it, making you more money?"

The problem is, no matter how little the game is sold for, there is still only a certain number of people that will buy it. Obviously if only 10,000 people will buy your game if you sell it for $1, but 9,000 will still buy it if you sell it for $10, choosing between $1 and $10 is a no-brainer. The hard part is finding the sweet spot that gives you the most profit. If your game is good enough, it's possible that you will still sell 8,000 copies of it at $40, which again would make the price increase decision an easy one to make. But of course, no one can know for sure exactly what the results will be until after the fact. And then you still don't know what the results would have been if you had started with a different price. So most publishers set the price high to begin with, and hope they can make up most of the lost sales by reducing the price later. So maybe you only got 1,500 sales at $40, but if you can reduce the price to $10 later and pick up another 5,000 sales, you're still doing better than the original hypothetical 9,000 sales at $10 from the get-go... except of course, at this point for all you know you may have actually gotten 20,000 sales if you had set the price at $10 initially.

It's just really hard to establish causation in this type of thing. So the large publishers set the price high because they know they'll sell a lot of copies initially regardless (which is great for them, because then even if the game is a stinker, they might still get a good return on it before word-of-mouth kicks in), and the indie's set them low because if they don't, their game might not get purchased at all no matter how good it is. For them, by the time word-of-mouth kicks in the game might already be too outdated to be worth buying.

Re: Economies of Scale

[westlake]

Being a good game does not equal good sales otherwise companies would make good games and not rubbish like baby and cooking sims on the DS.

What you describe are games which appeal directly to women and girls - 50% of your potential market.

[and don't think for one moment that there are no males playing "The Sims"]

Just like how software should be...

[Anonymous Coward]

'Every year, life is getting more and more expensive. Insurance. Rent. Food. And, at the same time, software is getting cheaper and cheaper, sometimes as cheap as a dollar, as we engage in a full speed race to the bottom. This is not going to help developers stay in business. This is not how a healthy industry is maintained.'"

I agree. The race to the bottom for software is not how a healthy industry is maintained. What will we do if software reaches a price point of zero?

There are no clear examples out there of how free software or applications can stay in business.

*rolls eyes*

Re:Just like how software should be...

[bigstrat2003]

Hate to break it to you, but those models aren't going to work for gaming. Gamers don't need support contracts, and they'll go nuts if you try to cram advertising down their throats. Just because it works for some, doesn't mean it'll work for anyone else.

Re:Just like how software should be...

[TheRaven64]

None of your examples are of games. There are no good, free, fun, games.

Re:Just like how software should be...

[Biswalt]

Really gamers go nuts with advertising thrown down there throats? Played any EA sports games recently? In those games the ads even ad to the realism. You don't get a half-time report you get the Gillete Razor half-time report, since this is how it's done in the real world, it fits right in, but it's still an ad. An even better example is EA Skate 2. The ads are not only in the game on the in game billboards, they actually rotate out to feature different products or companies because EA is selling that ad space just like real ad space. It's a profitable enterprise for EA, and none of my friends has commented on it beyond "hey those are real ads." After I explain how they work, most of the people I've asked told me they thought it was cool. I agree that most gamers wouldn't play a game all plastered with ad banners (a la porn sites, and torrent sites), but real ads on the boards in EA NHL 09 only makes sense.

Re:Just like how software should be...

[jimicus]

You know what, I've spent the last week searching for free games that run under OS X and aren't half-assed screwups, crippleware or otherwise about as entertaining as a bodged vasectomy.

I should have just come on here and announced that there was no such thing.

Re:Just like how software should be...

[BlitzTech]

I don't think most of those games turn a profit, or even that much in revenue. For full-time game developers who don't have a day job to pay the bills, they need to earn money with the games they make. Some go with ad revenue, donations, or micropayments to keep their games free; others, like those from the author of TFA, prefer to charge for their games.

If you would like to play only completely free games, you're certainly welcome to. I'm willing to pay for games that I want to play, and hopefully that will encourage the developers to make more games I like.

My point is that your examples are of games that don't need to make money, which completely ignores the entire indie games market. Don't devalue games because free ones exist; examine the quality and decide if it's worth paying for.

In response to the GP, Ubuntu makes money on service contracts, Firefox on donations and corporate partnerships, and Gmail from ad impressions - analogous to micropayments, donations, and ads in games.

Re:Just like how software should be...

[KDR_11k]

Careful pointing at WZ2100, that one was commercial before it got opened up so they had professionals doing the work for money before it was given to the community. Spring's biggest mods operate on pirated content too (yes, there are legal mods but they're getting little attention from the playerbase as the primary sales pitch is still "we stole TA"). Organizing free contributors into anything that can produce a coherent game is extremely difficult and so far the results tend to be mostly coder art or just verbatim ripoffs of commercial games.

Re:Just like how software should be...

[Psychochild]

As a further point, almost all the games given as examples of free games are clones or derivatives of previous games. One of the things that makes a good indie game stand out is interesting, new types of gameplay or new takes on existing gameplay. Not to say that games like FreeCol are bad, but comparing an after-work project cloning an existing commercial game and someone trying to create new types of games from the ground up for a living and then wondering why they both can't be free seems a bit silly.

Enforced low prices?

[dangitman]

iTunes doesn't set a maximum price for games, neither does Xbox Live, apparently except for those created with the XNA tools. So, the only one enforcing low prices is Amazon. Thus, calling the credibility of the summary into question, and the article for tenuous exaggeration.

Wrong question...

[denzacar]

It should be "Should expensive games be better".

FYI: Indie =/= Good

This is also an example of a "indie game".

What rock have these guys been living under?

[TOGSolid]

Have they completely missed Valve's Steam pricing report on what happens when you sell good games for cheap?
At twenty to twentyfive bucks, an indy game that isn't going to have the exposure a triple A game has is going to alienate shoppers that would have otherwise bought it just for the hell of it. It's going to have to be pretty damn good and get a lot of word of mouth exposure in order to be able to reign back in lost potential customers.

Re:More expensive? You mean LESS expensive

[Millennium]

Look... I'm sorry but 15 years ago games were $10-$15.

No, they were not. $50 was the standard price for new console games since at least the mid-1980s, and still is on the Wii.

Most developers use other engines to produce their games so don't give me the BS about how much a game costs to make.

You'd be surprised at just how little difference this makes. It has been a very long time since the majority of a game's development budget went into its code.

in fact ALL games should cost a LOT less.

The last few games I've bought were all PC games off of steam because they were reasonably priced. If it's more than $30... you're over charging. Period. You can try to argue this with me... but everything past that mark is greed pure and simple.

In other words, you're just being cheap. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, as long as you're not using that as an argument to steal games, which I suspect you probably are.

If you absolutely must pay less, buy used. This will not kill you, make you any less of a gamer, or shrink your genitals.

flamebait blog post is flamebait

[castironpigeon]

Does this slashdot even warrant a reply? Apparently, it does, since it was brought up and a few people even seem to agree with it. Let's just hit a couple big points.

Search for 'indie game' on Google. 19 million hits. Now search for free game. 96 million hits. How much spare time do you have to play these games? Hello Mr Supply and Demand.

I don't have a clever search term for this one, but I can count on two hands every game in the last 10 years that has held my attention for more than 30 minutes. I'm including big studios here. If you'd like to earn money, earn it. If not, here's a styrofoam cup. There's the street corner.

Now, let's compare one entertainment medium to another. You can read short stories for free online or you can pay for print magazines or anthologies of known good authors. You can read comics online for free or you can pay for prints or anthologies of known good authors. You can view photos online for free or you can pay for collections from known good photographers. Sense a theme? Indie developers are, by their nature, relatively unknown. If they can peddle their wares for any amount I'd call that a winning situation.

However, the blogger is right. This is no way to maintain a healthy industry. What we don't need right now is more of these healthy industries. Not every single source of income needs to be neatly packaged and protected as an industry from now until the end of time. It's bad enough we've got ISP monopolies gouging customers, investment companies begging for CEO bonuses, an auto manufacturing industry threatening to blow itself up if it doesn't get bailed out for its screw-ups (so it can screw up some more!), and an airline industry that's beyond reproach. The industrial revolution is over. Let's come up with something better.

(Sigh...) Again, it's supply and demand

[dazedNconfuzed]

Supply and demand is an economic law. Arguing that prices should be higher than the market will bear, in an attempt to re-write that law, is foolish.

I recall a little "indie" game company that released, with little advertising, a mindless shoot-em-up by giving away much of the game and selling the full package cheaply. They made a good game, didn't charge much, and did well by it. 17 years later you can _still_ buy Wolfenstein 3D.

Braid

[bFusion]

As someone who just purchased (and finished) Braid this weekend, I feel that game was worth FAR more than $15. I agree though that the price point for a lot of "indie" games are about right. I don't think I'd have payed more for Audiosurf, or Peggle, or the Penny-Arcade games.

Re:More expensive? You mean LESS expensive

[Dr_Barnowl]

Used is much worse for the developer than tail pricing. The developer will not benefit from a second-hand sale.

A small amount, or even just a better reputation for sales with their publisher, is probably better than the zero that a second-hand sale represents.

Also

[Sycraft-fu]

Part of the justification of a game's cost both in real and notional terms is the amount of work that went in to it. One of the reasons that big name titles cost a lot is that it takes a lot of people to develop them. It is quite an expensive production, on par with making a movie. Look at the credits for a game like Mass Effect some time to see how many people worked on it (remembering also the people who wrote Unreal Engine 3 on which it's based). Then play it and you can see all the work that went in to various parts of the game, the writing, the voice acting, the art, the programming, etc.

Now, compare that to a game like World of Goo that two guys knocked out in their free time.

I chose both of these titles because I feel they are both excellent at what they are supposed to be. However they show the real difference in terms of scale of effort. I'm not saying World of Goo took no effort, it certianly involved no small amount of creativity and skill, but it didn't take the massive team, and thus incur the massive cost, that Mass Effect did.

As such, it makes some sense that World of Good was like $20 at launch whereas Mass Effect was $50.

Then there's the fact that I don't think anyone is really forcing low prices on indy games. I'm not saying there aren't specific examples, however overall you are free to sell your game online for whatever price you see fit. However, if you want to charge $50-60 same as the big name games do, well then don't be surprised if people demand the same level of assets.

Again back to my World of Goo vs Mass Effect thing I own World of Goo and it was worth the $20 I spent on it. I wouldn't have gotten it for $50 though. It's a neat puzzle game, but not worth that much.

Mathematics

[Zarkonnen]

What most of the commenters seem to be ignoring is the evidence that the author is doing perfectly well selling his game for $28.

Having played (and paid for) one of them, given it took me dozens of (entertaining) hours to complete, I don't have much of a problem with that price.

I think what the post really boiled down to was:

Expect high ($30 - $60) prices for big commercial titles because they cost millions. Huge development costs divided by lots of customers result in high prices.

Expect low prices ($1 - $10) for indie games in popular genres (puzzle, etc) because there is lots of competition. Low development costs divided by lots of customers result in low prices.

But expect highish ($10 - $30) prices for indie games in niche genres, because there are simply fewer potential customers. Low(ish) development costs divided by few customers must result in highish prices, or you lose money.

Yes, there are free flash games, but point me at a free flash game in the same genre and of the depth of the author's games?

Re:Recession

[thetoadwarrior]

His argument was very reasonable. He stated that their costs went up so they raised the price of their game form $25 to $28 which no negative effect.

He states that some games are worth more than others and that his problem has to do with companies like Amazon not caring about that and instead trying to force all indie titles to be cheap.

He is right. He should be able to test the market and adjust the price as he wants rather than Amazon dictating to him that it has to be cheap.

The recession isn't an excuse for everything to be cheap no more than the inflation we're experiencing is an excuse for companies to raise prices.

are new games too expensive?

[jollyreaper]

When I see "used" games for sale for $54, is it time to ask if they're charging too much for new games? Hell, yes. I don't pick them up until they're $20 or less.

Re:are new games too expensive?

[cliffski]

That depends, if you buy a new game for $54 and play it for 54 hours, that $1 an hour. Compare that with going bowling/drinking/skating/movies/anythingelsewhatsoever.

gaming is a dirt cheap past-time.

Re:Evidence of the contrary

[Morlark]

I absolutely agree. In fact, if you're going to point out indie games that are doing well at a higher than "normal" price point, I'd have to mention Illwinter's Dominions 3. You might say that it's something of a niche game, in that it'd probably only appeal to people who already like turn-based strategy games. But within that niche, I wouldn't hesitate to say that this is the single best game I have ever played. And it's going for $55 at the moment. The game is several years old now, and they've successfully maintained sales at that price point, because, quite simply, the game really is worth it.

Most other indie games, I would never consider paying that much for. Even the ones that are fun, if they don't have any depth of gameplay or replayability value then they're not going to be worth much more than $10, maybe $15. That's why all these publishers are aiming for that low price point - because it's a reasonable one for the quality of games they sell. The games that actually are high quality will sell for what they're worth.

Re:More expensive? You mean LESS expensive

[brkello]

Then maybe game companies should get in to the used game market. Offer to buy back their games and sell them used from an online site.

Some games are niche

[cliffski]

It is not at all that simple.

My best selling game is this one:
http://www.positech.co.uk/democracy2
It's a very complex and in-depth political simulation game based around the idea of the interconnectedness of all aspects of government policy, and modelled using a custom-written neural network. It assumes a decent understanding of modern political issues and a willingness to not be put off by what appears (at first glance ) to be a VERY complex interface (it's actually not that complex).

In short, the game appeals to politics junkies, political science students, and people who enjoy chaos theory and complexity.

It doesn't matter HOW good it is, how polished it is, or how well I market it...if your idea of games is Halo, you will NOT enjoy it, and NOT buy it.

Many games exist in a very small, specific niche, a niche where the developer can make a living selling $22.95 games like that one. A lot of those niches are already on the borderline (mine is). Unless I can actually generate a worldwide greater interest in playing political strategy games, I can't expand my sales. So a drop in prices just means less overall revenue, and thus makes it less viable to make games like that.

If all you want is 'mainstream' games that appeal to everyone, why bother with indie games anyway? we make games for specific groups of players, not the whole market.

Yes, they should.

[Peganthyrus]

Yes, they should be more.

I am a long-time fan of Jeff Minter. The other year, he released "Space Giraffe" for the XBox360. As a downloadable game for $5.

He did not, I believe, make back his development costs.

(Admittedly, it was a hard game to get into; I'm hoping he learnt from the reactions people who are not wired the same way he and I are, and that his next game will be more approachable.)

Me, I loved it. And when he ported it to the PC, I leapt at the chance to buy it again. Not because I wanted the extra levels he added, not because I wanted to play it on a PC - but because I wanted to finish paying Jeff for the fun I had. I literally felt guilty because $5 felt like I was ripping him off for the amount of fun his game gave me.

The race to the bottom, with the $1 games on iPhones, is one that nobody wins - developers abandon their indy dreams and get a job as a minor cog working on "Derivative Safe Game IV", users don't get more cool games. All we get are throwaway pieces of crap that extend brands, and first efforts by newbies living in their parents' basements.