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On the Expectation of Value From Inexpensive Games
An article by game designer Ian Bogost takes a look at what type of value we attach to games, and how it relates to price. Inspiration for the article came from the complaint of a user who bought Bogost's latest game and afterward wanted a refund. The price of the game? 99 cents. Quoting:
"Games aren't generally like cups of coffee; they don't get used up. They don't provide immediate gratification, but ongoing challenge and reward. This is part of what Frank Lantz means when he claims that games are not media. Yet, when we buy something for a very low price, we are conditioned to see it as expendable. What costs a dollar these days? Hardly anything. A cup of coffee. A pack of sticky notes. A Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger. A lottery ticket. Stuff we use up and discard. ... I contend that iPhone players are not so much dissatisfied as they are confused: should one treat a 99-cent game as a piece of ephemera, or as a potentially rich experience?"
99 cents? What a rip off! On my phone, all the games are .99 cents.
This makes me think of this
There's something about games where people expect to be entertained... no matter the price. It's incredible what people are willing to throw money away on, but games (and sometimes other media) tend to have strange, insanely high expectations.
Shouldn't people expect the same amount of satisfaction out of a 99 cent cheeseburger as they would get out of a 99 cent game? This is definitely a weird phenomenon.
Paying for games? That's SO old school!
Moreover the value of ones time, which degrades when the game experience is good. If the game sucks, then suddenly we grow impatient and want the buck back out of spite. If the game is good, then hours become years as we trance out like lab rats on the crack feeder button test...na na na na ....be the ball billy....
If the consumer thought it was a bad game, he would have probably asked for a refund even if it was only ten cents. Price paid is kind of irrelevant.
I think pretending the consumer is 'confused' about how much he values the game may just distract you from what really happened.
The reason game enjoyment is different from coffee/movie/etc enjoyment is that we typically spend much more time playing a game. How long does it take to drink a cup of coffee? 2-10 mins. Go to a movie theater? 2-4 hours. Play a video game? 20-40 hours for most games which don't plan for replay value.. for those games that do, especially popular online games (WoW, Counterstrike, etc), the number can go into hundreds or thousands of hours.
The game has to deliver a constant flow of "funness" for that duration, both in comparison to what playing another game would deliver, and in comparison to doing something other than playing games in that time. If for example your job pays you $20/h, then when you get a video game and after a few hours feel its crappy and not fun to play, you'd treat the hours lost as money you might as well have made working. This expense stacks on top of whatever money you paid for that game. So if you got a 99c game and wasted 4 hours of your life on it in what seemed like work and not fun, you suffered a loss of $80 you otherwise could have made (yes I know not everyone can just "add" paid work hours to their schedule at will, but the general analogy holds). The more long you expected the game to last (such as buying an MMO), the bigger your disappointment would be when you realise it sucks, particularly if you invested a lot of time learning to play or levelling your character only to realize the game is a dead end and the process hasn't been fun in its own right either.
MMOs have already adapted to this kind of consumer rationale by usually shifting their pricing structure from a flat fee to a monthly deposit. If you play an MMO for years, you will pay MUCH more overall than the game's shelf price. But the payments will be gradual and if you keep paying, the idea is that you keep enjoying the game for the duration for which you are billed. If not, then you wasted those hours of your life which you are never going to get back on something that wasn't fun, and regardless of how cheap the game was to buy, you paid too much.
Waiting for Duke Nukem Forever Forever.
All it was was an infinity symbol spinning while Duke randomly spouted phrases like "Come Get Some!" "It's time to kick ass and chew Bubblegum and I'm all out of Bubblegum" and "Who want some Wang" (The last one slipped in by accident. Really.)
A guy goes to a $5 lady of the night, and he gets crabs. So the next day he goes back to complain and the woman says, 'Hey, it was only $5, what did you expect... lobster?'
... games are just cheap entertainment for most people. They are nothing more unless the game is REALLY well made and that is INCREASINGLY rare today.
If the consumer thought it was a bad game, he would have probably asked for a refund even if it was only ten cents. Price paid is kind of irrelevant.
Years ago, my wife and I had a yard sale. A bunch of our shiat parked in the front yard with little signs made with white masking tape and a sharpie. We had a full set of Time-Life books that were fairly recent. We figured they'd go quickly at $0.25 apiece. And while we were asked about them repeatedly, they didn't sell.
But then we raised the price, from $0.25 to $2 apiece. Suddenly, they weren't "junk" books, they were suddenly valuable! They sold quickly, many of them "worked over" to $1 apiece.
Most of the value you see in things around you aren't based on your assessment of the value, but rather your acceptance of the assertion of value. You value things not for their relative qualities, but for the value asserted by the salesman.
I drive a 10-year-old Saturn 4-door car, a very common car in my town. It's very reliable, it's got a good safety record, mine has just shy of 200,000 miles on the original engine/transmission. Parts are widely available, and cheap to obtain. Even with over a decade of heavy driving and lots of miles, the exterior looks quite nice, and the interior is still together.
By any measure, this car delivers value upon value upon value. Yet it was a cheap car, even when new! Meanwhile, a BMW commands top notch prices even though merely copying a key costs well over $100.
Why? Well, they are a well-engineered piece of equipment, but it's definitely not 5-10x as reliable as my cheap Saturn. They are perhaps marginally safer, but certainly not 5-10x as safe as my cheap Saturn. Parts are expensive, they are expensive to repair by anybody's estimation.
So for what reason does the BMW continue to demand such a price premium if not the simple fact that it's asserted as a high-priced car?
And this isn't just true for cars. People assert themselves automatically, without thinking it. For example, women dress the part almost uniformly. For some reason, you can spot a cheap tramp a mile away. They dress/act "trampy". Geeks look "geeky". Assholes look rather.... "assholey".
People go to great lengths to look the part of who they are. Nearly all of them.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
This statement about value seems to be a common observation in my country these days. I figure it's important to note that the rapid expansion of normal society into the l33t world of information systems has destabilized many businesses (and thus valuation systems) in the last ten years. Look at second hand books, for example: once a fairly widespread sort of business. Today, at Amazon you can pick up any well-thumbed paperback for the price of shipping, thus most second-hand bookshops can't afford to have that kind of stuff on the shelf. Then you get the weekend-or-maybe-just-holidays-bibliophile who cruises into my shop expecting to drop a buck for a copy of Steinbeck or Burroughs and finds that the only Modern Library copy in the store is twelve bucks. (It's more detailed than that, really..) Point is, it's destabilizing and many people can't really tell what to pay for something. (Oh yeah, re:China too.. and RIAA... and, etc..) As far as the actual quote from Mr. Lantz: He's right about games being as ancient as man (what is business but a game?) but there is a subtle detail in specifics (re:Plato): A computer game utilizes media as a primary factor in the "playing" behavior of humans. Notice the way that a game like American Football doesn't actually require any visual or aural media, but there is in fact quite a lot of it. The uniforms, the logos, and even the music of which certain select tracks have become the usual sounds at a game. Perhaps computer games are an extension of games like Battleships or Hangman, where the media provides a specific enhancement of the player's imaginations or artistic side. However you cut it, they are art and they are a very young art. The proliferation of Flash games has totally boggled me and I wouldn't have expected it even ten years ago. It will be a rocky road, just like it was for Gutenberg's book... just don't insult me games, Mr. Lantz.
As an iPhone game developer myself who recently released a game (some shameless advertising: Tuzzle) at what I think is a very reasonable price: $0.99, I'm amazed by the negative comments I immediately received from people who didn't actually buy the game. Most of them complained about the fact that there are "only" 25 levels. Instead of putting 100 boring levels, I decided to design 25 challenging levels which would provide a few hours of entertainment. For less than the price of a cup of coffee, I still think that this is more than acceptable.
I have the feeling that these days, only quantity matters and people got used to have everything for free with the Internet and expect impressive graphics, hours of gameplay for free...
Is $0.99 for a few hours of fun expensive?
- Raph
I never had the original XBox, but when I saw it was compatible with the X360, I found a used copy of Morrowind for $2. GOTY edition, no less, with the expansion packs. Yes, $2 at my work's monthly swap meet (it's an engineering outfit, so the swap meet has all sorts of computer stuff, test equipment, great for the mad scientist in your house) Must have gotten a couple hundred hours of enjoyment out of it. I wish Bethesda would port Daggerfall and Arena over to XBox Live Arcade.
i have gotten much more enjoyment out of games i have paid for. I spent longer playing them, enjoyed playing them more, got more involved in them etc... when compared to games i have pirated. I put this down (atleast in part) to that having paid for it ill stick with it longer, 'ive paid for it so i better play it...', so i play it a little longer, get through the couple of boring bits and so just enjoy it more. Sure there have been games ive pirated that i got as involved in as ones ive purchased, but as a proportion of the total number of games, its much less.
Media gets used up?
Games are very much like a cup of coffee, the race to the bottom is what happens in perfect competition. The net economic profit in such a scenario is zero - which is exactly what Bogost describes:
"That's just about enough to pay for the iPhone and Mac laptop or desktop you'll need to develop for the platform in the first place. Put more plainly, for the average developer the App Store is a financial wash."
The only way for a seller to make an economic profit in such an environmnet is to differentiate their product. In fact, the coffee industry with many suppliers and substitutes is analgous to the iTunes store, and demonstrates different business models for individual companies to turn a profit.
He concludes: "If everyone selling games doubled or tripled their prices, then the average cost of games for iPhone might rise above the threshold of cognitive dissonance."
Not everybody needs to raise their price. Some coffee beans are purchased on the commodity market for your "freeze dried Taster's Choice," while coffee retailers serving $5 lattes pay higher rates for specialty contracts.
The game industry will have similar price stratification catering to different consumer needs. There will be a market for the 99 cent hit-or-miss products and a seperate one for the $15 marketing blockbusters.
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Say $10 for a (new release) movie = 2 hours of entertainment. You can argue that movies are overpriced, but I think it's a good starting point. It's in the entertainment 'arena', some are good, some are bad, some are short, but so are games. If a $10 indie game entertains me for 2 hours, I figure it's good value. If a $60 game entertains me for at least 12 hours, then I figure it's good value. If I thought I'd get 48 hours out of Rock Band Beatles ... ok, I still wouldn't consider that.
If that doesn't work for me I just pretend I bought it "for the kids". The 6yr old is loving his Killzone 2.
This water is terrible! I want my free back!
(Okay, that was funnier when I was a kid and water was free.)
So for what reason does the BMW continue to demand such a price premium if not the simple fact that it's asserted as a high-priced car?
BMWs aren't cars. They're billboards to announce how rich you are. There's no point in buying used, or building one to last more than three years, because having an *old* BMW just means that you couldn't afford to buy this year's model. If you're trying to repair an out-of-warranty "beemer", you're doing it wrong. They're a lot like the "i'm rich" app on the iPhone app store.
What I find confusing, though, is that people of average means who will pay $40k for a car will turn around and make fun of YOU for paying $2k for a computer or more than $300 for a bed. It's like they don't even realize that they could get a decent car for half that price, and have enough left over to afford luxury everything else.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Your ideals are correct, however your approach is all wrong. Let me explain this to your using only recent anecdotal evidence:
I'm not going to cover the AAA titles because they are simple: put together a great game dynamic with a killer team of artists and programmers, and you get your AAA title. Everyone who doesn't dislike the genre will like it, and the only reasons to fathom a refund on these games are "I thought I would like it, but I dind't." Not refundable, I'm afraid. Almost ALL games up until recently were these, so refunds were never an issue.
Now we are getting all these "indie game studios" and people in their basement "publishing" games. Most of these are just "mods" of games which would otherwise be free. Hell, some recent games for sale were free mods before. My point? Lets look at teh good, teh bad, and teh ugly:
TEH GOOD:
I've bought games like Peggle and Plants vs. Zombies. They have very little content (read art/graphics, sound, etc.) They were "cheaper" to make, but they hold just as much value as that $50 Half Life 2 game. They are just as fun and addicting, and I play them for hours, just as I played HL2 and Fallout 3 for hours. It just happens they have about $35 fewer assets put into the game, but they are just as fun. Hell, I just hit 80 hours of gameplay time in Fall Out 3 and I don't see myself putting the game down in the near future... it's addicting. (See the end of the post for a Fall Out 3 rant.)
TEH BAD:
Sin Episodes: Emergence. Great potential, fun gameplay (albeit the same as HL2), and a good story with great (AMAZING) art, especially for an "indie" studio. They promised the game would be extended slowly over time by the release of additional "episodes." So I bought the first full priced episode only to get "we quit, it's over" right after and to never see the game fully realized. I wanted a refund, but I couldn't justify it because it was a good game despite being incredibly short. So I stand having lost a little bit of money, but I don't feel like I wasted my money (this time).
TEH UGLY: /wasted/ my monies. It consisted of non-animated "zombies" simply respawning in "waves" and trying to kill you. That's it. You kill them and they just drop. Such a horrible game. Not to mention the borken server browser and menu system. If you are going to sell a mod, at least put more effort into it than free mods out there. I got to play for all of 1 minute. I demanded a refund of $15. The first game I ever even thought about wanting a refund for. Just because it was so bad. I was disgusted that someone would try to even sell that garbage. I could have made a similar mod for HL2 with just the level editor, set spawn points for zombies and have made the game myself. It was just not even worth $1 to me. Shit, if I paid $0.05 for the game, I would have demanded a refund. (See "Teh Bad" about about a cheap game I bought that wasn't good but not refund worthy.)
Killing Floor was a mod for UT, and made me feel completely "used" by having
REPLY TO ANOTHER GUY:
To the guy wanting to do "rental fees" on steam: Lower your rental fee to $1. Trust me. Access to a game (especially if it's not a AAA title) for 1 week is not worth $5. I wouldn't even pay $5 to have access to Halflife 2 for a week. If it's a good game, price it as you see fit and let it be. If it sells, good... If not, don't blame "market place value" for your business failures. Seems to be the "thing to do" lately: "It wasn't my business, it was the market, BAIL ME OUT GOVERNMENT OVERLORDS!" (Same argument given by RIAA. The MPAA is comming back into a good light with me and a lot of people, so don't include the MPAA with the Mafi-RIAA.)
FALL OUT 3 RANT:
Although I'm a bit upset about only being able to get to a level 20 character, as I'm nowhere near done with the game and am already at level 18, but that's another discussion. This game is ****ing aweesome. I grew up in the D.C. metro area, and they captured the "essence"
Honestly, at that price it's pretty tacky to be asking for a refund. And it certainly wouldn't be worth *my* time to try getting it. It may however be worth my time to get some contact info for the developer and send him a short note about my take on the game. There's at least the chance then that he might take it as constructive criticism and make a better game next time. Asking for a refund tells him nothing other than that you're a cheapskate and didn't think the game was worth $0.99.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
With free games, I feel no regret if the game is bad (I wasted no money) and I feel very connected to the game if I like it. Favorite games right now are Battle for Wesnoth and Freeciv.
When you're young and still unsure of your skills, it's really easy to promise that you'll do a full-color piece of art for something like US$5 - waaaaay too low. After all, all the other beginners are pricing like that; hell, some of the people teetering on the cusp between "fan" and "pro" are still pricing themselves like that.
Now, artists will trade stories about their nightmare commissions; like any specialist group, we share our war stories. And the one thing I've noticed is that almost every story about a picky commissioner who demands ten rounds of changes on an finished piece is also one about a commission that's way below what the artist's time is worth.
I avoided doing commissions for a long time. When I finally did start doing them, I looked around at the going rates and positioned myself well above the bottom, offering very limited numbers of commissions at a time. And you know what? The first set sold out like lightning. I raised my prices for the second set and they still went quick. And everyone's reaction upon getting their art was "wow!" - some people even threw in a bit more money afterwards. Nobody asked for changes, everyone knew they'd be getting my interpretation of their scenario.
A few sets of commissions down the line, I did an experiment: instead of setting a price, I let people pay what they thought it was worth. One person who was quite broke paid about half of my usual price; the other two people in that set of commissions more than made up for her lack of funds.
If you price yourself like a slave, people will treat you like one. Set your rates to something fair and you get treated like the skilled professional you are. All the people writing iPhone games for $.99 are hanging out a sign that says "my hard work is worth next to nothing"; it is not surprising to find consumers treating them badly.
egypt urnash minimal art.
On this platform, you happen to get a music single you listen to over and over again until you're sick of it for a dollar as well.
Its not as relevant what a dollar gets you in the rest of the world as what this particular market segment sees a dollar being worth.
If your game isn't as entertaining to them as the latest piece of music they downloaded and for at least as long, you should expect them to be annoyed at the price.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
A $20 bottle of wine tastes better than a $6 bottle, because it usually is. But, is a $100 bottle better than a $20 bottle?
Usually yes, because the customers factor in the price when they experience the product.
Reminds me of the anecdote of the jewelry store owner who had a bunch of novelty products that weren't moving. She decided to cut their price by half, but the manager misunderstood her over the phone, and wrote instead "All items in this display, Price x 2".
They immediately started jumping out of the case.
Is $0.99 for a few hours of fun expensive?
It is if you're young enough that the law prohibits you from having a job.
The average of revenues for applications in the iPhone app store might be less than $3000 but this is somewhat misleading. Like any publishing market there are a few winners and many, many also-rans. If you calculated what the average book out of Amazon's 3.5 million books took in, you might conclude you can't make any money at all publishing books. But even a specialized tech book on a current topic is going to rank in the 20,000-40,000 range in sales rank, and that is in the top 2%. There is a lot of obscure stuff that got printed at some time or another that really can't be considered part of the market that real publishing companies participate in.
So, if you put a truly professional effort into a product, you can reasonably expect results that are way above the average, and that seems to be borne out by the tennis application mentioned in the article: It made several times the average. But, due to low prices, that amounts to only a few tens of thousands of dollars over the product lifespan.
The price erosion in the iPhone app store is going to be a real worry to real game publishers. If you can't sell a game for $19.99 you won't get quality studio-produced games, except as an experiment in the market. Good or bad, it sure is different from the DS. At those pricing levels, the number of financial winners will be very small, and since price erosion is hard to undo, new revenue sources will have to be found in order to change the fact that only a very small number of products will make revenue in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I wrote parts of this stuff
What's that old, but very common, expression? You get what you pay for.
Is a BMW/Benz 5x better than a Honda Civic? It may be a better performance vehicle, but more reliable? Not really. I've got 200k mi on my '97, and while it's reliable it's pricey. How about a Land Rover? Definitely not, yet they are easily twice as expensive as any other SUV.
People commonly associate price with quality. If you go into a store to buy something, and X is $2 while Y is $4, most people will buy the $4 because they assume "There's gotta be something about Y to justify the $2 increase in price.
The worst price? FREE. Why? Because psychologically when someone sees something that is FREE, they assume that it has no value. Have a yard sale? Don't mark anything FREE, otherwise people will look at it and assume it's junk. Would you "buy" FREE food from the supermarket? Doubt it, you'd probably think "there's gotta be something wrong with it."
Bottom line: without doing any research people look at two objects/services of different prices and instinctively think that the higher priced object can justify it's higher price.
You're an iPhone game developer, and you're complaining about the lack of sophistication of your clientele? Face it, the kind of people who appreciate a well thought-out challenging game are not the kind of people who shop for games on the iPhone app store. Give your audience what they want.
I've forgotten the technical name for the term, but there's a well proven concept in behavioral theory that people do not proportionally associate the cost of payments with the actual cost of the payment. There's a fixed cost emotionally for any transaction, no matter how small the actual purchase. In simpler terms, people feel much less happy making 100 $1 payments than they do one $100 payment (all things being equal). I actually think this irrational behavior explains the attitude of buyers much better than the article does. I also think it is why micropayments are so hard to make work.
The author of the article is attempting to make the claim that games somehow fall into a special category of consumer behavior. I do not think this is the case at all. We have an irrational "fixed cost" for any transaction, regardless of price. If you buy a nickel gumball and it came out of the machine defective, you'd probably be upset- far more upset than the loss of a nickel actually justifies. Exactly the same way that the disappointment with a .99 game and demanding a refund is out of whack with the loss of a dollar. I personally believe that the disappointment of a failed transaction has to do with a perceived violation of trust (vital to any relationship or trade), which is far more upsetting to a social animal than the loss of an insignificant sum of money.
I work at a computer surplus, and people are not just this cheap about games....
So, we used to sell inkjets for $5 a pop, as-is. We'd make sure it prints a page, and that's it. People kept bringing them back and bitching whenever they ran out of ink or anything.
We dropped them to $1, put "as-is" stickers on them, and as soon as a customer picked the printer up told them "Hey, this printer is strictly as-is" (Computers etc. have a 1-week warranty against DOA.) People would *say* "OK", but in actuality it'd go right in one ear and out the other -- they'd STILL come back and start bitching and whining "Oh, it only printed like 50 pages" etc.
So now, guess what? No ink jets for you! People come in "Hey don't you sell ink jets?" "No people kept trying to return them even though they are as-is". "Oh I wouldn't do that". "Well, that's what the people said that returned them too, no I won't sell you an ink jet." Simple as that.
One person even complained they should be reimbursed for gas! I lipped off a bit at them and pointed out "I didn't make you buy a Suburban, you knew you'd burn a lot of gas when you bought it."
The question is how much are you willing to pay for entertainment, on an hourly basis? If the cost is <= that value, then the game is a good deal for you.
Of course time is not always the only factor for entertainment. Maybe it's something really spectacular or special so you don't mind paying more if it lives up. Or maybe it's so you can be with friends.. a beer isn't worth $5 but the time in the pub with your buddies is. Or maybe it fills some other need... like porn. :-) Generally, though, with 'commoditized entertainment' like computer games, cost-per-hour is a good measure.
For me I have generally been happy if I pay no more than $1/hr, so a $0.99 game is good enough if I get an hour of entertainment out of it. This has held for almost 20 years, going back to NES cartidges. However, it now seems to be too high. Orange Box kinda blew the curve, as I narrow in on $0.10/hr, and some of the other cheap games I've bought on Steam have been close to that mark too. So despite inflation and higher wages and stuff the acceptable cost-per-hour for computer games actually seems to be dropping... which isn't all that surprising I guess given that gaming is so huge now and there is way more supply.
That's 33 cents per hour. Take a game like Sim City 4, which sells now for $15, and ask if 45 hours sounds like the correct amount of fun to receive from it. (I'm probably at 45 hours right now, but I'm not yet done playing it.) Take a classic like DOOM which you probably bought for $20 or so, and played for hundreds and hundreds of hours. It's easy to imagine DOOM being less than 10 cents per hour.
Then there's Super Mario World. I may have played that game for a thousand hours, and I didn't pay anything for it: I found it and its console in the closet when I moved in. That's inifinty hours of fun per dollar.
Clearly your 99 cent game simply doesn't measure up. Just because people are paying less than a dollar doesn't mean they are paying nothing at all. Try 25 cents, which will yeild 12 hours per dollar, at which point I'm sure the only complaint you will hear is that you don't have enough games available for purchase.
The state has - rightly or wrongly - decided to use capitalism as the basis for producing and distributing goods such as online games. This differs from the pro-crap games faction's perception of capitalism as a trap for separating suckers from their money. If you represent a product as a game, and charge people actual money for it, it has to function as described; whether it costs 99 cents or $99 billion is completely irrelevant.