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?"

Comments

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

It boils down to Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Our brain attaches abnormally high values to food/clothing/sleep/sex because without these, we cannot function properly. Video games show up much higher on the pyramid, and are therefore less necessary and less valuable.

Averages are misleading with a "long tail"

[Zigurd]

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.