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Letting Customers Decide Pricing On Game DLC
An anonymous reader writes "How much should game developers be charging for DLC? It seems that one indie dev has decided to carry out a unique experiment. The latest expansion pack for Gratuitous Space Battles is priced at $5.99 — or is it? It turns out there is both a standard ($5.99) version and a discount version ($2.99). And the difference between them is... nothing. The buyers have been left to make their own decisions on whether or not they should pay full price, and send more money to the developer, or treat themselves to a deserved discount. The buy page even lists comparisons of national incomes, average salaries and even the price of sausages to help buyers make up their minds. Will this catch on? Will Microsoft start asking us whether or not we should get a discount and trust us to answer honestly?"
Well, he's basically tesseracting the gap in time between when the DLC is released and the point where it goes on sale on Steam for half price (which is where it sells the most, according to him) by offering the DLC at the sale price, while also offering people who are willing to pay full price the option of paying what he feels his work on the content is actually worth.
The fact that he expects to make money on his work should be no surprise. He's experimenting with different ways of doing it instead of trying the tried-and-tested-to-be-shit method of throwing your loyal paying fans under the DRM bus.
Yes, run Linux.
(Please don't mod me funny. I'm serious - I've seen lots of people pirating Windows and Windows apps, I've seen lots of people running Linux for all sorts of reasons but I have never yet seen anyone run Linux because they can't pirate software. Because they don't want to pirate software (and perhaps can't afford to purchase legitimately), sure.)