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Dollar Apps Killing Traditional Gaming?
donniebaseball23 writes "There can be no denying that the rise of smartphones and tablets has had a major impact on the gaming business. The prevalence of free and 99-cent apps has changed consumers' perception of value. Mike Capps, president of Gears of War developer Epic Games, said, 'If there's anything that's killing us [in the traditional games business] it's dollar apps. How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it? They're used to 99 cents. As I said, it's an uncertain time in the industry. But it's an exciting time for whoever picks the right path and wins.'"
The installed base for iOS is over what, 60 million units? And Android is like, 40 million. So if you develop a game that costs a million bucks to develop and sell it for ten bucks, you have to get 0.13 percent of the users to buy it to break even. And if it's a 99 cent thing you and your mom cooked up in a few weeks during summer break that's cute and catches on, you may never work in a real job ever in your life - before you're even out of middle school.
An interesting game. It sounds like the only way to lose is not to play.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You sell a $5 app and hope you make 12 times the sales. Or that other costs are sufficiently lower to justify the reduced income per unit
No really, they often sell big name game titles with a grand discount in for example the holiday season.
I think that whoever alters his/her business model to a new more flexible design (being able to put 75% off the price for a game for example), wins this battle.
That makes me think of an ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."
Shh.
The $1 apps you get are great for distracting you from boring commutes or the odd 5 minute little game when you get a moment, but they won't be replacing larger games of the kind Epic makes for a long time, if ever. Angry Birds is fun and all, but even the most involved games in that market are nothing close to something like CoD. What they *should* be worried about is lower priced/free indie games, like Minecraft.
Your $60 game should be incomparable to a $1 game, in terms of both gameplay and technology. If it's not, you are Doing It Wrong.
"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?"
You can have your Angry birds etc. and i will play my Demons souls, Dead space, Gears of War and Portal 2
Why anytime, anything gains a bit of popularity it automatically starts to 'kill' anything remotely similar ?
Most of these get deleted after 5 minutes (and in the case of the first item, within 30 seconds). Games like Street Fighter IV are completely unplayable on a touchscreen. I don't think Epic really has anything to worry about.
Summation 2
How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it?
Has there ever really been such a thing?
Maybe it's just me, but to me "Traditional Gaming" has always meant stuff like traditional boardgames, wargames, and RPGs. Video Games certainly took a lot of their possible customers, but stuff like Catan and Warhammer still sells.
I'm sure traditional video games will survive.
Isn't this the same as asking whether short scruffy videos on You Tube are going to usurp Blockbuster films? I think the only threat would be if smart phone games could be developed so that the game arena was the real world and the phone was some mission interface. That would be neat - best it isn't a FPS though...
Make a good game and it will sell itself. Don't spend most of the funds on marketing.
-Ex beta tester.
Cheap Games a Risk To the Industry, Says Nintendo President
Of the phone games I've bought that cost maybe 1€ or 5€, most of them have been pretty bad. Either the game is so easy to beat that it only lasts a few hours, or it is so boring that you won't play it. For example, the chess game I bought for 5€ was so simple to beat even at the highest difficulty level that there was no point in it. So for me the $60 console games still provide a lot of value because they provide many more times entertainment than the cheap phone games.
Football Odds
I don't expect to get multi-player FPS HD blah blah blah on a 4" screen. I expect to get a little doo-dad game limited to what I can do with a touch screen, a couple buttons, and accelerometer input. Something to occupy a few minutes at a time here and there.
We already had this same article with NOA CEO Reggie Fils-Aime bitching about the same thing despite the fact that they're absorbing the same behavior with the Shop Channel, which BTW, makes buying World of Goo easy & cheaper (on both ends) instead of driving to an archaic dying store to get a hardcopy for 2-5x the price. Random Rant: I think Sony has something here w/ the PSP phone. I think Nintendo should develop an android handset of their own, but with a patented APU so it'd still technically be their platform, & they can still be archaic if they want & keep a DS slot on it if they can't spare the 200MiB/Game.
Really. Most of what you game dev studios/industry was producing, was CRAP. $60 was the perception of the 'price point' that the marketing types came up with - "hey, what is the maximum people in america will pay for a game ?" turned out, that perception was wrong.
you were rehashing the same crap over and over and pushing it to masses with marketing. just like movies. trailers, marketing hype, ads, showing only the best few parts you added to the game, whereas the rest was rehash of the previous version or other games. taking no risks to please shareholders. a few cents per share more for every shareholder, more important than satisfaction of your customer.
that was why there was rampant piracy.
thank mobile apps. this '$60 blockbuster' bullshit will end.
Read radical news here
Our perception of value is distorted anyway. Example- It takes about 100 days to raise a chicken to the point where it's slaughtered, plucked, driven to your supermarket and refrigerated. It'll cost 5 GBP. At that price, 5p/day per chicken, someone manages to feed the chicken, clean after it, vaccinate it, transport it, keep it cold and apparently still make a profit on it. But don't expect to be getting premium stuff at that price.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
The Multi-Player experience is what provides the gaming console experience with value and makes it "sticky." A player buys the latest $60 game because the people he hangs with online -- his guild, his clan, platoon, his whatever -- are buying it and want to "move on" to the next shared experience. It's a proposition that works for the developer, the online service, and the player.
But the solo-only game? I have not purchased a solo-only game at full price, within the first months of its launch, since the debut of the original Xbox. It'll be less than half-price within a year if it reviews well, and under $15 and bundled with a second game if it does not. I can wait. Not being in high school and needing to brag that I "beat" a game in a weekend, there is zero value to me in owning a solo game when it first comes out.
Add to this the idle-time-wasters of inexpensive and addictive arcade games like Angry Birds, Plants versus Zombies, etc., I mean... geez... there's still only 24 hours in a day, last time I checked...
I've never paid $60 for a game. I bought a PS3 when the slim version came out, and there were several good games priced down to $30 at the time. That is about all I'm comfortable paying.
Just last night, I was in Walmart and saw Portal 2 for PS3 for $60. No way. I just gifted it on steam to my nephew for $40. It's not just perception of value; same game, lesser quality on console probably, much greater cost.
Saying that 1$apps are killing real games is like saying comic-books and/or short-stories are killing novel sales.
Mike Capps, president of Gears of War developer Epic Games, said, 'If there's anything that's killing us [in the traditional games business] it's dollar apps.
I thought if there was anything killing you it was piracy. That's what you guys have been sprooking about for years on end, anyway.
What it is killing is the pricing of games with an 8hours single player mode at $60. There are two choices, either make games which are worth the price or reduce the price.
I am a long time PC Gamer and currently in state of intoxication over the amount of gaming goodness I can get on the platform these days for buttons. I can get so much high quality gaming for $5 and $10 that Angry Birds for a dollar seems like the rip off to me.
Perhaps it is impossible to cover the cost of a traditional AAA game by selling it at such a low price but the market is moving on towards dramatically lower prices whether the publishers like it or not. Maybe increased sales will help compensate for lower prices. Digital distribution surely saves some cash as well.
How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it?
Perhaps it isn't worth $60.
If a $1 game provides me with about 1 week of entertainment, a $60 game should provide me with 60 weeks of entertainment.
There aren't many games that can do that, and there are even less that give me the convidence to pay for those 60 weeks up front.
I fear TFA calculates "worth" as "the amount of money we had to spend to make it". There used to be a day when games could be fun without gigabytes of graphics and sound. That day has never really gone, it's just been obscured by an increasing focus by developers on adding stuff that isn't part of the actual game.
If I bake a cake and package it in a golden, diamond encrusted box designed by some guy that changed his first and last name into a single, unpronouncable word, the cake hasn't increased in value at all. Sure, it looks much nicer with all the shiny bits, but it can't compensate for the fact that I can't bake a decent cake.
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Dollar games are not killing anything. Things change. Period. Adapt or die. Its called the free market.
One game I have been desperately looking for on both Android and IOS, and failing to find a suitable version of, is Baldurs Gate - put that on the mobile scene and I would be more than willing to pay more than a few bucks for it. But it doesn't exist, and nothing is rising to replace it, so I dont spend my money.
Games will always be sold and bought for what they're worth to the consumer... and guess what? People are still buying $60 games. This is old news and I'm sick of hearing about it.
I bought some 30eruo games for the wii. They seem perfectly targeted for my children. However the gameplay sucks so much that they are often not played again after a first time, or only once or twice. It just seems win windows port where you have to point at the screen to emulate the mouse movement.
There is not always a correlation between price and quality. A lot of those "low-prices" 30 euro games were 60-70 dollar at release.
Te solution is to read review and recommencements, and not the specifications of the games. Same goes for appstore games.
How do they end up with a $60 price anyway ?
Hello? Portal 2
There you go. You sold it for more than a buck. The truth is that a dollar game should not be a direct substitute for a $60 game and if it is you're making it wrong. This is true almost everywhere - you can rent a movie for your family for $1 or go to the movies for $50 (or a football game for hundreds). You can buy $2 flip-flops or $400 designer footwear. You can get $0.50 ramen or $30 steak, Two buck chuck or a $100 bottle of wine.
The gaming industry has always been volatile and unpredictable and if this guy is just figuring that out he's forgotten a lot of history.
There was a report here a few months back or so that linked to a game company's discovery that quite a few people only played a $60 game for a few hours and many never completed it before moving on to the next game. These are the folks that are being lost. Instead of spending $60 on a game they don't complete, they spend a buck or a few bucks on a game for their phone. It lets them play a little when waiting or idle without having to go to their computer, power it up and go back in.
I was a pretty heavy gamer back when Doom, Command and Conquer, Red Alert and StarCraft were popular. As multi-player became more popular, I found I didn't have the time to invest in trying to beat some twitchy 15 year old who had nothing better to do all day. I still get the newer games like StarCraft II and even play them, but I haven't finished it yet. I'll get the other two when they come out as well and may finish it they, or not.
I also have several "games" on my iPad and iPhone ranging from Angry Birds (it's really a puzzle solving game), Popper, and Pocket God to Small World, Rage, and Red Alert with several others in between. They're fine when I'm sitting here at work at lunch or in the car with my wife going somewhere.
The game companies have less of my money because I'm not interested in sports or super realistic multi-player gaming (battlefield 2 or crysis for instance). I like the games like Castle Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, Doom, Quake, Command and Conquer, Red Alert (the original one more than the newer ones), Carmageddon, and StarCraft. Heck, I'd be excited to get many of the games I played back then simply updated to work on the current tech.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
But it's an exciting time for whoever picks the right path and wins.
This is what makes reading the summaries worthwhile. If not for reading that, I'd have thought winning was a boring time.
People still buy conventional games. People still buy hugely expensive to develop RTS games in insane amounts. Many, many people still subscribe to games to the tune of 10 to 15 USD a month. People pick up crazy numbers of the latest run around and shoot people multiplayer games.
So.. no, I wouldn't say that cheap casual games are killing the console and PC game market. People are still willing to pay 60$ for a new game, so people will keep making 60$ new games.
The only problem here and in other places is that anybody has the ability to speak up. That comes with the internet. And the reality is stupid people seem to gain a majority. Not because they are more than smart people, but because they have more free time. In the case of the one having this dillema: there is no dillema. For example one might have the mind and skills to make beautiful coats, but has no idea of how to make shoes and beyond taking a pair and walking around can't really evaluate a pair of shoes either. To get to this particular case: because a claustrated young person can generate a few lines of code does not mean he or she can sell it at a profit. It simply takes a different set of skills. Now, because of the trend of the last decade to imply that SOME programmers are good and that SOME of the good programmers are well paid thus (falsely) the must be smart - any pimple face has assumes a smart stance.
To give a solution to this dillema: maybe you are addressing the wrong crowd. Sure, a Steve Jobs would sell that $60 game at $260, but maybe, just maybe, one who starts with the assumption that his clients would pay only 99c for the product just knocks at the wrong door.
And again, the fat cats in the industry are looking at things backwards. Once the costs are calculated, they figure each copy of the game should go for $60. There may be good reasons for this figure, since they have to recoup their costs. In their head, they think that this $60 figure they discovered is a natural fact, like weight, for instance, is a natural fact. If you take a bunch of apples and put them on a scale, you'll get a certain weight. Give the same bunch of apples to someone else and they'll get the same weight. (Those who would like to quibble can go jump off a cliff a this point.) You can repeat the experiment with 10, 100, 1000 people and maybe after discovering that their scale needs recalibrating, they'll agree on the weight.
The $60 figure is not like this. It is not a natural fact. It is an opinion that the game holds such value to potential buyers that they'll willingly give up $60 for it. And then if you ask 10, 100, 1000 people about how much they value the game, they'll give very different answers. It may very well be that no one agrees that the value of the game is such that it is worth $60. Now, if it so happens that there are games which are sold for $1 which provide what people seek in a game, why should they be willing to pay $60?
So the fat cats say "$60", the market says "no way!" but because the fat cats think their opinion is a natural fact, they then assume that there is something terribly wrong with the world. They do not ever consider that their opinion that their $60 game is "really worth $60" could be mistaken because they think the $60 figure is a natural fact rather than an opinion.
(Other entertainment media also think like this. CD sales declining? It is not because we do not deliver the value people want. It is because something external (e.g. piracy) is interfering with the order of nature.)
99 cent games aren't changing consumer's perception of value. Your intolerant, draconian treatment of your customers are changing their perception of your value.
Premium downloadable content? What the hell is that? I once bought two 3.25" disks full of Doom2 WADs because it was convenient to do so versus downloading them off of ftp.cdrom.org, not because Doom2 was defective by design unless I pay even more for "premium content".
But then, isn't that a problem with the rise of consoles? Not exactly a great place to start for a user mod community.
But at the same time, what the hell is this article going on about? The gaming industry is a huge beast now. Some gaming titles are making more money on opening weekend than movies do. So congratulations, you have managed to trick the consumer into accepting your asinine treatment of them. So I guess...
well
whatever
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
because 1$ games must compete on innovative gameplay, as they can not compete on bling bling!
No it hasn't.
And you're president of Epic Games? I think the reason your company is being "killed in the traditional gaming business" just became obvious...
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Epic's games lack decent scripts and stories. They're all a bit samey and lacking any real variety or innovation. They rely on making games prettier than their last ones which is expensive. They can't compete against cheaper games but the thing is no one was ever really happy to pay $60 for a game especially when it's yet another sequel with another hulking space guy spouting cheesy rubbish.
"If there's anything that's killing us [in the traditional games business] it's dollar apps.
Actually no. What is killing the traditional games business is unneeded bloat in your corporation. In the end of the day there will still be demand for that $60 dollar game. _You_ might not be willing to make it, it might not make _you_ enough money, but some other company eventually will. Maybe they won't be able to pay exorbitant CEO salaries, corporate cars, multi million advertising budgets, corporate campuses, licensed-title games, and teams of lawyers ready to sue players for minor IP infractions. But they will be made, and they will be made with out any of the unnecessary crap that defines your "industry."
Look at the tools needed to make music for example. Today any off the shelf computer can rival a recording studio from 20 years ago. The barrier to entry is way less then it used to be. Programming and game development is going to follow the same path. My only hope for the future is that the game developers get to profit more then the project managers and CEO in the game companies of the future. But thats probably being a little too optimistic.
The days of overpriced crap console games at a fixed 60$/hit are coming to an end. Time to look for gameplay and quality but steamline cost. No more "ages of war 2, 3, 4, 5 etc" as an easy revenue stream. Eventually the apps will whittle down as well just like podcasts did. The proverbial wheat from the chaff separation and we end up with lower cost higher quality gaming options.
-Xen
People beginning to see that games aren't supposed to be big-budget barely interactive movies, want actual games which cost very little to produce.
Film at 11.
Games are worth about $30 tops. These game makers need to adjust to reality. They have been over-charging for entertainment for too long and just like Microsoft, are having a difficult time adjusting when the market changes.
So yes, tiny tablets (phones) and larger tablets are making changes in the software industry. Compete, change or get out of the way. And certainly stop complaining about market forces which you once commanded being taken away from you.
"How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it?" :
The real question is
"Is a $60 game ever worth it ?"
Prices have always been too high, from Nintendo NES cardridge to the last XBox game. That's also why you find piracy.
We want some $20 to $30 Games.
Sounds reasonable. Although you can understand why the established players are concerned.
Now refuses to buy a game that costs more than $1.00?
I don't believe it. Cheap apps have expanded the market to people that wouldn't buy a console. If you're having a hard time selling console games, don't blame the casual gamer who wants to spend 15 minutes on the subway playing a game. Blame the glut of "me, too" games at the high end.
"...it's an uncertain time in the industry. But it's an exciting time for whoever picks the right path and wins.'"
Sheesh. I really get sick and tired of hearing "who is me!" from the gaming industry as they continue to turn record profits.
Bottom line is there is enough demand out there to satisfy damn near every single major player in this industry. If you can't thrive in this world where reality is so bad and stressful that mind-altering legal and illegal drug use is at an all-time high and people are literally craving that alternate reality to escape to every day, then either your product really sucks ass or you're doing it wrong and not paying attention to the several players in the industry who are doing it right. Everyone can win here, just ask Charlie Sheen.
Traditional gaming? You mean, like cards and chess and parcheesi?
How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it?
I have no idea. Let me know when they create one.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
'If there's anything that's killing us [in the traditional games business] it's dollar apps. How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it?
I have seen lots and lots of $.99 games which were worth more than that. And I have seen really really few $60 games which were worth the $60. And they were worth the $60 not because they had loads of content, but because I really enjoyed playing them.
And that's the core of the pricing problem IMO: pumping more content into a basically $10-20 game doesn't make it a $60 game. The wasted $40-50 bucks are just that: wasted.
I wish the game developers went back to basics and started making simpler games appealing to the gaming essentials. I personally miss a shooter which is really a shooter and not also a racing/diving/flying/swimming simulator at the same time.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I feel compelled to write this because I recently played the diabolical port of Bullet Storm on PC. I have absolutely no sympathy for Epic, nor for any other studio that shovels millions of dollars into a 10 hour title and can't even be bothered to support 4:3 aspect ratios. I remember when Epic actually released games with any sort of longevity - Like Unreal Tournament. Now they, like many other 'AAA' developers ship bloated, 'HD' (nonetheless held back by aging console hardware), soulless games that focus more on treating the player like, frankly, a fucking idiot without any free will than a thinking, feeling human being. Unsurprisingly, $60 IS too much to charge for a title and hopefully consumers will vote with their wallets. Perhaps soon we'll get back to having games with well thought out and engaging stories, instead of gratuitous crotch shots and a script that seems to revolve almost exclusively around killing dicks (no matter how funny that occasionally is). In recent years I've had more fun playing 'low-key' titles like Pixel Junk Shooter, Scott Pilgrim and Amnesia than any major title shipped by a big developer.
'If there's anything that's killing us [in the traditional games business] it's dollar apps. How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it? They're used to 99 cents. As I said, it's an uncertain time in the industry. But it's an exciting time for whoever picks the right path and wins.'
I've got a Droid, but I'm not a big mobile gamer. I'm used to spending $50 on a video game for my PC, or Nintendo, or whatever.
And what's killing you [in the traditional games business] is that your games are not really worth it.
Used to be that I'd buy a game for $50 and get 20+ hours of gameplay - not counting multiplayer. And I'm not talking about an RPG either... RPG's would be a good 60+ hours of gameplay.
I remember playing the first Unreal, or Quake, or Marathon, or Half-Life - and they all took me over a week of late nights to finish.
And then you'd have multiple hours of multiplayer on top of that... Usually with some terrific mods bolted on... And then some mods for the single player... Often the modding community would double or even triple the gameplay you got from your original purchase...
Now you shell out $60 for a game and get 5-10 hours of gameplay, plus the multiplayer. Then they'll start releasing more single player content, and multiplayer map packs, and skins, and whatever else as DLC. And the game will be designed around consoles, so there'll be very limited support for modding.
$50 for 20-80 hours of gameplay... Compared to $60 for 5-20 hours of gameplay...
Is it any wonder you're having a hard time selling your games?
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
How can I sell my e-book for 5.99 when someone is selling their's for .99? Maybe quality trumps price in certain cases. Maybe some people just like cheap and weren't going to pay more than .99 for a book or game.
Some pieces of software should cost $0.99 and some should cost $59.99. Suggesting either is killing gaming is silly. If anything price structures on many platforms are too rigid where the platform vendors can't handle a game because its the best price is neither $0.99 or $59.99.
if you cut out the big box store price can be $40 and you just need to pay the hosting fees + CC fees.
No game is worth more than $20.00. Game prices have gotten completely out of hand. And most games these days are jus poorly disguised re-writes of old games anyway. There are very few original games.
The game producers don't seem to realize that a game priced at $20.00 will sell many more copies than one priced at $60.00, especially in these hard economic times. And if its a really fun game, word will get out generating more sales. Notice that I said a really fun game. If the game play is fun, people don't notice if the graphics are super great. Look at Smokin Guns (a free game) that is very popular, Many peoplw would pay for it because it is fun. it has good graphics, but not so that it requires a super expensive video card to run.
They just don't get it. People want reasonabley priced games that are fun to play!
I buy a $1 game to amuse me during lulls at work.
I buy a $60 game to amuse me at home/weekends during my free time.
I am NEVER going to replace one with the other.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
The simple fact of the matter is, that most people are not serious hardcore gamers, and/or don't have enough free time to devote to such levels of gaming...
As a result, very few if any games are worth $60 to most people... Now when there was no other choice, it didn't seem so unreasonable to buy a full priced game to only play once or twice, but now we finally have an alternative which is not illegal.
For me, and many other people i know, most games will only provide a couple of hours of entertainment at best. Sure there are rare exceptions, but in most cases i simply cannot justify paying anything like $60 when something for $1 would also provide me an hour or two of entertainment.
Plus there is the added convenience of a phone, most of the time when i find myself bored with nothing else to do i'm away from home... So in many ways, the $1 app actually provides greater value to me.
There is also the fact that game prices have just kept on going up, while quality has often come down... You get far too many games which are just fancy looking graphics combined with poor gameplay, games which are only trivial updates to existing games and games which are difficult to play because of draconian drm. Sure there is the occasional gem, but they're hard to find in the sea of crap.
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Here's the thing the business people, gaming professionals and even gamers themselves seem to have forgotten: video games are toys. They're slightly more sophisticated than spinning tops and swing sets and their purpose does not change with form. "How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it?" Answer: you don't. You do, however, sell them a Christmas toys that works out of the box. Something that's played with until, ideally for business people, the price is forgotten during enjoyment.
In the case of mobile phone games: cheap, simple, fun. In the case of console games: expensive, often broken & bugged, often require patching, often require DLC purchases to the intended game. It's not hard to see why one model sells more copies.
Maybe you are not losing someone from buying your $60 game. That person might not have been a gamer before the phone or tablet and the $0.99 games. Since the Wii came out there have been whole new groups of people playing games that were never targeted with the previous game systems and expesive games.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
You don't. First of all dollar apps are not a big threat to the big $60 games. What is threatening those big $60 games is the $60 + paid DLC. If I pay $60 it should be all-included with free DLC like StarCraft 2. Portal 2 is a bad example of that as well - a full priced game ($50) but every little outfit I want costs $1-5 and the game isn't all that big and very linear. The rest like Dead Space is again linear and just another zombie shooter. It has some cute concepts in it but it's not worth my money. Then the rest doesn't want me to resell their discs so they'll charge somebody another $10-15 just to unlock the game which is a big no-no to me, I won't buy something if those are the conditions.
Indie developers like FrozenByte develop some very good quality (graphics, engine etc.) games on a budget and charge $10-20 for it and make a profit. Buy the Humble Indie Bundle and get Trine, ShadowGrounds, ShadowGrounds Survivor, the sound track to those games, the source code and art to a canned game and they promise they'll give you one of their upcoming games as well. Choose what you want to pay and download it without DRM for Windows, Mac AND Linux and link it to your Steam account if you want. I paid $50 for the bundle even though I really don't care that much for ShadowGrounds but Trine is definitely worth it.
Another good game is MineCraft, no DRM, 'bad' graphics but fun gameplay. It's a mix of WoW, LEGO, SimCity and the like. EUR 15 right now in beta or EUR 20 when it's released. Those are the games that those big companies are fighting against and they'll have to either adapt or go extinct.
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Those dollar apps are really filling the void that the decline in arcades. Where you have games designed to kill a few hours of your time, without really feeling ripped off, if you don't like the game. It is kinda of a funny turn of events. The Arcade was more popular then game consoles because they did better graphics and had more cooler stuff. Then the consoles got better then the Arcade systems. But because they are expensive to have games were a good gamer could complete in a few days. There is interests into the Lower Quality cheap games that are on their phone. As they offer people fun without a huge investment.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Start a band, go on tour, hand out things with odd stuff on them, sell / give away DVDs/CDs T-shirts
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I will admit I buy more $1 apps than traditional games now. My gaming time has been scarce for years, but back before the app store I would shell out $60 for a game and half of them would get played for an hour or less. Now I actually play more just because of the convenience, yes most of the games are more casual but are a entertaining enough experience that I just dont miss console gaming anymore, in fact I sold off both my 360 and PS3 a few months back. That said I dont mind paying for good games, I paid $10 for dead space and regularly buy $5 plus apps if they are interesting and reviews are decent. Im more of an old school gamer anyway, most of the time I would rather play a shooter like dondonpachi than CoD. For my kids gaming on an ipod or ipad was a no brainer...my son doesn't care if its Mario Cart or Kart Racer Rush he just likes the racing, I can spend $30 for him to do that on a DS or $1 to have the same type of game with motion sensing on the ipod. For my daughters games like Cake Mania and Plants vs Zombies are the types they were into to start with, I can pay $19 for a CD copy for a computer or $5 for the same game on the app store...its not even something I have to think about.
I do think that predictions of death for gaming on the pc and consoles are both exaggerated and premature, however I do think there will be a big drop in impulse purchasing of games for those platforms. I will still always choose a game like Bioshock or Fallout on the PC but my usual habit is changing, as a result there are far less games on my shelf I have "still have to get around to", games I buy now are ones I actually want to play now.
I'm curious why people compare $1.00 games to a console game the costs $60.00. Personally I have no games on my phone, as I find these casual games to be quite boring and limited on a 4" screen. I'd rather go home, turn on my 360, PS3 or PC and play my console games on my 42" screen with my 7.1 JBL audio system.
As far as people complaining about DLC: The reason for it is due to places such as GameStop that sells used games. All profits from used games go directly to GameStop; none of which is given to developers and such. So to combat this they create DLC, to offset the loss.
DNRTFA.
How much does it cost for packaging, shipping, retail store space, etc. for a $60 game? There's a lot of middle-men involved with manufacturing a product and shipping it to a brick and mortar store.
Contrast that with an App Store game. You set up a web site with all your documentation and marketing info. Apple or Google or Amazon take a straight cut of the retail price and provide all the distribution and payment infrastructure. It costs very little to host & sell 1000 units vs 10000 units.
And then you get into working the number of units sold formula. How many people will buy your game for $1, $5, $10? Will the number of units sold offset the lower price? Because in the digital world, once you make one copy, you can make a million at almost no additional cost (which is not true of DVDs or any other physical delivery medium). So cost to sell a million at $1 is the same as selling 100,000 at $10.
Take out the physical delivery medium and the cost-to-profit structure takes on a whole new shape.
- Jasen.
Mr. Capps missed a major point, probably because he's part of the problem. PC game developers haven't made any significant progress in several years. PC Games today are portable to consoles, and are therefore "stuck" having to support old hardware like you'd find in a PS3 or XBOX 360 or PC from 2008.
Small devices like phones are improving in capability rapidly, while games for other platforms have stagnated for several years. On the small device market games are inexpensive.
If he wants customers to be willing to pay 60 times the price of a smartphone game, he needs to provide something better than the smartphone game does.
I don't see it happening from any existing game shop anytime soon, they all love making the easy money with console ports. It'll take a few nerds to create a new company that does something amazing to move the game industry forward at this point.
I can count the number of games that were worth $60 on one hand... heck, even at $40 they were pushing it on the vast majority of published titles.
Whereas a $1 game needs to be approximately as entertaining as a cup of coffee to be worth it...
Where i live and they wonder why i dont buy many games.
Were are the usual voices that argue piracy is okay because games want to be free. And they argue that piracy does not hinder game development. But now that games are cheaper it looks like it may be killing the big-tim gaming market. Defend thyself hypocrites!
On another note, it may be that we simply have more small games with more people earning more money in total. it may be an expansion in gaming. But it may come at a loss of the concentration of capital that enabled the "big time" games of high polish. i.e rabbits farting versus CGI masterworks.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it?"
By making it worth $60. Stop scrimping on story for over the top gore, stop tacking on useless mp modes no ones is going to be playing after 6 months. To be fair gears 3 will probably sell cod like figures regardless, but from what I hear bulletstorm was kinda short, although I just got shadow complex on the xbla sale and thats well worth the money I paid, Who says all the games have to be $60 anyway?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
While I'm waiting for the raid to fill, or during breaks. No way a 1$ game is gonna replace my WoW. However, the whole 'Faceville gaming' stuff will eventually end. Big Fish is shutting down one of it's Faceville games....which saddens me too, I had built up over 1Mil g and had spent a good $40 on playfunds...just for the game to disappear. As this happens to more people, the more they will stop getting hooked or spending money on them. 1$ apps are no different. Blip in the pan, and then it will be back to console/pc gaming.....where at least you know you can still play the game even after they quit selling and developing for it. (I will mourn the loss when Blizzard does decide to shut down WoW....but man, I have a ton of frapps and screenshots to make up for it...)
I don't mind paying $60 for a game if after playing it for two hours, I'm not thinking, "Well this is disappointing."
And that's very few games over the past 10 years.
Mostly, I wait a month or two, read the reviews and perhaps wait for the reduced price bundle that includes an expansion pack.
Dear Mr. Capps: You hold in your hands the ability to compete with the dollar games. In fact, this problem is very easy to fix. What magic can this be? The same thing that businesses have been doing forever, when competitors are undercutting them: LOWER YOUR DAMNED PRICES.
I understand that English is a living language, but I object to changes arising merely from repeated errors.
Right now, I couldn't name a single unlicensed sports game of any success level at all.
First, let's agree on what "licensed" means; otherwise, discussion is not fruitful. In one meaning of "licensed", all sports games for consoles are licensed because the consoles' firmware automatically rejects unlicensed games. So I'll assume you mean licensed by a league, as opposed to licensed by a console maker. But even within that stipulation, neither the meaning of "licensed" nor that of "sports game" is clear:
If I get the gaming itch, I either fire up old games (still fun - like Unreal Tournament) or find updated new ones or ones I haven't played. Like Frogatto, World of Padman...Or more recently SuperTuxKart, or Red Eclipse. A while back I tried to play HL2 demo via Steam, but it keeps screwing up on my machine (Linux). So why would I buy it? Oh well, so I can't play it. I learned a long time ago that needing to play the latest and greatest, or anything in general - is kind of sad. I've played a few wii games, but don't think they're worth spending hundreds of dollars on it. I had heard so much about Grand Theft Auto, and tried to play it at a friend's once... wow. What a piece of crap. My view of society plummeted - not because I'm on some moral high-horse about what's "acceptable" but because that game was dumb and boring. I can't believe that it was popular, let along spawned sequels.
I realize my rant will probably kill any chance of someone reading this and agreeing with me, as most people seem to be gamers and are willing to spend hundreds of dollars on multiple gaming systems. Having said that, I don't think you can compare your phone games to console/pc games. That's like saying why would someone buy a car if they can get a Razor scooter for $20 off of craigslist.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Cheap crappy imitations of game ideas done years ago are somehow the savior of a just order of the game industry where quality would flow in proportion to dollar spent.
http://insomnia.ac/commentary/on_value_for_money/
"But even if one tried to disentangle the subject of a game's price from the main body of a review, perhaps placing it under a separate "value for money" heading, that effort would still end in failure. For how could a modern action game ever compete in the "value for money" stakes with something like a chess game -- or Sid Meier's Civilization? And what would be the point of us pitting them against each other anyway? Is an hour-long game of basketball more worthwhile than a one-minute long skydive, simply because it lasts longer? Would you like some apples with your oranges, sir? Have you ever had an orgasm? But even if we restrict ourselves to comparing "values for money" in the context of individual genres, we'll still end up praising inferior games and trashing superior ones; we'd still end up talking nonsense, and compelling designers to pad their games with shit in order to make them seem like "better deals" to the poor and the feebleminded. I never tire of bringing up the example of Tomonobu Itagaki, who, in an interview regarding Ninja Gaiden long before its release, stated that if it was up to him he'd have made the game two hours long instead of twenty. Can you even begin to imagine the possibilities of such a design choice? (meaning a two-hour game made with the budget of a twenty-hour one). I certainly can, and no doubt Itagaki, yet half a decade later and still no one has dared explore them!" ...
"It is at that point that the issue of "value for money" disappears to be replaced by that of "value for time", even for the feebleminded (for the intelligent person it had always been thus), for when all games cost nothing the only question left to ask is whether any of them are worth anything. This is the timeless, the eternal question -- it is the only question worth answering"
Are the 99 cent app purchases taking away share from their market? How many are making at least five figures in income?
I'll be honest, I'm a part-time Indie developer who has not had any real fiscal success. I have a list of flaws too long to write here that I need to overcome if I want to be successful. Part of that includes combating envy and not trying to come up with scapegoats or excuses, and what Mike is saying sounds like something I would want to say if I were having trouble selling a $60 game (which I've never actually tried to do).
digital distribution is cheap, no packaging, etc
Unless the only broadband provider in your area imposes such a low daily or monthly cap that you could get the game from Amazon with Super Saver Shipping before your download finishes. Or are you referring to the fact that games offered for paid download have a much smaller average footprint in gigabytes than games offered on disc?
you can get rid of the middleman - in this case publisher - for digital distribution.
I agree that the overheads tend to be less for paid download than for retail sale of a copy, but they're not reduced to zero. A developer going all digital still doesn't get rid of the hardware maker's overhead (on consoles and iDevices), Valve's overhead (on PCs), the overhead implicit in end users' possibility of ISP overage fees incurred as a result of the download, or (for the smallest developers) the organizational overhead involved in working from and commuting to a dedicated secure office as opposed to a home/cloud-based business.
For me this is about the equivalent to saying that tents are killing traditional housing.
These folks are in the same boat as professional photographers that endlessly bitch and moan about "amateurs" selling stock photos for ten bucks that they would have charged thousands for, or journalists that are seeing their profession decimated by free news sources. I don't own pro photographers, journalists, game designers, etc. a living. Yeah, it sucks they are going to lose their jobs and/or make less money, but that's how progress works.
Elaborate games are an art form all their own, and one that is quite different from $1 games. But if it turns out the market for those $60 games is perfectly satisfied with the entertainment they get from the cheap ones, then the market for expensive games will die. Is this something that needs "fixing"? I'd say no.
I've gotten more entertainment out of Master of Orion II than any other game I've purchased. Close behind is Diablo II. Neither of those games have INSANE graphics (MOO2 for sure doesn't) but both have a lot of replayable fun. I think I paid 29$ for each of them, and I've purchased them both more than once because I lost the discs and boxes and whatnot and just bought them again.
If someone released MOO2 for my iPhone for 5$ I would buy it in a heartbeat.
If someone released the old Monkey Island games on the iPhone for 5$ apiece there would be a good chance I would buy those too. To me the best market for games on the mobile devices is old school games. You could re-release a bunch of nintendo, super nintendo, or playstation 1 game on a smartphone and make bank. Final Fantasy 3 on my iPhone? Hell yeah.
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
There's an old joke about how to make rabbit stew--the first step is to catch the rabbit.
The first step towards convincing people that the $60 game is worth it is to actually make the $60 game be worth it.
Look at the cost per "entertainment unit". If you get a very entertaining app for a dollar or maybe 5 dollars your return on investment is very high compared to a great game for sixty dollars. You can't go and say "well the expensive game has lots more technology and bells and whistles and depth" if those things don't add to the entertainment factor.
If dollar games are killing traditional gaming, then so is YouTube. I almost never buy a game these days without researching it on YouTube first. Gone are the days where I get severely ripped off from crummy games that would've been obvious had I seen some gameplay before buying.
How much does it cost you per month to enable your online mult-player experience? [Over two years,] that $60 game just turned into a $300+ game.
What all do you mean by "enable", unless you're referring to MMOs? Do you mean switching from dial-up to a high-speed Internet plan? Most people did that long ago to watch YouTube.
Value.
These cheep games are great, for 5 - 10 min at a time. They have no story. No intrigue. No production value.
Compare Agree Birds to Mass Effect.
AB = Fun no brainer game that keeps you coming back for more... but really its the same thing over and over.
ME = A Story, a movie, voice actors, interaction, PLOT...
A similar question might be
Why aren't Production Games Killing Movies?
At 5 times the cost of going to a movie by yourself, (or renting a movie), that is 1.5 – 3hrs you can buy a game and get 1 - 3hrs of cinematic scenes + 50 – 100hrs of play.
Why does it have to cost 60 dollars, for starters? I've got plenty of 1-10 dollar games on my iPad, but I just bought Portal 2 for 40-something dollars because Portal was amazing, and Valve consistently does a bang-up job. He's right that I would absolutely never pay $60 for a Gears of War, because Gears of War is tedious, rehashed, thinly plotted, trendily desaturated garbage, and when I borrowed it, I couldn't even be bothered to play a quarter of it.
I'll probably buy L.A. Noir for 60 dollars, because Rockstar generally does a great job, provides great depth and breadth in their free roaming games. I bought New Vegas for those same reasons, and I'll probably get the next DLC for it.
I don't plan on buying any games that promise "realistic modern combat", no matter which part of the planet they're set on. I don't plan to buy a racing game that computes my coefficient of friction to two more decimal places than the previous version. I don't plan to buy a game based on a movie based on a cartoon that I liked when I was ten.
How do you sell someone a $60 dollar app that's worth it? Put some actual work into the conceptual side, instead of trying to be a billion dollar game-factory that cranks out sequels to the latest incrementally improved rehashes of Marathon. Create some IP that isn't deliberately targeted at the lowest common denominator. Yeah, I know Gears of War has broad appeal, but it's broad and shallow. There's nothing wrong with broad and shallow, but if that's what you're after, you're going to have to launch at 20-30 bucks, and learn to love the shelves by the checkout lane. There's no shame in it, especially if that's the quality of effort you're putting in the begin with.
Gears of Fucking War.
Shut the fuck up.
Games are worth whatever people will pay for them. So, no game *to you* might be worth more than $20 but for many people there are lots of games worth more than $20. The way companies can (and do) sell to as many people as possible for about what they are willing to pay goes something like this: Gamers who think the game is worth a lot get to play it first (and pay more), those in the middle get to play it a year later for about half the price and people who've never heard of it will get two years later when it goes into one of the steam value packs for $5 or less. The time periods may change but the basic concept is the same. Start out at a relatively high price and decrease the price over time. It's a pretty good system for everyone involved. If you want to play first and are willing to spend the money you can. If you want to save money just wait (you'll also save on computer hardware if you take this route).
Most games are bad. Most gamers have certain things they don't like about some games. The end result is buying games reandomly often results in a sub-par experience.
Buying 1 dollar games randomly and getting sub-par experiences sometimes is not so bad.
Buying 60 dollar games randomly and getting sub-par experiences sucks.
The blockbuster games are full of problems, just like the one dollar games. They offer some kinds of experiences the one dollar games don't, but the risk is so much higher to the buyer, that I can't see both of these continuing in their current form.
Either (many? most? of) the dollar app makers are going to come to the conclusion that their model is not really profitable, or the 60 dollar game makers are going to be forced to lower their price point. That is, the ones who don't have a gold plated reputation for always kicking out winners.
-josh
and I'm be damned if I said that I don't feel it was worth every penny. And that's also 1/3rd of what most of us would consider the complete game!!!
I foresee myself buying the second and third one too!
Personally, I'm really sick (literally - I get of physically sick) of yet another FPS. The last one I played and enjoyed was unreal tournament. Come up with some other types of games and we'll talk!
Let's use Borderlands as an example...
Hmmm...spend $60 today, then buy each DLC that comes out forcing me to spend $100 total?
Should I wait 6 months, buy it used for $40 so that I'm only $80 in the hole after DLC?
Should I wait a year for the GOTY edition, spend $40 for the new version and use the voucher code to get all the DLC for free, knowing I won't be able to resell the game with the DLC?
Should I wait another 3 months and get the GOTY edition with the DLC content on the disc so I can actually resell this thing later?
Should I wait a little longer and buy the final edition used at Gamestop for $20?
The truth is that some people like me are more sensitive to spending $60 on a game. You see a business model migrating to a situation where they are discouraging used sales through DLC, and you'll find those customers will jump ship for a cheaper option, even if it isn't apples-to-apples.
If the console makers would produce games with free upgrades for a more reasonable price, we wouldn't even be having this debate.
The REAL reason for the death of gaming: Shrinking play-through times, shrinking content, diminished options and control choices, and the consolification of our beloved PC's. I've spent more than 2k on my PC rig. Consolers spend on average of $300 on theirs. If gaming companies want to continue to charge hefty prices for games all of these issues need to be addressed. Or, people like myself will find other things to do with our time, and other endeavors to spend our hard earned dough on.
The problem is that most people today are casual gamers. Hardcore gamers will pay that 60$ per game if it scores high in the reviews and has some depth and decent content. The problem with 60$ games these days is they all follow a cookie cutter design and nothing really new and unique is being released. Because of this, people are looking for cheap entertainment and there are plenty of 99 cent apps that will satisfy.
Splitreason Clothing | Gear for geeks and gamers.
How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it?
You don't. But instead of a market of 10 million wiiboxstation3, you have a market of 600 million mobile devices, so you can keep the exact same creative level, profit and overall game experience by selling it for $1.
In fact the $60 has nothing to do with the actual effort of making the game, and it's all about maximizing revenue on an item that has a marginal cost of $0 for each extra unit produced. So the $60 is the "sweet spot" that maximizes the profit (or minimizes loss) for that particular game, given that the production costs are already sunken.
The fact that the market drove the price down to $1 means that there's much higher competition, spurred by the low entry barrier in the mobile market (less resources, less detail, less graphic effort, less or no 3d modeling etc.)
It feels like every couple months someone at Epic is all "X is killing us!" Maybe they'd make more money selling games if they sold more than mediocre shooter games.
It's like if Ford only made cars and complained that the car *AND* truck makers are selling more product.
No sig for you!!
I know I've passed on plenty of $60 dollar titles recently for engrossing dollar games. IMO very few boxed titles should be priced at $60, select AAA are worth $100+ white the rest are overpriced at $40.
If by a controller upgrade you mean buying controllers 2, 3, and 4 for a game console or gaming/home theater PC, this expense can ideally be amortized over multiple games for the platform. In fact, it's even easier because HTPCs and Xbox 360 consoles can use the same controllers. If by a controller upgrade you mean instruments for a music game such as Guitar Hero, Rock Band, or DDR, those costs are certainly not hidden because the game is often sold bundled with an instrument.
As for PC video cards, look for games that share an engine with a game ported to Mac OS X. These will run usefully on a 3-year-old video card because they also have to run usefully on the integrated NVIDIA GPU in a Mac mini, MacBook, or iMac.
As for Xbox Live Gold, play the PC version instead if you can. When it comes to multiplayer, the big advantage of a console is that more games support local multiplayer on Xbox 360 than on PC because publishers think there aren't enough HTPC owners to make a market. Besides, even for 360 exclusives, Xbox Live Gold is still one price no matter how many games you play (apart from MMOs).
Why be deliberately dense and attempt to obfuscate a non-point?
Because Nintendo habitually bucks trends. How many licensed motor racing games have Mario Kart games outsold?
Do you think people would buy 'Generic Kart Game' as opposed to 'Mario Kart'?
There's the brand, right there.
Which illustrates my point: The discussion is not over whether it's "licensed" but whether it's a "brand". Why can't companies other than EA develop and publish a video game about a fictional sport league based on one of their own brands?
Because you say so?
What if you priced it at $30, and sold more than twice as many?
Which is what they do, by lowering prices to the next price point once the first wave of early adopters have bought the game at "full" price.
Maybe it's just that the buyers have gotten smart to that trick.
And
For me, the competition for $60 games are high quality, low price games that aren't new, being easily available from impulse, steam or GOG.
I recently bought Max Payne 1 & 2 for €3.75.