One thing this video fails to take into consideration is that a big part of the reason games like Vampire Survivots went viral to begin with, was the price. When a game costs about as much as a cup of coffee they are in the impulse buy price range where even a slight bit of curiosity will often result in a purchase. For a few dollars, most people won't think twice about rolling the dice. There is also the simple fact that when a good game is a shockingly low price it sort of becomes part of the game's legend and that makes for a very catchy and clickable game review or let's play video title. Look at Vampire Survivors for instance. Pretty much all the early RUclips videos mentioned the crazy low price in the video description with titles like "I Had More Fun Playing this 3-Dollar Indie Game than the Last 3 AAA Games I Bought!" I do happen to agree that five bucks really is too low for anything outside of like a game jam title, but there is something to be said for keeping an Indie title in the impulse buy price range which is around $9.99 for most people. Of course that varies depending on the sort of game it is and how much content it has, but once you get above the $20 mark, an indie game really needs to stick out as something special because at that price you will only rope in people who already have a serious interest in the title. For most people, they won't just impulse-buy a game at first sight for that much.
Yeah the price of a game can be the reason people will play the game. People would never have bought vampire survivors if it were anything more than it was on release, however I think in general people are a tad too stingy when it comes to dropping a couple of bucks on a game. Considering the amount of content you get from a game versus the price, video games typically tend to be far cheaper than any other good or service. It’s not really as if that’s going to change either, you’re exactly right that vampire survivors got so popular because of its price, however I just think that’s a bit of a bummer for other developers who want to price their games competitively but also might’ve higher development costs, more content, or any other reason that might make their game more valuable.
@@progress_games I think Vampire survivors did a really good move by instead of updating the base game and increasing the price, they instead decided to add dlcs for a similar price to the base game. Also I want to mention that although I really liked the demo of paper planet, I probably will not buy in in a while. Only because I do not have the money to buy games at that price for the same rate I usually buy games. To be fair paper planet really is a good game.
@@progress_gamesHere's what I want to try. First I'll determine the price of a game based on as many important factors as possible. I currently don't know how to do that, but it will be based on math including probability. Then overpricing the game by 10 to 50 percent depending. I'll do this because I'm going to inevitablely update the game, (hopefully if smart) inherently making it more valuable of a price to eventually match or surpass the price.
There are quite a few $5 games in my steam library, even ones that never were popular and maybe only a few hundred people have played and its the price that is the whole reason I made the gamble on purchasing them. I come from the olden days of Indie games where $10-25 was a full fledged indie game as that was when flash games were still popular and a thing so charging anything for a game you had to at least be better than what flash offered at the time for free. $5-10 as much as a hate to admit it will likely keep on being my unconscious bias for taking a risk on a small title as that was just the standard of the time. I mean I still rarely purchase the new $70 games and still find myself often buying the $60. It's not that the price is all that different its just you look at $70 dollars and it hits that part of your brain that seeing the $70-80 editions of games did years back and your just like I guess I don't need it. Honestly I do believe that prices did need to go up as games have gotten way more expensive but I do have to say that people's spending habits change slower. There are a lot of games that I wish I actually had payed more for as they were genuinely really good and had boughten friend and family to give the devs extra sales. I see both sides I guess.
The main issue is the stagnation of wages. Most people simply don't have enough money to justify spending 20$ to 50$ on a game all that often. this has created a weird situation for game dev's, if a dev prices their game for what its worth, often that pushes it above what people can afford, leading to less sales and often less profit. Dev's definitely should price their games fairly, and Indie prices are past due for an increase, but until people can afford them, the games are gonna have to stay under priced to be accessible and competitive.
I feel the same with microtransactions. When people want $10-20 for a single skin that is only useable on a single character, and especially in first person game? yeah no thanks. Theres a reason why the Deep Rock dev's DLC does so well. $5-6 for 4 skins and a variety of weapon skins, mining pick parts, and a color scheme, its a great deal and the price of a burger and I wanna support those devs since they put constant work into their updates. Plus you don't have to buy a premium currency and it goes on sales because its in the steam store. I'd love to buy some Darktide skins, but I'm not paying $10 for a single skin in an FPS. If people lowered microtransaction prices people would call them predatory less and you'd get WAAAAAY more sales.
5:58 I like that you mention the goods of refunds. I hear way too often gamedevs complain about the refund feature, only seeing money being taken from them... but it's actually a good thing, cause refunds make a lot of people try games that they wouldn't have otherwise. Some games that I'm unsure, specially if I feel like they are too expensive, I try them and a lot of them I end up liking and keeping, games that I would not have given a chance if the refund feature didn't exist.
Yeah I mean the refund feature is there for a reason. I published a game on Steam and it ended up getting about 11% refunds, and I think that's more telling of the game's quality rather than the refund system.
Yep. Theres some games I refunded because I disliked them so much, I would be much less willing to take a risk on a game I've never heard of and don't feel like doing a ton of research on if there was no refund feature. I've gotten a ton of indie games that I wasn't sure about and tried right away due to the refund feature and I've kept most of them. I have over 1000 steam games and I could probably count the number of refunds I've requested on my two hands.
same af there's even been times where i refunded a game but left a positive review because the game was still well-made - even if it wasn't my preferred genre (Scrap Mechanic being the main one i can think of).
I think a good comparison is 20 minutes til dawn and Vampire Survivors 20 minutes til dawn has around 30-50 hours if you want to “complete” the game when Vampire Survivors has well over 80-100 hours and much much more content. Both are priced at five dollars. 20 minutes til dawn is worth probably worth 5-10 dollars and is a fair price and Vampire Survivors is worth 15-20. Since they are both five dollars they are compared too much even though they are vastly different rogue-likes content wise and gameplay wise.
i think the Factorio devs do the slight opposite of this - the game is $35 but *never* goes on sale, and while i think it's $5 too high the fact that it never goes on sale just comes off as a bit pretentious imo. not sure if it's had any impact on the total sales, but it's always slightly bothered me.
He also raised the price "because inflation" I've always found it very pretentious when a dev refuses to ever put a game on sale or drop the price when its an old game. Pair that with the fact that the Factorio dev is a bit of a chud and I will never be buying factorio. I would have considered it if I could get it on sale since all my friends love it, but I have never played a factory style game and I'm not sure if I'd like it. Not gonna take that chance.
@@Zectifin I'm sure you'd love it. Very addictive genre. It's worth the full price imo (especially after 2.0 comes out), but yeah I also dislike the price raise and never doing sales. As I said, it comes off as pretentious. I got the game for like $20 back in 2014 or 15 and feel like that was a good price at the time. When it launched and went up to $30, I thought that was basically perfect given how much stuff had been added & changed. Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program are 2 great factory buliders that go on sale every so often (and are cheaper than their retail price since they're still in Early Access). Both are great, but I do prefer the former just a tad.
Factorio has gone from totally free, to a steady price growth over the years, to the point where it's now $35.00USD, and yet it still garners praise and attention all these years; a great example of a dev pricing their game accurately based on the changes and improvements made over the game's history.
Lower price-more players can buy it,a lot of people woudn't never touch vampire survivors if they would see like 20$ tag on game "that looks like this",the dev earned a lot because game got so popular,it got so popular partly because of it's price
Yeah I'd say one of its major selling points was and still is its price, however I think it could be higher than it is now and still be insanely good value. $20 is probably too steep, I'd agree, but I think the game has enough notoriety now where it could be priced $10-$15 and still be really good value for what it is
@@progress_games I would say that applies more in the past when indie games were new and not so plentiful. You'd have youtubers talk about even the most mediocre of indie games and they'd at least get some traction. Now we have so many you can constantly find games on teh steam store that you've never heard of, have been out over a year, and only have a positive or non review score because it has 10 or less reviews for it. Once a game is released you can't take it back so you'll never know if it would have blown up if you'd priced it at $3 vs $15. Lowering it after the fact is too late unless it already has some amount of traction.
Yeah it was sort of a trial and I don’t think it worked. Especially when it was very quick. Chances are I’ll redo the video, sorry for that and thanks for watching :)
In the case of the "Survivors" auto-shooter genre, I think the price of those just comes down to how relatively easy those kinds of games are to make (not from personal experience, I'm not a game dev, just an observation from the sheer amount of clones that spawned in Vampire Survivors' wake). Heavy agree on people associating a game's value based on how many hours they spent on it. Several shorter games I've played like Journey, GRIS, and Artful Escape left bigger impressions on my memory than several games I spent hundreds of hours on.
I fuck so hard with indie games! What AAA games are doing with prices on top of how hard they work their devs (pre-order, insane deadlines, bad pay) and micro transactions is criminal.
100% true. You can have the most expensive, fun, and innovative indie game and it's still gonna be half the price of a AAA and without micro transactions.
I love to see new creators like you who are putting much effort and heart in their first videos. I think thats really inspriring and I Really enjoyed the content. Easy sub :D
The video fails on the moral aspect of the price value of games, it's to have a supportive community that builds up trust in a developer, hence the low cost but high value. And a game developer will price their game to a entry level based on their experience or their reputation out there in the market. Developers deserve their fair share yes, but this should not be determined by anyone but the customers. It is the customer that determines if a price is fair, not the seller, not the manufacturer. Guess what happens if you encourage everyone to 'list' their own price to sell things based on their own personal bias? Total anarchy. A lot of AAA developers used to be small time indie making their games straight out of their garage or home. They didn't go around peddling their 30 hour 8 bit RPGs for the price of weekly wage. When reputation and influence grows bigger, they become a company and business, then it becomes their primary goal to milk and dime everyone just to keep themselves afloat. Things were better back when Blizzard wasn't owned by Activision you see, you had a level of trust in the community that is completely gone once Activision-Blizzard dictated everything that can be done. Even Minecraft is heading into this direction ever since Notch sold the IP and Mojang to Microsoft, price hikes, more social engineering and less content releases, makes for a very poor value disposition... They'd rather have you argue and fight social network flame wars over what DLC content they 'may' release in a vote system, than to just release content normally. Necesse, Rimworld, and Terraria are the good examples of indie game devs that puts morals above greed, and they become super successful due to the automatic trust their community has in them (Necesse got picked up by a minor publisher who usually is very picky about the titles they choose to support). Rimworld is a bit different as it offers DLCs, but it's always considered to be priced as a complete game that has minor QoL improvements.
One thing to keep in mind, when you make the price cheaper you can actually make more profit than if you were to make it more expensive. If your game is more expensive, yet lacks in quality compared to other games, then people will be more hesitant to play your game than a game that is already cheaper. Not to mention, bringing that cost on the customer down allows for a larger available audience, thus your profit can be much larger than if you were to price it higher. Ultimately, it is up for the devs/producer of the game comes up with the price and the customer to decide whether or not to value that game over the money they currently have. Thus why cheaper games might allow for a better profit, given the game is actually good.
Games should be trying to compete with each other, and lowering price is one way to win at that. But what I will give you credit for mentioning is that the perception of a game is too strongly tied to its competition within the same price range. A 5 dollar game might be great on its own, until another even better game comes along for the same price. The reviews will start to suffer due to a new comparison, and those reviews become further away from the objective value (whatever that means, but you get the idea). And in doing so, a new prospective buyer may get swayed away from what they might have actually enjoyed. Or worse, they buy the game but it has been forever soiled by the ugly reviews and that player can't unsee them (happens to me quite often). I wish it wasn't a problem, but it's a necessary sacrifice for competition in the game development industry, which we definitely need more of, especially at the top (I'm looking at you AAA games, whining about Baldur's Gate 3)
yeah I see this a lot. My gf and I love the farming sim genre and Fae Farms just came out and its charging $40 base. Its a little steep, wish it was 30, but everyone is complaining that its a rip off because stardew is charging much less and you can get it on sale super cheap. Everyone wants to compare it to stardew when so many other farming sims are charging much more. You also have to consider many of them have larger teams, 3d graphics, and haven't been able to constantly update the game. Most of those games are priced pretty well, but because theres 1 game in the genre that is great and cheap, nothing else can compete with it.
Factorio is a good example of pricing done right, whereas i do agree that a lot of games especially free games like cookie clicker, should be monetised better, as if i'm playing a game for a hundred hours or more, i want to help support the developer, so they can make more content in the future. As game development can be very expensive, especially if you have a team of 10 or more people, costs quickly ramp up over time, especially due to inflation, as well as rising costs of living, or even simple things like leasing office space, or even just keeping the lights on can be very expensive.
I think there is another type of cheap games, that only appears to be cheap. I'm talking about Paradox int. titles and Civ series, where the main game is very cheap - Civ 6 has 90% discount something like every two weeks, - but it's not really a full game and you need to find guides for what you need to buy for the game to be good. I understand the idea - as a noob you play a simpler version of an intended game, and if you like it you buy more, - but it seems kind of exploiting to me
I know i'm late(because i'm new in this chanel lol) but yeah i buyed a game called Totally Acurate Batlle Simulator that costs like 450 and i played it like 80h,or Terraria that Vanila+Moded i have like 400h (And i actually don't know about that because i play mostly rougelikes/lites like Dead Cells that have progresion,but they just never end) WAIT AND YOU'RE SOOOO UNDERATED LIKE,YOU HAVE 500!?!?!? I KNOW YOU HAVE 3 VIDEOS AND STARTED A MONTH AGO BUT MY GOD
I see someone's trying to get a job with a certain company. "Games should cost more, I get more value out of a game then a movie ticket." Where have I heard that one before? Not like they're completely different experiences or anything which makes them not at all comparable.
My main gripe with your gripe, is that if all indies went with your logic, nothing would deer or even cause AAA's to lower their prices to the value of indie games, simply because they don't really want to. No matter how little the quantity or how bad the quality, AAA won't budge as a whole, so really, if you get all indies to raise, raise, raise, then you're effectively just telling a decent chunk of the world (even during times of recession like we're in right now) to bugger off. Like yeah, I totally get the "devs deserve to be paid more" mantra, but so does everyone else working a job?, yet that hardly happens, because there is always an elite class or group running the show from the background, and things turn out the way they want them to turn out. If you want things to change, like actually change for the better and for the longest of terms, you need to remove those at the top preventing or stalling those changes, not fucking ppl like me out of an entire industry and mocking me with "lol ur poor, you can't afford games". Like at this moment in time, AAA games are far too expensive for me, and as such I have been pushed outside of that bracket almost entirely (I now have to wait upwards of 1-3 years for a decent discount, and also hoping the games are fixed and not diming me on top of that). Indie games are basically my affordable window, and you are wanting to push me outside that bracket, simply because you think one group deserves to be paid more over others (this is why we have class wars and conflict, because you think one group deserves money, whilst I believe we all deserve a raise). I do hope you at least reconsider your own logic at some point, because it becomes a dangerous and slippery hill when you fail to consider anyone else not within your logic's line of sight.
That's definitely a fair point. I think AAA games are far too expensive at the moment, and some indie games are far too cheap. It's a difficult balance because it does end up meaning you push people out of the bracket but it's ultimately the developers decision to either cater to most people, or make more money. Fortunately enough, smaller titles prefer to cater to most people because they typically have small to non-existent development costs and they can afford to be priced really cheap. But it's then difficult because there are indie games that get shit for being 'too expensive' when, in reality, they are really cheap but just expensive compared to industry standard. You gotta remember that for every cheap indie game you buy, there's probably 100+ games of the same genre that aren't recuperating their costs because they were priced too low for their value because industry standard is so low. I actually develop games, and I released a title earlier this year for $3usd because I thought that was how much it was worth. I'm not saying that all developers deserve more money, because my game, along with a lot of other cheap games, is appropriately priced for what it offers, but there are some games that do deserve more money, or at least warrant it. I appreciate the comment and I do like to be quite constructive with the things I say and post on RUclips and elsewhere. At the end of the day, we all come to topics like this with different perspectives and there's always a side I mightn't have considered. Thanks for watching! :)
all of the gaming industry and their selling platforms are controlled by one single gang of controllers, the aaa and indie gaming devs serve the same master
My main problem with some of these arguments is that I feel like you are really assuming vocal minority opinions are more popular than I think they really are. Sure some people whine when games are too short for $15 or that "vampire survivors was $5 so this $25 game sucks" but I really don't think those are popular opinions. Who cares if people have bad takes. Good video regardless.
i was interested in the subject matter of this video but could not keep watching because the way you have the graphics wiggle and bounce around is too much and ends up being nauseating and distracting. i understand you're trying something new but this isn't it for me
One thing this video fails to take into consideration is that a big part of the reason games like Vampire Survivots went viral to begin with, was the price. When a game costs about as much as a cup of coffee they are in the impulse buy price range where even a slight bit of curiosity will often result in a purchase. For a few dollars, most people won't think twice about rolling the dice.
There is also the simple fact that when a good game is a shockingly low price it sort of becomes part of the game's legend and that makes for a very catchy and clickable game review or let's play video title. Look at Vampire Survivors for instance. Pretty much all the early RUclips videos mentioned the crazy low price in the video description with titles like "I Had More Fun Playing this 3-Dollar Indie Game than the Last 3 AAA Games I Bought!"
I do happen to agree that five bucks really is too low for anything outside of like a game jam title, but there is something to be said for keeping an Indie title in the impulse buy price range which is around $9.99 for most people. Of course that varies depending on the sort of game it is and how much content it has, but once you get above the $20 mark, an indie game really needs to stick out as something special because at that price you will only rope in people who already have a serious interest in the title. For most people, they won't just impulse-buy a game at first sight for that much.
Yeah the price of a game can be the reason people will play the game. People would never have bought vampire survivors if it were anything more than it was on release, however I think in general people are a tad too stingy when it comes to dropping a couple of bucks on a game.
Considering the amount of content you get from a game versus the price, video games typically tend to be far cheaper than any other good or service.
It’s not really as if that’s going to change either, you’re exactly right that vampire survivors got so popular because of its price, however I just think that’s a bit of a bummer for other developers who want to price their games competitively but also might’ve higher development costs, more content, or any other reason that might make their game more valuable.
@@progress_games I think Vampire survivors did a really good move by instead of updating the base game and increasing the price, they instead decided to add dlcs for a similar price to the base game. Also I want to mention that although I really liked the demo of paper planet, I probably will not buy in in a while. Only because I do not have the money to buy games at that price for the same rate I usually buy games.
To be fair paper planet really is a good game.
@@progress_gamesHere's what I want to try. First I'll determine the price of a game based on as many important factors as possible. I currently don't know how to do that, but it will be based on math including probability. Then overpricing the game by 10 to 50 percent depending. I'll do this because I'm going to inevitablely update the game, (hopefully if smart) inherently making it more valuable of a price to eventually match or surpass the price.
There are quite a few $5 games in my steam library, even ones that never were popular and maybe only a few hundred people have played and its the price that is the whole reason I made the gamble on purchasing them. I come from the olden days of Indie games where $10-25 was a full fledged indie game as that was when flash games were still popular and a thing so charging anything for a game you had to at least be better than what flash offered at the time for free. $5-10 as much as a hate to admit it will likely keep on being my unconscious bias for taking a risk on a small title as that was just the standard of the time. I mean I still rarely purchase the new $70 games and still find myself often buying the $60. It's not that the price is all that different its just you look at $70 dollars and it hits that part of your brain that seeing the $70-80 editions of games did years back and your just like I guess I don't need it. Honestly I do believe that prices did need to go up as games have gotten way more expensive but I do have to say that people's spending habits change slower. There are a lot of games that I wish I actually had payed more for as they were genuinely really good and had boughten friend and family to give the devs extra sales. I see both sides I guess.
Cheap game haters when they play Toree 3D 😱
It's such a good platformer
The main issue is the stagnation of wages. Most people simply don't have enough money to justify spending 20$ to 50$ on a game all that often. this has created a weird situation for game dev's, if a dev prices their game for what its worth, often that pushes it above what people can afford, leading to less sales and often less profit.
Dev's definitely should price their games fairly, and Indie prices are past due for an increase, but until people can afford them, the games are gonna have to stay under priced to be accessible and competitive.
I feel the same with microtransactions. When people want $10-20 for a single skin that is only useable on a single character, and especially in first person game? yeah no thanks. Theres a reason why the Deep Rock dev's DLC does so well. $5-6 for 4 skins and a variety of weapon skins, mining pick parts, and a color scheme, its a great deal and the price of a burger and I wanna support those devs since they put constant work into their updates. Plus you don't have to buy a premium currency and it goes on sales because its in the steam store. I'd love to buy some Darktide skins, but I'm not paying $10 for a single skin in an FPS. If people lowered microtransaction prices people would call them predatory less and you'd get WAAAAAY more sales.
5:58 I like that you mention the goods of refunds. I hear way too often gamedevs complain about the refund feature, only seeing money being taken from them... but it's actually a good thing, cause refunds make a lot of people try games that they wouldn't have otherwise. Some games that I'm unsure, specially if I feel like they are too expensive, I try them and a lot of them I end up liking and keeping, games that I would not have given a chance if the refund feature didn't exist.
Yeah I mean the refund feature is there for a reason. I published a game on Steam and it ended up getting about 11% refunds, and I think that's more telling of the game's quality rather than the refund system.
Yep. Theres some games I refunded because I disliked them so much, I would be much less willing to take a risk on a game I've never heard of and don't feel like doing a ton of research on if there was no refund feature. I've gotten a ton of indie games that I wasn't sure about and tried right away due to the refund feature and I've kept most of them. I have over 1000 steam games and I could probably count the number of refunds I've requested on my two hands.
same af
there's even been times where i refunded a game but left a positive review because the game was still well-made - even if it wasn't my preferred genre (Scrap Mechanic being the main one i can think of).
I think a good comparison is 20 minutes til dawn and Vampire Survivors
20 minutes til dawn has around 30-50 hours if you want to “complete” the game when Vampire Survivors has well over 80-100 hours and much much more content. Both are priced at five dollars.
20 minutes til dawn is worth probably worth 5-10 dollars and is a fair price and Vampire Survivors is worth 15-20. Since they are both five dollars they are compared too much even though they are vastly different rogue-likes content wise and gameplay wise.
i think the Factorio devs do the slight opposite of this - the game is $35 but *never* goes on sale, and while i think it's $5 too high the fact that it never goes on sale just comes off as a bit pretentious imo.
not sure if it's had any impact on the total sales, but it's always slightly bothered me.
He also raised the price "because inflation" I've always found it very pretentious when a dev refuses to ever put a game on sale or drop the price when its an old game. Pair that with the fact that the Factorio dev is a bit of a chud and I will never be buying factorio. I would have considered it if I could get it on sale since all my friends love it, but I have never played a factory style game and I'm not sure if I'd like it. Not gonna take that chance.
@@Zectifin I'm sure you'd love it. Very addictive genre. It's worth the full price imo (especially after 2.0 comes out), but yeah I also dislike the price raise and never doing sales. As I said, it comes off as pretentious.
I got the game for like $20 back in 2014 or 15 and feel like that was a good price at the time. When it launched and went up to $30, I thought that was basically perfect given how much stuff had been added & changed.
Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program are 2 great factory buliders that go on sale every so often (and are cheaper than their retail price since they're still in Early Access). Both are great, but I do prefer the former just a tad.
Factorio has gone from totally free, to a steady price growth over the years, to the point where it's now $35.00USD, and yet it still garners praise and attention all these years; a great example of a dev pricing their game accurately based on the changes and improvements made over the game's history.
Lower price-more players can buy it,a lot of people woudn't never touch vampire survivors if they would see like 20$ tag on game "that looks like this",the dev earned a lot because game got so popular,it got so popular partly because of it's price
Yeah I'd say one of its major selling points was and still is its price, however I think it could be higher than it is now and still be insanely good value. $20 is probably too steep, I'd agree, but I think the game has enough notoriety now where it could be priced $10-$15 and still be really good value for what it is
@@progress_games I would say that applies more in the past when indie games were new and not so plentiful. You'd have youtubers talk about even the most mediocre of indie games and they'd at least get some traction. Now we have so many you can constantly find games on teh steam store that you've never heard of, have been out over a year, and only have a positive or non review score because it has 10 or less reviews for it. Once a game is released you can't take it back so you'll never know if it would have blown up if you'd priced it at $3 vs $15. Lowering it after the fact is too late unless it already has some amount of traction.
could you maybe rotate the images and clips you use less? I get a bit motion sick from it
Yeah it was sort of a trial and I don’t think it worked. Especially when it was very quick. Chances are I’ll redo the video, sorry for that and thanks for watching :)
In the case of the "Survivors" auto-shooter genre, I think the price of those just comes down to how relatively easy those kinds of games are to make (not from personal experience, I'm not a game dev, just an observation from the sheer amount of clones that spawned in Vampire Survivors' wake).
Heavy agree on people associating a game's value based on how many hours they spent on it. Several shorter games I've played like Journey, GRIS, and Artful Escape left bigger impressions on my memory than several games I spent hundreds of hours on.
I fuck so hard with indie games! What AAA games are doing with prices on top of how hard they work their devs (pre-order, insane deadlines, bad pay) and micro transactions is criminal.
100% true. You can have the most expensive, fun, and innovative indie game and it's still gonna be half the price of a AAA and without micro transactions.
I love to see new creators like you who are putting much effort and heart in their first videos. I think thats really inspriring and I Really enjoyed the content. Easy sub :D
Thanks! :D
The video fails on the moral aspect of the price value of games, it's to have a supportive community that builds up trust in a developer, hence the low cost but high value.
And a game developer will price their game to a entry level based on their experience or their reputation out there in the market. Developers deserve their fair share yes, but this should not be determined by anyone but the customers. It is the customer that determines if a price is fair, not the seller, not the manufacturer.
Guess what happens if you encourage everyone to 'list' their own price to sell things based on their own personal bias? Total anarchy.
A lot of AAA developers used to be small time indie making their games straight out of their garage or home. They didn't go around peddling their 30 hour 8 bit RPGs for the price of weekly wage.
When reputation and influence grows bigger, they become a company and business, then it becomes their primary goal to milk and dime everyone just to keep themselves afloat.
Things were better back when Blizzard wasn't owned by Activision you see, you had a level of trust in the community that is completely gone once Activision-Blizzard dictated everything that can be done.
Even Minecraft is heading into this direction ever since Notch sold the IP and Mojang to Microsoft, price hikes, more social engineering and less content releases, makes for a very poor value disposition... They'd rather have you argue and fight social network flame wars over what DLC content they 'may' release in a vote system, than to just release content normally.
Necesse, Rimworld, and Terraria are the good examples of indie game devs that puts morals above greed, and they become super successful due to the automatic trust their community has in them (Necesse got picked up by a minor publisher who usually is very picky about the titles they choose to support).
Rimworld is a bit different as it offers DLCs, but it's always considered to be priced as a complete game that has minor QoL improvements.
Glad to see a 2nd video from you!
Welcome back! Hopefully you all enjoy it (and what I've got in the works)!
Pretty sure why Vampire Survivors is priced so low is the graphics
Dang 82 views on this? 60 subs? You deserve way more good stuff man!
Thanks man, we'll get there!
One thing to keep in mind, when you make the price cheaper you can actually make more profit than if you were to make it more expensive. If your game is more expensive, yet lacks in quality compared to other games, then people will be more hesitant to play your game than a game that is already cheaper. Not to mention, bringing that cost on the customer down allows for a larger available audience, thus your profit can be much larger than if you were to price it higher.
Ultimately, it is up for the devs/producer of the game comes up with the price and the customer to decide whether or not to value that game over the money they currently have. Thus why cheaper games might allow for a better profit, given the game is actually good.
Games should be trying to compete with each other, and lowering price is one way to win at that. But what I will give you credit for mentioning is that the perception of a game is too strongly tied to its competition within the same price range. A 5 dollar game might be great on its own, until another even better game comes along for the same price. The reviews will start to suffer due to a new comparison, and those reviews become further away from the objective value (whatever that means, but you get the idea). And in doing so, a new prospective buyer may get swayed away from what they might have actually enjoyed. Or worse, they buy the game but it has been forever soiled by the ugly reviews and that player can't unsee them (happens to me quite often). I wish it wasn't a problem, but it's a necessary sacrifice for competition in the game development industry, which we definitely need more of, especially at the top (I'm looking at you AAA games, whining about Baldur's Gate 3)
yeah I see this a lot. My gf and I love the farming sim genre and Fae Farms just came out and its charging $40 base. Its a little steep, wish it was 30, but everyone is complaining that its a rip off because stardew is charging much less and you can get it on sale super cheap. Everyone wants to compare it to stardew when so many other farming sims are charging much more. You also have to consider many of them have larger teams, 3d graphics, and haven't been able to constantly update the game. Most of those games are priced pretty well, but because theres 1 game in the genre that is great and cheap, nothing else can compete with it.
Factorio is a good example of pricing done right, whereas i do agree that a lot of games especially free games like cookie clicker, should be monetised better, as if i'm playing a game for a hundred hours or more, i want to help support the developer, so they can make more content in the future. As game development can be very expensive, especially if you have a team of 10 or more people, costs quickly ramp up over time, especially due to inflation, as well as rising costs of living, or even simple things like leasing office space, or even just keeping the lights on can be very expensive.
I think there is another type of cheap games, that only appears to be cheap. I'm talking about Paradox int. titles and Civ series, where the main game is very cheap - Civ 6 has 90% discount something like every two weeks, - but it's not really a full game and you need to find guides for what you need to buy for the game to be good. I understand the idea - as a noob you play a simpler version of an intended game, and if you like it you buy more, - but it seems kind of exploiting to me
I know i'm late(because i'm new in this chanel lol) but yeah i buyed a game called Totally Acurate Batlle Simulator that costs like 450 and i played it like 80h,or Terraria that Vanila+Moded i have like 400h
(And i actually don't know about that because i play mostly rougelikes/lites like Dead Cells that have progresion,but they just never end)
WAIT AND YOU'RE SOOOO UNDERATED LIKE,YOU HAVE 500!?!?!? I KNOW YOU HAVE 3 VIDEOS AND STARTED A MONTH AGO BUT MY GOD
I see someone's trying to get a job with a certain company.
"Games should cost more, I get more value out of a game then a movie ticket." Where have I heard that one before? Not like they're completely different experiences or anything which makes them not at all comparable.
love the video! excited to see what you put out next :)
How did you find this??
My main gripe with your gripe, is that if all indies went with your logic, nothing would deer or even cause AAA's to lower their prices to the value of indie games, simply because they don't really want to. No matter how little the quantity or how bad the quality, AAA won't budge as a whole, so really, if you get all indies to raise, raise, raise, then you're effectively just telling a decent chunk of the world (even during times of recession like we're in right now) to bugger off.
Like yeah, I totally get the "devs deserve to be paid more" mantra, but so does everyone else working a job?, yet that hardly happens, because there is always an elite class or group running the show from the background, and things turn out the way they want them to turn out.
If you want things to change, like actually change for the better and for the longest of terms, you need to remove those at the top preventing or stalling those changes, not fucking ppl like me out of an entire industry and mocking me with "lol ur poor, you can't afford games". Like at this moment in time, AAA games are far too expensive for me, and as such I have been pushed outside of that bracket almost entirely (I now have to wait upwards of 1-3 years for a decent discount, and also hoping the games are fixed and not diming me on top of that). Indie games are basically my affordable window, and you are wanting to push me outside that bracket, simply because you think one group deserves to be paid more over others (this is why we have class wars and conflict, because you think one group deserves money, whilst I believe we all deserve a raise).
I do hope you at least reconsider your own logic at some point, because it becomes a dangerous and slippery hill when you fail to consider anyone else not within your logic's line of sight.
That's definitely a fair point. I think AAA games are far too expensive at the moment, and some indie games are far too cheap. It's a difficult balance because it does end up meaning you push people out of the bracket but it's ultimately the developers decision to either cater to most people, or make more money.
Fortunately enough, smaller titles prefer to cater to most people because they typically have small to non-existent development costs and they can afford to be priced really cheap. But it's then difficult because there are indie games that get shit for being 'too expensive' when, in reality, they are really cheap but just expensive compared to industry standard. You gotta remember that for every cheap indie game you buy, there's probably 100+ games of the same genre that aren't recuperating their costs because they were priced too low for their value because industry standard is so low.
I actually develop games, and I released a title earlier this year for $3usd because I thought that was how much it was worth. I'm not saying that all developers deserve more money, because my game, along with a lot of other cheap games, is appropriately priced for what it offers, but there are some games that do deserve more money, or at least warrant it.
I appreciate the comment and I do like to be quite constructive with the things I say and post on RUclips and elsewhere. At the end of the day, we all come to topics like this with different perspectives and there's always a side I mightn't have considered. Thanks for watching! :)
Hey there! Nice videos! Im gonna stick around and see what else you make in the future, thank you!
Thanks! Got some more video ideas in production!
all of the gaming industry and their selling platforms are controlled by one single gang of controllers, the aaa and indie gaming devs serve the same master
Hey you popped on my feed, I’ve never seen a small channel with so much effort behind it. Please keep going I hope lord algorithm smiles at you soon.
Thanks! It's pushing this video way further than I thought it would!
I think RUclips is recommending this to gd players since you put a gd ship in the thumbnail 💀
Not the gd players 😫
To summarize, it's a lot of math including probability. Understand economics, which most people don't.
The only fair price is one the market accepts.
My main problem with some of these arguments is that I feel like you are really assuming vocal minority opinions are more popular than I think they really are. Sure some people whine when games are too short for $15 or that "vampire survivors was $5 so this $25 game sucks" but I really don't think those are popular opinions. Who cares if people have bad takes. Good video regardless.
this video has no right having this little views
Believe it or not, about 3 days ago it had like 20 views. 4K is pretty fucken good lol
i was interested in the subject matter of this video but could not keep watching because the way you have the graphics wiggle and bounce around is too much and ends up being nauseating and distracting. i understand you're trying something new but this isn't it for me
Yeah I agree 100%. Never doing this again lol
HOW DARE QYOU PUTGD IN THE GHUMBNAIL AND PUT IT IN A CHEAP GAMES VIDEO:(
It’s a cheap game brother