Columns The Economy of Happiness

for me, the most I'd pay for a game is £25 and just wait for the price to drop.

 

I agree with the 'collecters edition' sentiment. If I want the game enough, I'll get it on launch day, if I want it a lot (GoW, Fable 2, etc) I will snag the limited edition, even if there's nothing of huge value in there (I like collectors editions with art books (Be they hardback or paperback), a soundtrack (If there is one) and that's me happy), for the sake of throwing more money at the developer.

I won't say I'd pay more for a story driven game than an action game, because with Mass Effect as an example, there can be far too much dialogue to keep me interested. Some of the sub plots were nice, but the majority were so verbose and long winded in terms of things to read, I'd have prefered to read it in a book format. That's not to say I don't like story - I enjoy a good story, but some stories have a habit of going way over the top.

Other than that - I don't see how a 'mix&match' approach would work (Though, it seems to have done well with the Orange box and its component parts - Not that it cost much to begin with).

 

one thing that should happen is morphing of prices to fit the buying power of a certain country, the lower the buying power the lower should be the price.

another thing that should happen is for games to get cheaper once the game hits the profit line, and then very cheap once it gets to another superior level, and then being offered as a bonus with another game from the same software house or in a big cheap'ish back catalogue bundle of all of their games of that type.

games around here retain their original price for a long time... IIRC painkiller is still 49€ in some stores.....

 

I wish someone would start the ball rolling for COD4. It's still £39.99.

 

If game developers were really interesting in making money, and I mean a lot of money, they'd target competitive gamers who use their games as a platform. The players put in an obscene amount of time into the games and willingly pay whatever is charged. Knowing you've a community of customers playing your game means you can alternate your business model, perhaps to the point of releasing your game for free and thus expanding the user base.

In-game advertising, subscriptions, better cheat-protection, expansions and licensing when tournaments use your game, there are literally loads of way to generate money. Developers really need to stop seeing games as a one-off 'product'.

The only game I'm looking forward to is QuakeLive, which, ironically enough, is free and based on Quake III, which was released when? 1999? Yes, our game developers are surely doing a great job.

 

Developers need to revert back to the "arcade" style of game purchase. You play till you die then you have to insert coins to continue. That way developers can put in the Big Boss battles again that cost you £5.00 to continue.


P.S Actually thats a pants idea.....next.

 

Maybe re-evauluating the gaming model is the best idea...

Why doesn't some smart kid create a "better" steam.?

a STEAM clone like software, that releases a public framework to add any type of game to it has the REAL potential to make some money...

Hell, if the STEAM clone takes care of all the CC processing, getting the game to the customer, etc etc, if I was a game dev, 10% of each game sold would be worth it I imagine. (so 2 bucks from a 20 dollar game)

2 bucks can go towards covering your bandwidth cost for sending the game to the customer. IF you want to get real into it, make the backend of the engine based of of torrents so that its not all coming from your servers.

Of course, the hard part would be getting the bigger games to come on your system... but if you made the app rock solid, and used C instead of whatever the f*ck STEAM is coded in (either way the app itself is laggy as crap for such a "simple" app; my computer can run Adobe CS3 better than STEAM)


to add even more, why not add some demo area so when someone wants a demo, it installs this too (assuming its less of a computer hog than steam)
maybe make a way way better community area too. STEAM's friends page BS is still crap, and will always be crap.


Now you can offer your games a bit cheaper, because of the simple fact that it IS an "online" game. make sure to code in a clever way of allowing your customer base to play the games even if "your server is down" (technically could be your server down, or could be their internet is down etc)

 

how about every game comes with two versions. Standard and High Def. The High Def version has extra discs with Gigabytes upon gigabytes of high res textures and movies and shaders that would be impossible to download, this content would be code locked also so even if they borrowed the HD content from someone else, they can't unlock it for themselves. People with lesser systems would be hard pressed to see the difference anyways and the time it takes for them download the other stuff would be wasted anyways.
for me, i would love for versions of games to play on my laptop but there is no way i'll ever be able to play COD4 and TF2 at full graphics. I would rather pay for less content.

 

haha i like Dreaming's reference to kenco!! sorry nothing to do with the point of disscussion topic but it did make me chuckle.!