
Why rampant video game sales are bad for players - xamlhacker
http://thecastledoctrine.net/seedBlogs.php?action=display_post&post_id=jasonrohrer_1389812989_0&show_author=1&show_date=1
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chipsy
When Jason Rohrer says something, it's invariably couched in zero-sum
sacrificial thinking. The principle is embedded deep in his games, as well as
his lifestyle, and by inverting that viewpoint it's easy to find flaws in his
arguments.

With respect to this idea, it models the game as a magical artifact of worship
that grows more valuable simply by being older, and then reasons backwards to
"this rewards the true fans." But most of the internal models used by players
involve the game being some mix of disposable content(interactive stories and
scenarios to experience), a pastime or hobby, or a piece of fashion -
something friends are also playing. And in the majority of those instances,
obsolescence can be assumed; mass piracy of our oldest video games is taken
for granted.

Price can rise if the game is continually developed. Minecraft is exceptional
in that it's always the same product with large, relatively frequent updates,
but the same effect is much more often seen across defined sequels: The first
in a breakout hit series might be a low-budget game, and then after a sequel
or two it warrants a bigger budget and a $60 price.

~~~
stonemetal
_it models the game as a magical artifact of worship that grows more valuable
simply by being older,_

Sounds rather similar to funding a startup. Those who get in earlier in the
cycle take on more risk but usually get to invest at a lower price. If you got
in on Minecraft during the beta you had no idea if it would actually make it
to release. Every time the price went up it was closer to release and less of
a risk. Sounds like his game follows a similar path, no one wants to play an
MMO with 2 other users. Rewarding those who take a risk of being an early
adopter\community builder doesn't sound like a bad idea.

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jiggy2011
I think the biggest benefit of Steam sales is probably lowering piracy. Some
large number of the people who got the game at 75% off would probably have
just pulled it off a torrent site had that option not been available rather
than pay full price.

~~~
teamonkey
By the time a AAA title gets discounted in a Steam sale it will have been
available to torrent for a long time already. A game that lasts a few days
without being cracked is remarkable.

~~~
chii
Whether there is a torrent available doesn't really factor in to the decision
to buy a game on sale.

If a game is deemed "worth it" by a buyer, they are going to purchase it,
instead of torrenting it. Or, rather more frequently i assume, they first
torrent the game when it comes out and full price, play a bit and find it not
that great. Then, when time comes for a sale, the gamer chooses to buy it and
replay it, because the price is worth it.

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corysama
We're talking about two very different types of pricing strategies that each
work very well for two very different types of release.

With a big-bang, "it's done, ship it" release, going out at a high price
captures high revenue from the few high-expectation customers. Dropping the
price later captures remaining revenue from the many low-expectation
customers. Steam-style repeated sales have the bonus marketing benefit of
being noteworthy and counter-intuitively do not appear to cannibalize high-
revenue sales much if at all.

With a slow-burn, "it's not done yet" release, going out at a low price
matches the general low expectations for the product and has the bonus
marketing benefit of getting talkative early-adopters on board early and also
getting them increasingly excited as development proceeds. As quality
increases, price increases accordingly. This has the bonus feature of putting
some time pressure on customers who are on the fence about the cost/value
proposition, but want to lock in a lower price by buying early.

------
wonderzombie
This is the problem with assuming humans are all rational, utility I
maximizing machines. When a game like Skyrim comes out, I don't care that
it'll be $45 instead of $60 in some months. My friends are playing it, the
Internet is playing it, people are making memes.

I picked $45 as an example price on purpose, because games which are brand new
(according to my anecdata as someone who couldn't stop refreshing Steam in
Dec), newer games just aren't as deeply discounted as older ones.

So no I don't buy it. There's a lot to be said for playing the new and shiny
if you can afford it and if it's great. The only time I hold off on for a
Steam sale is for a game I wasn't going to buy anyway. In a sense he's
committing the same fallacy as the RIAA did by presuming that, in the absence
of piracy (or sales in this case) people would just pay full price. Maybe some
would! But it's fallacious to ignore the difference an incentive such as a
sale makes in purchasing at all vs no purchase at all.

~~~
chii
The author of the blog is making, imho, the classic mistake that the music
industry makes when calculating potential revenue.

He makes this quote:

> If just half of the players who buy the game during a 50%-off sale would
> have bought the game at full price if that was their only option, we'd
> already have a wash. What fraction of sale-waiting players fall into this
> category? I suspect way more than half. The picture gets even worse for
> 75%-off sales.

Which is a plain wrong assumption. The buyers of a 50% sale would hardly
contain any who would've bought it at 100% price. Those who would've bought at
100% price have _already_ purchased! This is the same reasoning that music
industry counts lost sales in - if they pirated it, then they _must_ also
would have purchased at 100% price had piracy been prevented, because the
media is so rock solid that it's assumed that the acquisition is going to
happen no matter what, just the route to it!

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james-skemp
Wasn't sure until the end whether he realized why Minecraft's pricing made
sense; it was beta. You weren't buying a finished product.

I tend to play consoles and while I pick up a few games at full price every
year (3 preordered at three moment) I do tend to wait for the price drops
(about $10 each time unless the game is a flop) more than sales.

~~~
jamie_ca
Kerbal Space Program is (mostly) doing the same as Minecraft. As they're
hitting milestones the base price has been increasing, but they're still
allowing themselves to get pegged during the major Steam sales.

The other potential problem with rampant Steam sales (because honestly,
they've won the mindshare) is that it's affected my price sensitivity. There's
so many good games out there that I've picked up for a pittance, and have yet
to play, that I can't really justify paying full price for anything -- if I
don't have the time to play the all those other games, why pay more money for
yet another game I won't have time to play?

The sole exception to that rule is games with a compelling multiplayer
component, as something I can do while socializing with some friends.

~~~
minimaxir
What's really scary is how fast some of the AAA games drop in price.

Bioshock Infinite on the PC went from $60 to _$10_ during Amazon/Steam sales
_in less than 6 months._

~~~
Qworg
People were disappointed it was only 10 hours long. I see that as a selling
point, but many don't.

~~~
mxfh
Once they add a option to skip/autoplay the predictable-outcome fighting
sequences I would buy any sequel. Seriously if you're over 30 you shouldn't
have to prove to anyone anymore that you can beat scripted hoards and boss
fights.

Some goes for _Spec Ops: The Line_ after playing the first two levels I
preferred watching the play-through on youtube over having to kill the
equivalent of whole population Staten Island one by one just to follow better
than average plot.

Also what Dara Ó Briain says:

"I love video games for this reason over all other art form. They do a thing
that no other art form does, right. No other art form does. You cannot be bad
at watching a movie. You cannot be bad at listening to an album. But you can
be bad at playing a video game, and the video game will punish you, and deny
you access to the rest of the video game. No other art form does this. You’ve
never read a book and 3 chapters in, the book has gone, “What are the major
themes of the book so far?” You go “I, I, I don’t know, I wasn’t paying close
enough att…” And the book goes THOOMP."

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLi7HlAB_CI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLi7HlAB_CI)

[http://rhinospike.com/script_requests/enlasnubes/854/](http://rhinospike.com/script_requests/enlasnubes/854/)

~~~
lmm
> Once they add a option to skip/autoplay the predictable-outcome fighting
> sequences I would buy any sequel. Seriously if you're over 30 you shouldn't
> have to prove to anyone anymore that you can beat scripted hoards and boss
> fights.

What? You bought an FPS (or at least a game with FPS elements). The mechanics
of that, the co-ordination and the thinking, are part of the game, part of the
challenge, part of the fun. If you're too old for games and would rather watch
a movie, buy a movie.

~~~
qbrass
They're speed bumps with guns. The strategy for killing them hasn't changed
since Space Invaders.

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TrainedMonkey
I think this misses a few key points:

1\. Steam is digital, there is almost no cost associated with "selling" a
game, almost everything you sell is profit. Thus, it is somewhat disconnected
from standard sales where dropping price too much can hurt you.

2\. Steam does not allow you to buy physical games, you can't take a game out
of steam. What you are paying for is for game to be added to your digital
collection. Collection is a key term here, that what steam sales are all
about. In modern times nobody has enough time to play all the good games, but
we still want to buy them. I know a bunch of people with huge digital
collections on steam.

3\. Author seems to be divorced from realities of economies of scale. As
things get cheaper, the audience gets wider. Essentially this means putting
game into hands of more people.

4\. More players is good, steam trading cards means that more players = more
sustained profit.

~~~
stefan_kendall
More users is not always a good thing. Support costs increase linearly for a
while with the user base, and then I'd suppose superlinearly.

Apple has departments of people dedicated only to taking phone calls.

I would rather have 10 users at $10,000 each than 100,000 users at $1 each.

~~~
XorNot
Games aren't business software. You had to fix the bugs anyway, but you don't
_have_ to add new features all the time after release.

~~~
chii
and also, i don't see a game (even MMO style game) taking calls and operating
a call center. At best there's some admin/moderating role, and it'd be
asynchronous, and cookie cutter style responses.

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jasonlotito
> If you buy it at launch, are you going to be screwed a few weeks later by a
> sale? Am I going to make you wish that you waited?

Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I'd only feel that way if your game wasn't
good. I happily buy games at full price, and if they are good, they are good.
The reason why sales on Steam or other places work so well in attracting
people like me is that those places are marketing themselves. Steam is in my
face when I play games, so it's not as if I could miss the game.

Is it just the sale that increases the sales? Or is it also the in your face
advertising?

~~~
WalterSear
I wouldn't have bought 90% of the games I have if I hadn't been introduced to
them in some kind of sale or bundle.

~~~
jasonlotito
What point are you trying to make? That you only brought them because they
were on sale, or that you only knew to buy them because they were being
promoted through what happens to be a sale?

~~~
WalterSear
Both. That my money wasn't and wouldn't be on the table otherwise.

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afterburner
If there are more sales, but at lower prices, and it balances out, it only
hurts you if you thought you would get a bigger share if people hadn't spent
money on other games.

If it doesn't balance out, if sales have decreased spending, then fine, maybe
there's a problem. But I doubt that, give that Steam's sale frequency
increased after they started.

So how can I tell that he's not just complaining because he wishes he'd gotten
a larger share, that he feels he is losing out because people are spreading
the money around more?

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invalidOrTaken
I like the way this guy thinks. The full-price-then-sale model is industry
standard---but a company looking to build a relationship of trust with its
fans might be able to do so this way.

There are certain game companies I love---Stardock in particular comes to
mind. I like Stardock for the pretty simple reason that I read Brad Wardell's
writing, and he seems like a pretty cool guy.

When you factor in company-customer trust, there are a lot of wacky business
models that might just be crazy enough to work:

\- What if a player signed on as a Patron? $20/month, and the company comes
out with games whenever it feels like it. Only Patrons can play.

\- The company benefits somewhat from having trusted _players_. Documentation,
video tutorials, coaching---a lot of this can be done by players rather than
W-2's.

That's all I have off the top of my head, but I think there's virgin (or
perhaps fallow) soil here.

~~~
Brashman
What stops people from signing up as a Patron right before a game is released?
Or put another way, what's the benefit of signing up as a Patron ahead of
time?

~~~
akiselev
Well one way you could do it is require a three month minimum which limits how
many "blockbuster" games you can play but has staged/unlimited access to the
rest of the catalogue. Bigger packages/loyal customers get access to more
games.

The trick here is to get the customer on the subscription for long enough to
even out the volatility of financing new games, especially for more original
games that aren't baggaged by the success and creative choices of prequels.
I'm not sure if this can be done for games unless a platform like Steam does
it at scale, or someone big like EA does it with predatory tactics (difficult
to cancel subscriptions, auto-renew with all plans, etc.)

Netflix is doing this to some degree so we'll see how much success they have.
Valve is in perhaps a similar position with its usage data on PC gamers.

~~~
chii
the price point of $20 is a bit steep for such a subscription. Perhaps $10 a
month, and that seems to be stretching it. I think a lot of gamers are young
and therefore cash-strapped.

Netflix style gaming rentals have been tried before - i don't think they
succeeded much tbh.

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Dysiode
I'm largely a fan of the idea I've felt the burn of the "I paid full price for
this because I appreciate your work but now it's 33% off?" moment (Borderlands
anyone?). I want to see that abolished. Because I've seen a lot of negative
feedback of the argument, I want to offer an addition to it.

As an example, I had my eye on Kentucky Route Zero since I saw it in IGF and I
fit the example user "It'll go on sale. I'll wait" But after a year it only
went on sale for 50% (crazy, I know) and that happened a couple times. At that
point, I knew it wasn't going to go to 66% or 75% any time soon so I picked it
up. I can see a happy medium with sales where you make it clear that you won't
go on sale for a certain period of time and/or for a specific discount. You
don't necessarily have to verbalize that either. I don't follow any KRZ news
but it was clear that that price point was not going to change quickly. This
way you still get the press about sales (I saw a lot of KRZ at 33% and 50%)
without having to screw fans over.

I'm sure there are a few ways of strategizing it that would require some
experimentation (e.g. a bit before a steam sale, have another 10% type
discount like might be seen on launch week but make it clear that it's not
going to go below that). There are also more mediums for sales with the Humble
Store now you see a lot of games with shallower discounts.

I will say I don't think this model works as a long term plan however. I like
the idea of starting low for pre-orders and then increasing the price over
time, but I don't think it would work as expected over a two week period. With
Minecraft there was the expectation of more content over a period of a year or
so between increases. It may still be viable but that may be a case for early
access. Make it clear there that the price will increase when it's finished.

I hate seeing what appears like developers feel like they have to sell out on
their baby, and I hope something like this can work.

------
Semaphor
I stopped buying games at full price. What I do now is either buy them in
sales/bundles or I pay over full price because I really want the game
(kickstarter).

I wonder how KS to Steam Early Access fits in there, for Wasteland 2 it's
clear that the game will be cheaper once it is released. There is no secret,
it's been said over and over again.

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kevin_bauer
"Hell, No!, Never! ... or so, were my first thoughts, because aren't we
brainwashed into thinking that's the way how the market works?

But on second thought: maybe he isn't so of the tangent. How many games did i
buy, but never played, even never touched, just they were on sale? And how
many games, which i really, really wanted to try did i never buy, because i
thought : "Aww i could buy three for the price of this one! So let's wait for
the inevitable sales-offer.", just to loose interest, because i was occupied
otherwise and a half year later already new games were flooding the market.

So it boils down to price, time and satisfaction! Maybe this is another
triangle where you can move just on the axis, and never have all together.

The most limiting factor is time. You can only play one game at a time and if
it produces satisfaction you probably would be willing to pay a higher price.

------
mentos
> This waiting game is likely decimating your player base and critical mass at
> launch by spreading new players out over time. And your fans, who are silly
> enough to buy the game at launch and waste money, get to participate in a
> weaker, smaller player community.

It seems like part of the problem is that some of his games (MMOs?) need a
player base to realize their potential. In which case I wouldn't consider
these multiplayer games the same products as other single player video games
which don't require a player base.

If your game requires a player base, consider a freemium model that allows you
to get players in the game contributing to the community/network effect, but
also allows you to generate a profit from the inevitable ~10% (of a much
larger player base) that will buy extra content in your game.

~~~
chii
while it's logical to argue that an MMO style game benefits from a freemium
model, i rather argue that a freemium model destroys the craft by turning game
design decisions into business decisions (that is, whether you morph your game
design/mechanic so that you can extract more money). This is a terrible trend
i m seeing recently with many games (and especially true of mobile games).

I rather pay a $15 subscription and play a game designed without fremium in
mind, than pay $15 in In-App-Purchases.

~~~
mentos
Well I think a lot of subscription MMOs are already compromised by the fact
that they have an incentive to keep you around paying. This makes for a lot of
the 'level grind' you see in MMOs.

------
lawtguy
The reason Steam does sales is because they make more money:
[http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/24/less-is-more-
gabe...](http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/24/less-is-more-gabe-newell-
on-game-pricing/). From the article, they expected that cutting Counter-Strike
by 75% would result in 4 times the number of people buying it, thus being
revenue neutral. Instead 160 people bought it for every person that regularly
did, this increasing the revenue by 40x!

He's right about charging less in alpha and beta: those players are taking a
bigger risk and for a multiplayer game he needs to build critical mass. But
after the game is launched, Valve's results show that sales make you more
money, not less.

