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twesterm on 23 December 2009
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vlad321 said:
twesterm said:
 

h, but the problem is that there are a lot of good games out there that don't make money because they can't make money because people aren't buying them for any one of 100 reaons.

I'm not sure if you realize this, but even good games are heavily pirated.  I know your definition of good in the last five years is apparently Portal, Dragon Age, World of Goo, and nothing else, but there's actually a very large range of good games out there of all budgets.  Those games lose out on a large chunk of well deserved money because of piracy.

Furthermore, even your bad games that don't get a metacritic of 90+ still deserve compensation for their efforts.  As I said, when you actually manage to break in and make games, you'll see all the effort that goes into even "bad" games that only rate an 80.

I agree that even thegames which are not 90+ deserve compensation, however they do NOT deserve the same compensation as those that are 90+. They should be priced at $30, not $50. Worse/smaller games should hen be priced at 10-15, not $50.

Also I haven't heard of too many good games that have come out that have gone under and where the developers and heir families haave starved or gone bankrupt. An example or two would be nice, preferably of games that are actually popular, and whose unfortunate fate can be directly linked to piracy.

A good recent example-- Pandemic.

Yes, they've made some bad games, some really bad games, but they've also made some good games like The Saboteur and they just went under.  Now I doubt that's due to piracy, but I'm sure if people hadn't pirated their previous, who knows, they could have stayed open long enough to pull themselves out of their slump.

Anyways, so how do you judge before a game is even made how much it should be?  Do you think a publisher says hmm, I want to make a semi-shitty game so lets make a $30 game.  No, that's retarded.

Games are about making money and nothing else.  Games are sold for $50-60 because they cost a shit load of money to make and that $50-60 goes A LOT of different places.  The developer actually only sees a *very* small fraction of that money if any.

You can quote games that got their price cut by so much, but those sold so much because they were *really* good games for *really* cheap.  Of course people are going to take advantage of that.  Do you think that if Mirror's Edge, a middle of the road game, released for $30 it would fly off the shelves?

No.

It would sell more yes, but it wouldn't sell enough to cover that kind of price cut right off the bat and they would lose even more money because they would have to sell even more copies to just break even.

Your average game last gen needs to sell about 700-750k to just break even.  Budgets for this gen have nearly doubled so that means a normal game needs to sell well over 1 million copies to break even. 

If a publisher releases an average game, something in the 70-80 range, and decides to release it for $30, do you think it would sell more than 2 million copies?

What games in the last 10 years have sold 2 million+ copies within the first year of release?

Not many in the 70-80 range.

In a perfect world what you say about the price makes sense, but in the real world, it's just flat out stupid and doesn't work.

-edit-

And it's funny how you keep saying you wouldn't care if you made a bad game that didn't make money and your indie studio got shut down because of it.

I assume you like to eat and since it's a wee bit harder to buy food you want some sort of pay check.  When your indie groups go under I'm sure you'll be eating those words.