Look, I'd like to pay $1 for every game, but I realize that that's not a very sustainable model. How can gamers want to have perpetually improved (at least from a technical perspective) games and not want to keep paying for it, or pay less for it? It's completely impractical.

There has to be some worth attached to games. Not everything is a bite-sized, throwaway game like Angry Birds – some games actually try to do narrative or characters, or even play that goes beyond that one thing repeated over and over again. Most games aren't worth more than $1 in terms of their actual quality, but many of the best games being made today are absolutely worth a $50 asking price. Length doesn't equal value, sure, but an experience as polished and perfect as Super Mario Galaxy 2 for $0.99? No way in hell is that a good idea.

All I'm trying to say is that a blanket statement on the price of all games seems really shortsighted. Indie developers who are trying an experiment in bite-sized format can charge $0.99 for their games and make all kinds of profit, while a larger studio might have to charge much more to recoup the costs of making a massive game. Outside of the actual quality of any games that I'm talking about, the pricing models have to reflect the kind of development and the type of game that's being made. Maybe in the future we can see a kind of Netflix model for games, but for the time being, the pricing of games is going to have to remain somewhat nebulous – not everything is going to work on an Apple model.

(Also, to the Angry Birds folk: let's not forget that Angry Birds is an exception to the rule on the iPhone, and that even the paid version of Angry Birds has to be propped up by advertisements. And to gamers: If that sounds at all like an appealing business model, then there's something wrong with you.)

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