The Tides of the Video Game Industry (part 5)

What can a game developer do? Gamers look beyond the game itself, considering not just the genre/type of game or how it looks, but also how it stacks up against other games being released, how many hours of content it boasts, how large of a file size it is, and of course, price. As a consumer, I end up mentally assigning a price to a game I'm looking at based on how it appears to compare with other games I've seen and/or played. Even if the game is something I'm interested in, if my mental price-tag says the game is only worth X-amount of $, I'm not going to consider buying it until it hits that price or lower. The crazy thing about this is, sometimes we're only talking about a $5 game! It's ridiculous that someone wouldn't be willing to shell out $5 to try something new, but because there are so many other options available, and because this stuff adds up, gamers exert a self-discipline that emerges from the judgment of what they think the game is really worth, and they won't budge until it hits that price.

As a game developer myself, I know the difficulty of pricing, because to remain profitable--or at least recoup the money originally invested in making the game--the product sometimes needs to be priced out of range of what others might ascribe as “fair.” The gaming community usually doesn't think about the difference between small, independently produced games and games produced by huge companies. For that matter, the gaming community also doesn't consider the difference between crowd-funded games (and the quality boost crowd-funded games enjoy) and those that are independently funded. They bring their judgments of a “fair price” from their total game purchasing experience, which includes all of the above. Surviving in this industry is a precarious and volatile existence. Next week, though, I'll talk about a few things that are likely to give game developers a boost in their chances!