I usually look at it from cost per hour perspective. Tears of the Kingdom was 70 but I played it for ~140 hours, so 0.5 per hour. I’m ok with 1 per hour too but anything higher I start to ask myself “is the developer / publisher worth my support?”. Not all games can be judged by this metric though (eg outer wilds, unpacking)
So far, nothing beats the value of factorio. Mindustry (being so cheap) is a close second.
Little different for me:
$1 - 5 = $5
$6 - 12 = $10
$13 - 20 = $20
$21 - 50 = $50
$51 - 70 = $100
>$70 = $1000
That’s basically right.
$70?
I could buy a car for that kinda money.
You just reminded me of a time when $70 felt like nearly unlimited opportunities. Now, $70 means that I might get to buy groceries AND restock on spices.
Bruh a single bag of groceries is like 110 rn
God, I wish I could get groceries for 70…
Sorry, I meant an extra $70. I was irresponsibly drowsy-posting.
I keep being both entertained and baffled for the past three years or so by USians on Reddit complaining about games costing 60 bucks and simultaneously complaining about food delivery that they order every day. Not buying pizza for a couple days? Unimaginable.
No way $6 is $10 to you and not $5 this is how I know you’re lying.
I’m not saying it’s rational, it just feels like more money.
Same, quite a bit of difference to me.
$1 - 7 = how many of these are they going to charge? 100+ dollars
$8 - 60 = round to nearest $5
$61+ = irrelevant collector’s edition
60+: Haha, I can’t imagine it’s worth it.
20-59: Buy if it comes strongly recommended.
10-19: Impulse buy if the description and screenshots look cool.
1-9: Buy if I like the store thumbnail.
0: Hahaha FUCK no this will hold the game flow hostage every few hours to get me to pay infinite money.
EDIT: YES I know proper - often Open Source - free games exist. :) OpenTTD and good ol’ Nethack are my faves
There’s been a lot of good games for free on epic, and epic still pays the dev/publisher for it, so it’s worth clicking the button even if you don’t download it and play it from thier client.
Does my game’s thumbnail please you, m’lord?
Not necessarily my cup of tea, but at two bucks it’s basically free, so…
Not the one you asked, but I do like the art. Though I’m not a fan of beat em ups.
Thanks! My partner worked hard on all the art.
That’s really fun, reminiscent of old-school platforming, absolutely worth the $2 and it runs great on the Steam Deck! Good job!
Thanks!
Main previews won’t load for me right now I’m using mobile tho but yeah the banner looks great
Quick question for a game dev:
How does getting steam deck verified work? Like do you reach out? Or do they just check whenever they get to it?
Cool looking game! If I wasn’t deeply unemployed right now I would buy! Hopefully soon
It’s an optional part of getting your game on the steam marketplace, but I’ve had a friend try on steamdeck without messing with it and had no issues. Ymmv, I’m one example and this is my first project.
0: Hahaha FUCK no this will hold the game flow hostage every few hours to get me to pay infinite money.
https://supertuxkart.net/
https://www.wesnoth.org/
https://xonotic.org/
https://freeciv.org/Super Tux Kart is very underrated, super fun game actually
I wish Armagetronad wasn’t so forgotten and had more people in the servers :(
BloodborneNightmare Kart costs 0Don’t let me tempt you with !freegames@feddit.uk!
I thought this was age instead of price until I got to 0.
Oh, this is fun, lemme do mine:
1-5: It’s most likely worth the money because I’ll likely beat it and have fun even though it won’t land in my all-time favorites.
5-10: I’m hesitant, but it’s probably worth the risk or it’s niche and I need to support the developer.
10-15: I either know for sure I’ll have a lot of fun with it or I’m desperate to play anything new because my library feels a little stale RN.
15-20: It better be fantastic and end up an all-time favorite because why would I pay this much for a video game.
20-60: I’m good. I can wait.
Unless it’s free because it’s open source!
Netscapes?
Clippy! What’s up man! It’s been forever! It’s me, Netscape Navigator! Remember me?
Yes, I remember you! How are you doing, Netscape Navigator?
0: this will stay in my backlog forever
This is a really basic business concept; business 101 stuff. They definitely didn’t make it up, they’re just using it.
It works against the general population, if this particular one doesn’t, don’t get too busy strutting, there is almost certainly something else that does work on you.
Buy shit because you need/want it, not because it’s a deal.
Same reason that shit on TV is five easy payments of 29.95.
I’m willing g to spend $29. I’ll even spend $29 five times. But not $150.
I had my sewer line backing up into my basement a couple of months ago. My regular plumber was busy so I had to call in a company that I knew was an overpriced scam (“Dream Team” lol) but I had no choice since I had guests in the house for my father’s funeral. They came and of course they couldn’t clear the line and said they had to dig up and replace the whole thing. The guy had a special tablet that he showed me the three options and the prices on and it initially showed them all in dollars per month with “zero-interest financing”. I was like dude just show me the total cost. The three options were $17K, $22K and $36K total but the monthly payments actually decreased with increasing total price (naturally the payment option didn’t show how many total payments you would have to make).
Fortunately I called my regular plumber and he was so outraged at these motherfuckers that he came out that afternoon and cleared my line for me. Total cost $850.
Holy shit. Hold on to that plumber, lol.
He does like to launch into racist rants, but sometimes you just gotta hold your nose and swallow.
Ah that sucks but hey at least he’s not scamming you
The only time this breaks down for me though is that I still struggle to pay $0.99 for a mobile app I use often sometimes. Really not sure what it is.
It’s wild, I released a shareware music creation app for Windows back in 2000 and it was easy to get people to pay $29.95 for it. I now have a vastly superior iOS version and nobody’s willing to pay a dollar for it. It’s a very depressing situation for an independent developer.
It’s cuz people expect free or close to free mobile apps to be scummy and have a bajillion paywalls and need a monthly subscription and steal all your data so on and so forth
When there’s truly good apps, it sucks
Yeah. I used to have a $20 shareware product back when kagi was a payment processor. Apple introduced $1 pricing as a dick waving contest and fucked the entire indy developer community.
I originally sold my app on Beyond.com (which was originally software.net). They took 10% which didn’t seem too bad. One day they contacted me about giving my app a “freebate” – basically the app was still $29.95 but buyers could fill out a form and send it in and eventually (like months later) get their $29.95 back. Per their data only about half of buyers ever bothered to do this so it was effectively a 50% off deal. Beyond.com was supposed to give me about $10 per copy sold instead of the normal $27 to cover the freebate and they would make $5 per copy instead of their normal $3.
I said OK and they featured my app on their front page and sales went up like 100X and I was of course pretty happy. The funny part was that their accounting system was all fucked up and I kept getting $27 per copy sold even though the freebate was still in place. I actually tried contacting them multiple times about this to get the situation corrected and I could never get through to anybody who had any clue about what was going on. Eventually they went bankrupt and shut down and years later I got one of those class-action settlement checks in the mail without any explanation of what it was for. Maybe sales of my app were even better than they were telling me, I dunno. I’ve never once met a person in the real world who has ever even heard of the app so that doesn’t seem very likely.
It works against the general population, if this particular one doesn’t, don’t get too busy strutting, there is almost certainly something else that does work on you.
That is very well put! I feel like I’ve talked to so many people who see one ad that doesn’t land and say, “ads don’t work on me.”
The $8 tier has been around for a decade, for exactly this reason. MMO subscriptions, bargain games, podcasts, delivery fees. People love charging you $8
For me, it goes:
0 - hell no
1 to 5 - sure why not, that’s about as much as a bottled drink.
6 to 10 - maybe once a month.
11 to 15 - better be a pretty damn good game, or I’m refunding.
16 to 20 - I’m waiting for a discount, not worth it.
21 to 60 - hell no
61+ - I’m blacklisting your company from my recommendations.
I get that this is Lemmy and users here are a certain way but calling anything over 16 dollars not worth it is genuinely insane.
You can always do the XKCD trick
But even this seems to have gone stale over time, as retro game prices get sticker (even going up as vintage games come back into fashion).
One thing I don’t see on this list is “piracy”, which is a bit weird if your line is $15. I find a lot of bargain bin games to be as bad or worse than FTP games. $20-30 has historically been my sweet spot
I think for a good game, by a good company worth supporting, $30 is very fair and reasonable, especially if you get more than a few hours of play out of it.
We seem to spend $60 on movie tickets and snacks for two and leave the theaters after 90 minutes disappointed and never complain as a society beyond saying the movie sucked, but then going to watch the sequel because everyone else is watching it.
The only reason I wouldn’t personally spend more than $30 or so on a game is because generally everything more expensive is published by a major studio, and thus sucks ASS.
I found some good stuff in the F2P demo/early access. Especially if you’re just looking for a few hours of fun. Every now and then you can find a release F2P title that’s not monetizing you. But without the marketing budget or polish they don’t take off in popularity.
What do you have against OpenTTD and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead? \s
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
I spawned as a nun in-game on the rooftop of a cake restaurant. I’ve got nothing but a bible to wreck zombies. And there are so many, there is no tutorial, the controls are tanky, the devs are out of their mind.
0/10
I have not spent more than $30 for a video game in over a decade and a half. I have no idea who’s affording all these “AAA” titles that go for $50+, or who’s keeping that market alive.
There are some miserable, well-off parents out there in liberal America who just throw money at their kids and ignore what they do with it I guess.
Some of the best games i’ve ever played are in the 1-10 range. With that in mind, i do brlieve that a 60+ game would at least be über eccellent and have much to do. Which might unironically make such games bloated, if they weren’t costly that is. Just to add to this, terraria is about 10 dollars on steam at most times.
Not only is the game fun, but it can last forever if you want. There are many cases of games where the monetisation model is donation based. I bought an offer for pixel dungeon despite the game being free, mostly because shattered pixel dungeon singlehandendly revived the game.
So I suppose you are not doing
pacman -S endless-sky endless-sky-high-dpi?
A reminder that you don’t need to know advanced maths to be a developer. Just call the necessary functions to do the job
Glances at this guy’s main() function
Instantly dies
I remember when I saw my first main() I just started writing code only inside of it. That seemed to work so I kept going. 20 years later I’ve only ever written code inside that same main(). I’ve changed jobs 4 times. Just… if(job==0)… or if(job==3)… Works like a charm.
I haven’t touched software development in years. Fuck that shit
First, these jabronies need adderall.
Second, I need adderall.
I think we’re the same sort of jabroni.
You should go to the doctor and get a blood test. And while you’re there, try to get me some adderall.
Oh, me too! Uhh throw in some vyvanse while you both are there!
Finally, someone who thinks like me
This is just this scene from The Jerk in written form.
For me, the price listed is the price listed. If it’s $5, it’s $5. $8 is $8, etc.
This kind of ratio would just confuse me otherwise.
Basically everyone thinks that, and yet the data shows that basically everyone falls for it anyway. No matter how aware of it you are, you are not immune to manipulation
Vibe pricing.
So their greedy assholes that admit to price manipulation…
Bruh, 8 euro for a full game is greedy??? People out here regularly spending 20 for a skin, or a slotmachine dopamine surprise box… Now that’s real greed
Do… Do you not know what price manipulation is?
Yeah duh, it is when they manipulate you into buying a game for 8$, while we think it is just 5$. Didn’t you read the post?
/jk
Were… were you under the impression that companies who sell products of any kind have some kind of deep formula for making sure their pricing is only the razor-edge of what they need to price it at to keep a business running?
Are you insane? Have you ever sold anything? Have you ever run a business?
Also $8 is “greedy assholes” to you? Are you a bot or a tankie or something?
Never mind, ignore original comment
$8 is a fair price for peak
The crafty madmen
For something that makes absolutely no sense at all, this makes a lot of sense.
We supposedly evolved to perceive values logarithmically. The difference between 1 to 3 should feel bigger than 3 to 5. Yet, the difference between $5 and $10 feels to me way more than the difference between $1 and $5.
Maybe I’m just broke as shit and think $10 is a lot of money
they could’ve just said they smoked weed
