Payin' the Indies
Reverend Anthony offers his Rev Rant about donating to indies for small games:



An excerpt:

"We're willing to pay $60 on the chance that a game will be good, so long as it's a big budget, mainstream title. I mean, we may have paid a demo of a game like Assassin's Creed, or whatever, but when we pay that 60 bucks, we're still gambling. We don't know that it will be good. But we'll pay it anyway, because 60 (dollars) is the norm... But we won't pay a dime - not a f***ng dime - for a game that we just finished playing, even if it was fantastic. "

There are actually three different points here, and while I agree with two of them, I think the third one stumbles into human nature problems that just won't be fixed no matter how vociferously one makes his appeal.

And I haven't played Assassin's Creed, so I can't speak on that one with any authority.

The first point is that we can and should be creative with how we compensate people for making us games. I agree. The one-size-fits-all shrink-wrapped boxed-display-packaged physical goods model is a relic of an era that isn't quite dead yet, but it's probably in its twilight years as far as software (and other media) is concerned. Maybe we should be more creative. Certainly bypassing the middlemen and the physical package is part of it - but maybe we can do better.

But that is currently running into problems with his second point, which is the actual pricing of these little indie games (particularly when compared to mainstream titles). It's weird and counter-intuitive, but oftentimes people will agonize and debate more over paying $10 or $20 for a small indi game than they will paying $50 or $60 for a mainstream game. Or maybe it has something to do with the formality of the games business. Do people feel weird giving their money to some dude out in Nebraska over the Internet, but feel better handing their credit card to some overweight clerk at Game Stop to process because it's more conventional and seems more like a "real" business?

Maybe it's an expectation thing. Here in the U.S., we're accustomed to paying as much or more for a 24 ounce cup of carbonated beverage (which is mostly ice) at a restaurant as we'd pay for a big ol' 2-liter bottle in the grocery store. (And yes, we mix metric and English measurements like that all the time, too.) Because it's at a restaurant, our pricing expectations get reset.

Maybe the problem is we're now all programmed to expect games to be $50 - $60. If a game doesn't cost that much, then we automatically assume it's an inferior game, and an inferior game just isn't worth our money. Or, on the flip side, maybe people still think that just because it's on the Internet, it should be free. Case closed. A lame, emotional, knee-jerk reaction with very little logic to back it up, but that's the way it goes. Maybe. Or maybe that's just me (and I've been happily buying games for a while, so I'd assume I'm a little more "deprogrammed" than your average gamer).

This, I think, can be addressed over time. It's just expectations that need to be reset. Rants like this one help.

The third point he brings up is paying for the game after you have played it.

Some things in our world work that way. In labor / service businesses, you are often billed for a project after it is done. Larger projects might involve milestone payments along the way. But sometimes collecting on those charges can be so difficult that it's spawned its own industry. Psychologically, people are hard-wired to trade for those things that they want, not things that they already have.

I don't know if any amount of ranting is going to change human nature here. Shareware authors back in the late 80's and 90's tried - and failed - repeatedly to get conversions to go up without resorting to crippling features. But apparently, appealing to basic goodness and responsibility of human nature only works on about 5% of your potential customer base.

The rest need to be bribed.

I think while it's good to make the appeal to people to donate (even after the fact) and pay for these tiny but fun indie games - if for no other reason than to remind people that these may be labors of love, but they are most definitely LABORS that deserve compensation as much as fixing someone's roof or car or performing magic tricks at a birthday party. But ultimately, I think the failure is on the developer side. A game developer has to have to have a plan in place in order to profit from those psycho hours that they work when they could have been relaxing and spending time with their family like normal human beings.

Which brings us back to the first point - creatively compensating developers. There are some really weird, interesting ideas out there that could be explored that haven't been. A street performer accepting donations might also accept requests from those who donate. Gabe Newell's idea of gamers being investors might have some merit, too. What about custom endings? Some of these ideas don't scale too well to selling thousands of copies (let alone millions that the mainstream shoots for), but they might scale just enough that they work for indies.

But the biggest thing we have to get over, I think, is the expectation that a game has to exhibit all the graphical glitziness and slickness of an expensive mainstream production to be worth our time and money. I'm not sure how that illusion got into place, and I know I've gotten way more value out of a $20 or $25 indie game than from a LOT of mainstream titles costing more than twice as much (will I ever finish Mass Effect?). Yet I still experience some irrational hesitation at times when it comes to indie games, though I prefer to chalk it up to the fact that I don't have enough time to finish all the games I have already bought...

Labels: Biz, Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:02 AM (Permalink)