Re:King.com, makers of Candy Crush Saga – Trademark Trolls w...
by eropple on Friday January 24, 2014 @01:03PM
(#7116303)
Nobody's selling them because the few people who've tried to target an upmarket price point have failed miserably and the sort of investment needed to make a game "worth" $50 in the world of mobile games (filled with insane players who seem to think a dozen hours of gameplay isn't worth $3) would be a massive, massive risk. The only people able to actually move units at a price point over $10 seems to be Square themselves, and even they're not doing a great job of it with that mind-boggling back catalog of games and name recognition to use to their advantage.
I'm making a 2D JRPG right now - first wave of platforms being PC/Mac/maybe-Linux, second wave being mobile and tablet devices. The PC version will be priced between $15 and $20; the mobile one will by necessity end up around $8-$10 because that is the ceiling that people seem willing to pay for games (and not a lot of them at that).
From where I sit, the mobile market is largely quality-inelastic (unless you measure quality on 'reactivity of your Skinner box') and while I'm porting my game, I wouldn't bother otherwise if it wasn't solely a learning experience for me. Even if I was at an AAA shop I certainly couldn't justify spending the sort of money necessary to "validate" the existence of a $50 title on iOS.
Re:King.com, makers of Candy Crush Saga – Trademark Trolls w...
by chc on Friday January 24, 2014 @01:19PM
(#7116411)
Besides market issues, it is just really hard to make a very sophisticated game on a touchscreen. The controls are inherently imprecise and require you to cover up a third of the screen anytime you're interacting. The SNES game landscape would have looked very different if it had a control scheme with those properties. The popular sorts of games for mobile are the sorts of games that actually work well with the limitations of the phone hardware.
Re:King.com, makers of Candy Crush Saga – Trademark Trolls w...
by jaegerpicker on Saturday January 25, 2014 @10:38AM
(#7121055)
I'm not sure I'd pay $50 for a game unless it's one I REALLY wanted because friends were playing. I buy a medium amount of games but they are almost all are $20 and under. I tend to not like the big AAA production type of games except for a few exceptions (Mass effect, Uncharted, Skyrim but that's about all) but I love super meat boy, spelunky, bastion, banner saga, and tons of other indie games like them. To me it seems a better business model pay a smaller price from a digital delivery platform (Steam, iOS app store, google play store etc...) that a much larger chunk goes to the actual devs.
This is what you wrote. I haven't been a gamer for a long time, other than some $2 and $5 games, so I'm on your side.
I'm trying to understand why we're not interested in paying $50 for a game anymore. I have a stack of them at home, I paid $50 in 1990's and 2000's money for them.
I agree that you shouldn't pay $50 for a rehash of some old game that was never designed for touch, on a platform that doesn't provide really any other options for input control.
I'm just trying to understand why nobody is putting out NEW games that you would pay $50 for. Nobody is even targeting this price point. Is it because distribution channels are so much cheaper, and there aren't as many middle-men trying to take a cut? Is there some deficiency in the platform to explain why they /can't/ sell us games at the $50 price?
I'm not talking about Candy Crush Saga. The consoles are still successful at selling new games for $50+. Nobody is doing it for Android or iOS as far as I can tell. Are we waiting for NVidia Shield and Ouya, or is there some other reason why nobody is producing for this platform any new, original games of high quality that you would pay $50 for?