Devin Wilson asks on Slide to Play: what’s a game really worth? He initially, rightly, argues that people will bitch about spending a few bucks on an iOS game, yet will happily pay the same for a sandwich. And he complains about developers “bellyaching” about the race to the bottom, fighting for 99-cent scraps along with myriad other developers, before idly wondering if microtransactions/freemium or “any other pricing model” might be better.
The article dramatically smacks into a wall when Wilson mentions an essay by Jason Rohrer about the
absurdity of selling digital copies, which is—of course—exactly what game publishers have done for as long as most of us can remember
Well, not quite as long as most of us can remember, whipper-snapper. I remember when videogames came on cassette tapes, but anyway:
Rohrer’s writing thankfully isn’t a call for piracy, but it’s definitely enough to make you question the nature of the games business. What is it that we’re really paying for?
There’s a clear problem for some people in understanding that things that don’t have a tactile product that you can hold and, when necessary, hurl at next door’s cat when it’s taking a shit in your garden, have value. The value—what you’re paying for—is in the consumption and the experience. A game is still a game, regardless of whether it comes inside a piece of plastic or as a collection of ones and zeroes fired at your electronic device over the magic of the internet.
There’s already been some debate about this in light of the used game market, but we can almost certainly agree that a digital copy (which itself can be copied at no detriment to the original and practically zero cost) has—if nothing else—a slippery value.
From my statement above, you’ll note that I disagree with this. If anything, I’d argue a digital copy’s value is—when DRM is non-existent or applied in a non-hateful manner—far from slippery. That I can play my copy of Exciting iOS Game on my iPad, iPod and iPhone without paying any extra money to do so is fantastic. With iCloud, progress can seamlessly shift between devices, too. This is beneficial; this is added value. It’s not ‘slippery’ value. Still, it’s clear that quite a few people these days really don’t see any value in non-tangible products, and that’s a pity. The assumption that everything online is—or at least should be—’free’ is a big problem.
If I buy an app for $2.99 on my MacBook Pro, then put it on both my iPod Touch and iPad, these individual instances of the app don’t seem like they’re now worth just one dollar each just because it’s 3 dollars spread across 3 devices. At the same time, I don’t now have $9 worth of content, because then I’d just be printing money in a sense.
The value is in the ability to freely duplicate. Likewise, when I buy a downloadable album, the fact I can play that on any musical device I own increases its value. It’s impossible to put a set figure on this value (and to do so misses the point), but it’s an odd argument to suggest digital copies somehow make anyone question value, or that you need to somehow divide up the cost of a fixed-value purchase between the items you install it on.
It seems, then, that the entire business of games is quite possibly a sham! Even Apple’s overhead doesn’t make sense in terms of valuation: they can afford to distribute free apps for no cost to the developer.
If games have no inherent monetary value, then it must be the case that it is only by the generosity of those who don’t want to circumvent the normal channels of distribution that any developers make any money at all!
There are some serious leaps of logic here. “If games have no inherent monetary value”? From whose claims? Wilson’s, by making the argument without anything much to back it up? And to suggest that it’s “generosity” to not bootleg content is reprehensible. It might be easy to break the law these days when it comes to copying games, music and movies, but you’re not being “generous” in paying for these things—you’re simply acting within the law and, to some extent, supporting the people who made them. Kill the revenue stream and you wave goodbye to all these things.
Recently, Adam Saltsman wrote a blog in which he described microtransactions as “contrived” and “unethical”. This coming from the man who refuses to drop the $2.99 price of Canabalt for iOS, a repetitive, two-year-old game that’s absolutely free to play as long as you’re on a device that runs Flash.
Wow, what an absolute git Saltsman is. Imagine: he made a game and set a price for it, and he’s refused to drop that price! Man, I want to kick his face off, because— No, actually, it’s his game, right? It’s his decision what to price it at? And is the insinuation in the quote that Saltsman is being a hypocrite for calling microtransactions “unethical”, because he refuses to drop the price of his “repetitive, two-year-old game”? Because it sure sounds like it.
The source code is free to download as well! I don’t think Canabalt is bad (quite the opposite), nor do I mean to merely attack Saltsman (whom I respect), but his pricing model is no more logical than the practices he describes as “extortion”.
The problem is that a whole ton of freemium games are dodgy as hell when it comes to pricing. That’s not to say standard pricing doesn’t lead to questionable value propositions at times, but freemium is very often bait-and-switch. For every game that’s a demo (a few levels for free, and then a price to unlock the rest of the game), there are dozens of games that effectively force you to buy in-game currency to get anywhere in the lifetime of this universe. Sure, you can technically churn your way through without dipping into your bank balance, but only if you’re some kind of masochist.
It’s also worth noting that this is the kind of game Saltsman was rallying against in his post. He said:
Games that […] abuse [achievement] checklists and include In-App Purchases, are deliberately contriving their designs in the worst way in order to extort money from players, which is unethical and unacceptable design practice.
Wilson sums up his article as follows:
I like good games, and I think game developers would probably tend to make better games if they didn’t have to worry about their empty stomachs and overdue rent. Game makers undoubtedly need to get paid, but putting an absolute monetary value on a digital game doesn’t seem possible.
I really don’t see why not. Why is gaming so fundamentally different from everything else you buy? It’s extraordinarily rare beyond a PR stunt to have record artists let people pay whatever they want for an album. And I don’t pay my supermarket what I want to for my shopping. The enjoyment of a game might well often be subjective, but a single up-front price (or a free game with a single IAP) at least provides no scope for confusion nor is there any contrivance to get you to buy your way through the game instead of grinding. You’re paying a fixed fee for a certain amount of entertainment—and that’s it.