There's never a lack of price discussions here at TA, but something mentioned in the Cananbalt thread made me wonder what the general TA public feels on a particular topic. What should determine the price for a game? 1) The amount of content? 2) How fun it is? 3) How difficult it was to develop? The appropriate answer should of course involve all 3 of the above aspects, but in the Cananbalt thread someone thought the price should be lower because the game was developed extremely quickly (I'm not sure if that's true or not, that's just what was claimed in the post). And in that same respect, should all ports be priced at a heavily discounted rate since they were not built from scratch?
Content and fun above all else. However, "fun" to one person may not be fun to someone else. As for how much time was put into the game, I am not sure how much buyers really care about that, unless they also make games. From a buyers perspective, I think that when there are similar games out there to the game that you are releasing, you really need to have a good reason to have it priced at a higher price point.
What should determine the price for a game? I'd say the production values behind the game. If it's a crappy text based MMO, you are mental if you charge more than $0.99 for it. On the other hand, if it's a game that has a cool, original soundtrack and feels really polished (and has a good replay-value), I'm ok if they charge anything up to $9.99
gotta agree...most people are going to be absolutely ignorant of and not care about the effort that went into making a game, they will solely judge based on their own user experience whether what they just played was worth it or not
The content and how fun it is are the most important. I don't care how long it takes to develop i just care about how good are the results.
The people who are saying content....what's your opinion on flash game ports like Cananbalt? To play devil's advocate here, there's not much content there, but the gameplay experience is what justifies the price. The same could be said of most of the line draw, doodle, ragdoll, and stick clones. In the type of games I've described above, shouldn't the "fun" factor make the game more worthwhile than a content rich game that doesn't have as much pick up and play addictive potential?
Vinny, my take on this is that what one person thinks is "fun" may not be "fun" for the other person. What makes up the qualities of a good game is that it succeeds in the audience it is aimed at, and is even "fun" for people outside of that general audience. I think what makes a game "fun" or not is the appeal to the gamers. Also, the difficulty in developing the game should be an influencing factor, but should only sway the pricing decision up one or two dollars, not a whole lot. In addition, I don't think that ports should be at a heavily discounted rate just because they weren't built from scratch. Hope my opinion helped!
this thread has nothing to do with Fuzion, lol. I'm talking about iPhone games in general, and what the expectation is. The choices range from simple flash games and quick ports to some complex games that are heavily optimized for the iPhone platform and games with tons of content and eye candy. But which part makes certain games only "worth" 99 cents, while others are "premium" titles worth up to $9.99. This is highly subjective of course, but I've found some of the $0.99 games getting more playtime than the ones I've paid $4.99 and up for.
