You're talking about entirely different markets. Of course games cost more on the DS/PSP/whatever. That's because they are fixed at those prices. If developers started retailing games for $10 on those consoles, you could expect a hell of a lot more $10 games. On the iPhone, there are a ton of $1, $2, $3, etc. games. These prices are set by the consumer. Consumers want lower priced apps, and they get it. That's how the market works. Boo hoo for developers, but great for consumers. Welcome to economics 101. Class dismissed.
First of all, if it's a class, it's Economics 101, that's English 101. To the more important point, your argument is ridiculous. How in the hell are the DS/PSP prices "fixed" at higher prices while iDevice games are "fixed" at less than a buck. The answer is they're not. What seems to have happened is that many smaller developers made apps (fart apps and the like) that don't take a lot of effort and priced them at a reasonable $.99. Soon, people expected to pay a buck or two for an app. One economics (see how it's lower case when it's not a class?) principle you have correct is supply and demand. If cheap bastards will only accept $.99 apps (demand), what we will end up with are the beforementioned fart apps and free advertising "games" saturating the market (supply). Soon, thanks to consumers who have undervalued this market, true game developers like id who have just released a slam-dunk awesome freaking game BTW, will sadly abandon this platform just when it was beginning to show its full potential. Continue to b***h and moan about 10 dollar apps (the ones that are worth it anyway, and there have been quite a few), and the only devs left will be Khalid freakin Sheik or whatever his name is. And by the way, if consumers set the prices games would be free.
Why do you feel the need to trivialize my argument. Please really utilize any reading comprehension skills you may have. I don't buy fart apps or "time wasters." Let's take a quick review of the high quality and/or long-lasting $0.99 iPhone games: Uniwar, Hero of Sparta, Car Jack Streets, Peggle (not any more, though), Bionic Surfer, etc. These are all high quality games with much more longevity and replayability of this Doom game. Sure, they may not have the bling of Doom, but their overall quality is right up there with Doom. If John Carmack doesn't want to make high quality, lower priced (as in $5 and under) games or at least ones with a gameplay length of more than 2-3 hours at $10 (again, I refer to the $1 per 1 hour rule of thumb), that's his problem. Other developers will. I'll buy from them. If you want to pay a premium for a quick thrill, that's your prerogative.
How are $0.99 apps disastrous for the App market? Please explain that to me with credible evidence. Why do we have to pay a premium price ($10) for high quality games? Other developers are pumping out high quality games for much less. Why should I buy from develops who feel like they're above the market and can charge more? And are people really buying games based on eye candy these games? Sure, Doom really pushes the graphics on the iPhone, but is that really going to matter when the app gets deleted after the 2-3 hour stint. Wouldn't rather have a game that you'll be playing 15, 20, 40 hours down the road? Look, everyone needs to stop comparing this to the console market. This is an entirely different market with different consumers and different principles of economics. You can't compare them.
Did you just say poo-poo? I'm actually really looking forward to Doom Classic. I'm leaving the country for a few weeks starting Saturday and I don't think it'll be out by then. This should settle my craving until I'm back, though... I think
You can't compare launch day Doom pricing with Hero of Sparta bargain bin pricing, or any other sale pricing. Hero of Sparta was $9.99 on launch has pretty short playtime. arn
C-. See me after class. Consumers do not set the price. Developers do. Developers simply adjust pricing based on what the market will bear. Let me repeat that. They adjust pricing based on what the market will bear. Not what the market wants to pay. What it's willing to pay, which is generally the point where there are more people buying than whining. The App Store however started off early as a different market altogether. One that quickly became dominated by new developers wanting to turn a quick buck by pricing as cheaply as possible in order to get as many sales as possible. This has been exacerbated by the rating system and the top lists that both encourage quantity of sales over revenue generated from them, which is a piss-poor metric to judge the quality of anything by. That in turn engendered other developers -- larger developers -- to follow the same model in order to play the new system's game in order to get recognized and gain visibility. This has only continued to get worse -- and unfortunately, it still works in Apple's favour so they have nothing to encourage them to change it to something more sensible. $10 is too expensive for you <--------------------------------------------> $10 is too high for software Two statements with a world of difference. The one on the left end of the spectrum is your opinion of prices based on your ability to spare that kind of money for a game. The one on the right is a blanket statement offered as fact that is based on your financial situation. Oddly enough, not everyone shares your financial situation, which tends to mean that not everyone thinks prices are unreasonable. Let's put it this way: If you knew first hand what went into the making of the average game -- the time, the effort, and for developers that can afford to do so, the money put into it -- you too would cringe every time you saw a good game sell for $0.99. My cojones have taken up permanent residence in my kidneys from seeing so many great titles whoring themselves out for a pittance.
Actually peoples that you call "cheap bastards" are the mainstream market,because the iphone is...a phone not a game device For the same reason games are not as good as the console counterpart and the price is lower. And this game can be considered a good phone game but nothing more,from a gamer perspective an "awesome freaking game" is Half Life or Starcraft etc. This one,it's only a well done rail shooter for a phone with a basic gameplay.
Just because he thinks your argument is crap doesn't mean he has poor reading comprehension...I find it very interesting that you say those above titled games (all of which I own and paid for...no jailbreaker) have overall quality right up there with Doom. The reason I find it interesting is that you obviously HAVEN'T PLAYED Doom. They are all good games, but they are NOT in the same league as Doom Resurrection. They may or may not be longer, but they are not the same quality. You could not know this, but yet you continue to argue about something you HAVEN'T PLAYED. It's like I say about voting, "If you don't vote, you don't have the right to complain."
The ignorance. It ... it burns. Devs who write top notch stuff and sell it for a buck typically didn't put much money into it, if any, just their personal time and effort, and so can afford to sell it at whatever rate they want because they don't have expenses to recoup. Are you trying to tell me that this dev, this solitary dev, or this small team, who wrote a good game on a shoestring budget are exactly equivalent to a big team like id software, who have to pay developers, artists, musicians, sound engineers, rent on their office(s) and so on, and therefore should sell their games at the same prices? Are you seriously suggesting this? Really? The sky must be gorgeous in your world.
Oh the irony.... Hero of Sparta only recently went down to a buck. Before that it was, iirc, $4.99. Before that $5.99. And before that, guess what it was priced at? $9.99 And it actually sold quite well at $9.99, btw. So did a lot of games. Super Monkey Ball. Crash Nitro Kart 3D. Asphalt 4. Ferrari GT. Brothers in Arms. Need for Speed Undercover. Real Racing. Etc. Etc. Peggle was originally $4.99, iirc. Had a temporary sale at a buck. Car Jack Streets had an attempt at $4.99, iirc, upon first release, but got so-so reviews and quickly dropped out of the charts. In an attempt to garner sales, they dropped down to a buck. BTW, it only rose back up the charts when it was both a buck and when the updates made it a much better game. Other games "race to the bottom" in the hopes that increased "eyes" will lead to increased sales (often, btw, this does NOT happen) which will lead to offsetting any potential loses of revenue due to the lowering of price. However, there's no guarantee that sales will increase let alone increase to the point where they make up what they've potentially lost by selling at that lower price. You should know this from that Economics 101 class you've taken . The App Store is littered with the corpses of those who thought the "race to the bottom" was the "best" way to sell their apps. And what is good for the consumer in the short run is not always good in the long run. The $0.99 is an unsustainable model for higher cost developments and even low cost development for that matter. There's a need to sell MASSIVE amounts of units in order to make profit at that price point. We've been through the 2-3 hours thing, but I'll posit another thing: If you honestly think Hero of Sparta took longer than that, or any Gameloft game, or most EA, Capcom, Sega, etc. games on this platform, then...seriously...you must be smokin' some fine chiba.
That is THEIR problem, not the consumers. If small developers on a shoe-string budget can make games that are of just as high (if not higher) quality as a big developer, then that's the problem of the big developer. Why should we bear their costs when we can get titles of the same or better quality for less? Their costs are their problem, not mine.
Look, I understand your argument, but I'm not so sure I agree about the "mainstream market" thing, and that's important. Apple doesn't choose to keep updating the hardware to make a better phone or mp3 player. First gen iPhones and Touches were perfectly capable of those things. It seems clear that these devices are increasingly being looked at as more than phones and mp3/video players. The iPhone 3G S (Which I have) really seems to be tailored to run more powerful apps, many of which happen to be games. I think many people are underestimating what these devices are capable of. Is this game PS3 or XBOX 360 worthy? Of course not, no one is saying it is. But what I, and it appears others, are saying is that if we as consumers undervalue quality merchandise by demanding that something that for this platform is in my words "freaking awesome" be the same price as a fart app, then they will abandon the platform in its infancy. In a year or two, who knows what these devices will be capable of? If we insist on undervaluing the product we may never know.
That's beside the point. They are $1 now. That's all that matters. Doom is in competition with what is out there now and the prices at which they are marked. Should Doom drop in price, it may be worth it then. But at $10, especially as compared to other high quality titles at much lower prices, it does not fare well. And even Oregon Trail lasted more than 2 hours for me. Let's Golf has lasted way more than that. I can't speak for any EA, Capcom, or Sega game as I've never played them. But I've put dozens of hours in the $1 wonder that is Uniwar.
"But at $10, especially as compared to other high quality titles at much lower prices, it does not fare well." Again, you don't know this because you HAVEN'T PLAYED IT!
Wow, I came on here to refute pretty much everything florbastang is saying, but every one beat me to it. No offense, it's just that your arguments are brutally flawed. But it's cool, instead of typing a bunch of crap out I'm just gonna go play this game I just downloaded. Sweet. But I will say, if any company, big dev or small dev, makes a game and loses money on it, then they're going to stop making games. Simple as that. If id releases this game at $10, and they don't sell enough to recoup costs or turn profit, they're not going to make any more games on the app store. Same if the game is $5 or $1. As others have said, the less you sell it for, the more you have to sell. Why would devs want to keep making games just to lose money?
The days of big-time developers and record labels appears to be changing. The gaming market needs new blood and some of that innovation will come from startups that are willing to go the extra mile like id did in the beginning.
Wow. I just ... I ... wow. A funny thing happens when your testes drop: Simple solutions to complex problems that seemed perfectly rational, painstakingly thought out and easily implemented if only someone made it happen, suddenly look, in harsh light of wisdom, like naïve twaddle. Simple question: Do you think a single dev team consisting of maybe two or three people could pull off the likes of Doom: Resurrection in their spare time while attending school or working the 9-5 and sell it for $0.99? Don't answer that -- really, don't, the answer will probably hurt my brain. The answer is: Yes, they could. It would take them a long time, and they'd probably take a bath on the amount they'd make if they applied that amount to a reasonable cost assigned to the number of man hours spent on writing the game -- but hey, they didn't actually spend anything, so technically whatever they make goes straight into their pockets. Awesome. If you really, really, really like ramen, that is. Because that's those devs would be able to feed themselves if they tried to do that full-time as their primary job. In order for each of those devs -- let's say three of them for the sake of simplicity -- to make even a basic living wage off that game sold for a dollar, they'd have to sell 90,000 copies or more. Great! Except no. No, it isn't. It sucks monkey bollocks. Designing a game like this is damn hard freakin' work with long-ass hours and the kind of dedication most people would boggle at, especially if you're doing it from scratch. id had the luxury of being able to recycle a lot of assets from Doom 3 to make this game. That's a lot of work already done for them. For a small dev team without those luxuries, it's hard, gruelling work sitting in front of Photoshop or Maya or 3DS Max or Lightwave, sitting in front of the IDE, coding tens to hundreds of thousands of lines of code, tracking down bugs by the hundreds with slow-ass, eye-reddening traces and proof reading, slaving away in front of a synth or sampler and sound editing software and MIDI software designing sounds and writing music, and... ...and $30k for that its a disgustingly piss-poor return for your investment no matter what you've invested in it. Welcome to the real world. This is not a call for a new breed of developers willing to work their fingers to the arthritic bone for less than you could make as a freakin' customer service agent. Designing games is brainpower, raw talent, and incredible dedication. You may be willing to devalue that to the level of a basic living wage. You are not a developer. Make those arguments to someone who is, or one who has been one. Wear earplugs. And yes, I have been one, and will be again. Ah, KITH, me old friends. They always have a skit for any situation.
Small developers with shoe-string budgets can and do produce high quality games for peanuts. I honestly don't care how much work developers put into games or whether or not they have to eat Ramen to survive. That's their problem, not mine. I honestly could not care any less. It was their choice to do what they do, and it's the market that decides the price. If they don't like it, they can just bow out and let other developers take over. With the number of developers out there and the ridiculous number of games being released that only the hardest core of hardcore nerds can possibly keep up with, any and all developers are expendable. There will always be another prime developer around the corner. The App Store is a figurative spinning Rolodex of developers. If a developer wants to charge a premium price for their game, then they should go for it. I (and the vast majority of App Store customers) will just bide my time with low priced but high quality games (e.g., Hero of Sparta, Uniwar, etc.) while I wait for that inevitable price drop when the developer finally realizes that they can't sell mass quantities of $10 games on the App Store. When they drop it, I'll consider it.
