Once upon a time in happy land
Got to the car, put food and drinks on the roof, opened the car door, picked up food, put food in the car, picked up drinks, put drinks…. everywhere. WTF is the point of a drinks carrier that doesn’t carry drinks?
Thanks Burger King. I paid a bloody fortune for some coloured sugar syrup and fizzy water only to see it run down the drain (metaphorically) and make the car all sticky (actually).
If you want to go and see the latest 3D Disney adventure at the Cinema it’s going to cost you about a tenner a head. Add all the gubbins that comes with a trip to the cinema and some for travel and if you are doing it for less than £20 each you should slap yourself on the back because you are a skinflint superstar :)
For £20 you get at best 3 hours of entertainment and a bite to eat, some over priced soft drinks and the experience.
I’m not slamming cinema or cinema pricing I think the experience is worth the money but I don’t think game buyers are including the experience when valuing games.
You can go and buy a triple A title today for £60, play it for as little as 10 hours if you don’t go online and then go and trade it in the next week and find it’s worth £10 or £20 as everyother person not into online multiplayer games has done the same.
Only in a few cases do people moan about it. I don’t play MW2 online but I thought the single player was strong enough to justify the price I paid for it (I didn’t buy it on release day). The experience was there.
Now when it comes to iOS games the pricing can be so low that the reviews are skewed by people who want everything for nothing. They are probably the same people who pirate MW2 and then complain the single player game is too short :)
If we split the iPhone market into four like this…
The free games attract a lot of bad reviews because they aren’t long enough. The same people that might pay £20 for less than 3 hours entertainment in a multiplex or £60 for a AAA current gen console title will slag off an iOS game for not entertaining them for free, forever, with perfect gameplay, controls, audio and level design.
This is the worst portion of the market. Nothing is good enough even if they didn’t pay for it and games attract lots of one star ratings and terrible reviews.
The next set of games is where most indie titles spend the majority of their life. There are still gamers here who will slag off a title for not being worth the money despite the fact it’s cheaper by the hour than a AAA 360 or PS3 game and way cheaper than a visit to the cinema.
The premium sector is where lots of games created with ‘known’ ip are found. Now these games can be worse than a similar game in the free sector but get better reviews. I don’t know if this is because the IP is established or if people are more likely to rate highly games they have spent more money on to justify their purchase. This portion of the market offers excellent value for money compared to other forms of entertainment.
Above this sector is the WTF! section. Top established IP can offer their games in this sector and get excellent reviews. Normally games in this sector are either very good and developed by a large team or have a really strong identity that people want to be associated with. Some of the best sellers at this price have been really simple puzzle games with the ‘right’ name attached so not all the games have to be complex to be a success here. At this price people buying know what they are getting before hand and rate accordingly.
Now look at the list again and even the WTF! prices are cheap as chips when it comes to a new game these days so why aren’t more titles attempting to move up the price rank again.
I personally think indie gamers should be aiming their products in the $2.99 and above slice of the market. This allows us to justify the time and expense of developing games professionally and is cheaper (in real terms) than the mastertronic and codemasters titles we bought in our youth.
If gamers don’t think that this price is correct they don’t need to buy but those that do will perceive the game as a premium product and rate it accordingly. I’d rather have 1 satisfied customer acting as a promoter of my product and giving it a high rating than 4 who think the game should have given them the same experience as a AAA title produced for millions of pounds by hundreds of people for 59p.
This rant was written completely off the cuff with little thought :)
I’ve finally rethemed this site but don’t be too surprised if it disapears at some point as that always seems to happen once I’ve set up a theme on a site :)
I ate shed loads of home made goodies including a mountain of England World Cup Cupcakes, home made garlic and coriander naan, home made samosas, home made meatballs in home made pasta sauce, poppadom piles that would have filled a mini (x2) and lots of other things my memory is blocking out.
Exercise, damned near nil. Lots of sitting on my arse writing Objective-C code and drinking pop.
Result. 2lb weight loss and my first target of being under 20 stone again reached.
Conclusive proof that diets are bollocks :)
Next week I’ll try and do some exercise and expect to put on a few pounds (I always do when I return to exercise after a lay off I think it’s water) but first a big fry up for tea. It’s only our second fry up of the year so it will be a blow out :)
I hate radio 4′s current overuse of the word hyperbole and the insistance it’s pronounced Hyper-bolly and not hyper-bowl.
I blame Nick Clegg.
Hack your interfaces with more ease thanks to these templates. Not used them yet so not sure how well the 11×8.5″ sheets fit on the A4 the real world uses :)
Warning beer and speech are used interchangably in this article.
32 Free Software Solutions for Photographers over at DIYPhotography.net.
I’m thinking of regularly blogging my thoughts and links I find just like I used to early in the last decade.
I always imagined my life would be like a great book translated to the screen by the worlds greatest director. It would have a soundtrack by Clint Mansell, Voice overs by Marc Silk, and the most amazing twist at the climax where I live happily ever after in a farmhouse in the country after discovering a million pounds in a suitcase or some other Deux ex Machina worthy of Russell T. Davis (that might perhaps include a flying car along with the suitcase full of money).
Instead it seems to have been scripted by Alan Bennett, soundtrack byPop Will Eat Itself, with voice overs by Stuart Hall (who has either seen the referee fall over a small dog, or a man dressed as a small dog fall over a referee, the two are interchangeable.) and I’m pretty sure the climax will involve a custard pie to the face.
Still it could be worse at one point looked like it would be soundtracked by Stuart Hall, voice overed by Alan Bennett with a Deux ex Machina that comes via my copy of the original blue covered The Eight Legged Atomic Dustbin Will Eat Itself
