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10Jan/114

Gamasutra Warns Of The Coming "Gamepocalypse"

Over at Gamasutra they have a greta new article by Tadhg Kelly named What Games Are: The Mac App Store And The PC Gamepocalypse.

The pie ce crystalizes some thoughts that have been bandied about in 8bitrocket.com towers for the past few weeks: The App Paradigm Shift.  Tadhg says that he believes the natural price for games is about $5.00.  I'm not sure that any regular readers of this site could argue, as many wish they would see $5.00 per unit sold!   He also believes the "Gampocalypse" will be good for indie developers:

"I think that what app stores are going to do to the desktop market is bring its pricing into line with where it naturally wants to be. In the process this is going disempower many developers and publishers who believe their business model should be ARPU-based rather than volume-based. It will reduce the number of big-budget games to only a handful, perhaps making those games seem like the ultra-premium Gucci bag game, where most others are simply regular bags.

And yet it will also empower many newer developers."

You can read more about Tadhg on his blog: http://whatgamesare.com/

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Filed under: App Store Revolution Leave a comment
  • http://nightflyergames.com Tony Fernando

    I think there is clearly a $5 price point for games. The Recettear guys pretty clearly left money on the table by going from $19->$5 bundle rather than $19->10->5->bundle. (see their financial postmortem http://www.carpefulgur.com/drakblog/?p=9)

    I don’t think its clear yet that the audience for games want or will accept an app store as sole source of distribution on the Mac. Direct distribution is still more important than Steam for most indies, and their audience is used to that.

    It’s hard for me to imagine Positech, Spiderweb, etc joining a race to the bottom on the Mac… it’d make more sense for them to drop Mac support entirely if direct distribution were made impossible. And those guys are the ones who survived the ‘You must get your game on Big Fish, Reflexive, and every other portal’ meme which ran through indie space a few years ago… by not releasing on portals.

    And I have to say, I got an iPod touch as an early Christmas gift this year… I love the device, I adore the interface, but I’m coming to despise iTunes and it’s app store. As a consumer I don’t want such an abomination moderating my desktop software purchases. Such a thing becoming required on Windows wouldn’t drive me to the Mac or ChromeOS… I’d end up running Linux. (But I’m probably not a typical user ;)

    -TF

  • Anonymous

    Yeah, a 60$ game is just too much. Even without competition, prices that high just make me stop buying games. I can see paying to 35$ for something that I’m going to get a lot of mileage out of, like a fighting game or acclaimed RPG. 5$ would seem right for something short and void of replay value.

  • http://twitter.com/hayes_maker Hayes

    Ace, make a new Golden Axe clone with no file size limit, and i’ll pay you $5 for a copy! :)

  • Anonymous

    You serious? cuz I’ll totally do it.

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