Selling a Game: Pricing

Back in the day, video games came with three price-tags. New, second-hand, and rented.

These days, games come with a staggering variety of prices, from the wallet-friendly ‘free’ all the way up to the £100+ mark. Strangely, these prices do not equate very well with the usual labels we like to use. You would imagine ‘casual’ games would be cheaper right? Wrong. That £115 game is Band Hero.

So. Enter your game. You have an interesting choice to make now. A low price might shift more copies, netting you more money overall. You might want to ensure you keep games accessible for the cash-strapped. Or maybe you want that premium branding, you want to ensure your profit margin on each copy is as high as possible. If your game falls into the £30-£60 range, you’re probably aiming at the middle of the market, predictable but high-quality games for run-of-the-mill hardware. If you’re up in that top bracket, you’re probably flogging ‘more than a game’, accessories, a whole new way of thinking about gaming, possibly a limited edition box set. And if you’re in that extremely interesting £5-15 market, then you are probably selling something a little bit different, and a little bit smaller.
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Console versus PC

Here’s a question for you: looking around your house, right now, how many devices do you own that can play video games?

Here’s my answer: 5.

Those five are:

1. Playstation 3
2. Mac Mini
3. PC laptop
4. Nintendo DS
5. Playstation Portable

Many people will add a smartphone, multiple older consoles, and possibly multiple newer consoles to that list. Now the question becomes - for a designer or developer - what games do people play on what devices?

This one I’m going to leave up to you. Think about the way you game, and the way your friends game. Where is the most time spent? Where is the most money? What devices specialise in particular kinds of games?

Isn’t That Spatial?

Every video game has certain benefits and constraints in the way it represents space. Interaction fiction, arcade titles, 2D side-scrollers, isometric RPGs, and first person shooters all have advantages and disadvantages to how they deal with space–some technical in nature, some design-based. This month’s topic invites you to explore the ways games have represented the spatial nature of their storyworlds and what this does for the audience experience. Is it possible to ignore the constancy of spatial relationships in a graphical game? What would such a game look like? Are there ways of representing spatial relationships that we haven’t explored? Do you have ideas for games that could intentionally twist the player’s perception of space, or do you want to write about a game that already has?

Back in the old days, video games were almost entirely side-scrollers or vertical-scrollers. The camera either didn’t move (Space Invaders) or it tracked to the right, or upwards. This had one massive benefit - you weren’t going to get flumoxed by an uncooperative camera, nor were you ever going to be surprised by finding yourself going in a different direction to the one you thought you were going.

But the quest for both realism and a love for the cinematography of the film industry led us neatly into a number of different ways of handling the camera. There was the first person ’shooter’ perspective, the top-down, RTS perspective, the rolling 3-D mid-range ‘fighter’ camera. As it became more complex, it became much easier to screw up. A first person camera, designed to increase realism and immerse you in the characters world, would instead cause vector-buildings to explode into bizarre polygons when you came too close. Just like in the real world.

Hands down, the top-down, or side-scroller is still the easiest, simplest and most useful of all the ways of creating space. First person has its uses, and shooters could never abandon that now. However, clever use of space and camera can enhance and develop certain themes within a game.

Claustrophobia is an easy one. A first person pov, a small light-source, rapid movement that you’re never quite quick enough to catch, and all the unseen horrors of the imagination can create an atmospheric back-drop for a game. Equally, a rolling panorama with wide-angle mid-range lenses can firmly drop characters into a beautiful and well-realised world - ideal for fantasy and sci-fi.

My suggestion then, would be to keep to the simplest camera/perspective possible, and only deviate from that if you have a very well realised and developed reason for doing so. In which case, make it flawless. The camera should be invisible, a subtle undercurrent to the atmosphere, and not an obtrusive and difficult mechanism that increases the games difficulty.

Selling a Game: Word of Mouth

First up, let me apologise for disappearing for a month. I moved house, lost my internet for a while, and then my computer died. Not a good chain of events! However, I’m back now - with my follow-up to Selling a Game: Making People Want to Buy.

Once your website is up, and polished, your cover art is done, and your promotional materials finalized and ready for the public eye you have to ensure that the public actually notices. Many people spend a huge amount of time and effort on their publicity materials, and then just trust that people will find their way there. Not so.

I am not going to get too in-depth with this, as generating publicity is an entire field in itself. But for the bootstrap developer with no money this quick guide should get you pointed in the right direction.

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Selling a Game: Making People Want to Buy

Let’s face it. Most people out there building mods, indie games, browser games, flash games - are doing it for the love, and not for the money. If you’re one person running it out of your bedroom, then you are probably happy enough earning a few bucks from ad revenue.

But if you’re serious about video games earning you enough to pay your bills and let you quit your day job, then you need another skill set. You must be good at writing, drawing, modelling, coding, and animating - or good at finding people who can do those things - but you must also be good at selling.

The internet is either the best thing, or the worst thing, to happen to the industry. If you want to make games the traditional way - big boxes of promo material, shelf space in Game, DRM protected disks going for $40+ a pop… then you’re reading the wrong article.

Can you use the internet to help sell your game? Absolutely. The best part is that there is a very low barrier to entry. Anyone can buy a domain name and some cheap webhosting, and you are ready to go.

First of all, assess your game. Is it a cheap ‘n’ cheerful flash game with an addictive hook? Then you’ve got a good chance of going viral, and ad revenue may well work nicely for you. Is it a more traditional downloadable game with slick graphics? Then you are going to want people to pay for it.

You might think this is as easy as getting x-million people to look at your site. Not true. If your website (or facebook page, or twitter stream, or whatever) is boring, difficult to navigate, or gives off completely the wrong ‘feel’ then you won’t sell anything. So what do you do?
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International Borders: Online Games Create a Shared Global Culture

Cultures clash sometimes. Put two people in a room, one who thinks long beards are divine, and the other who thinks they are sinful, and you’ll have a generational war before you blink twice. People have clashed over everything from skin colour to the way they eat. Got a sacred animal? The next tribe over will slaughter it and have it for dinner.

So when you create a truly international forum, you can expect misunderstanding and conflict to spring up. Unfortuantely, the only way to progress to a deeper understanding of other people is to interact with them. Somehow, we have to create a place that allows us to see past the immediate ‘wow, look at how different they are’, and observe that everybody thinks, breathes, feels, loves and despairs.

Enter online games.
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