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In defence of Indie pricing

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Nidhogg can and will eat you..

The impetus to write this came from the reactions to the score I gave Indie fighter “Nidhogg”. I gave it a nine out of ten because I enjoyed it a whole bunch and a lot of people didn’t think it was worth it due to the 15 dollar price tag. So it got me thinking; What metric should people price games? Is 15 dollars (USD) too much for a content-light indie game? What makes a AAA game worth $60  in comparison?

Mass production be expensive

If we are going to give the real answer, games are priced based on how much they cost to make. Physical copies tend to be dearer due to the added overhead costs of printing disks, game cases and manuals (or nowadays promotional material and day one DLC codes). Games made by AAA developers and publishers usually have a lot of people working on it and tend to spend a lot of money on their game, meaning they have a lot of people to pay and a lot of profit to make. In the case of say, massive blockbusters like GTA5 they spent 200 million and 5 years on making that game sell like everyone needed a copy to live. They sold the standard edition of the game worldwide for the normal AAA price of $100 (AUD) here, keeping in mind we get a pretty big markup due to tariffs.

Nidhogg can and will eat you..

In the case of Nidhogg, it was made by one guy; Mark ‘Messhof’ Essen and was first showcased in 2011 as a prototype and again at EVO 2013. It is only available digitally and I would imagine development costs were much lower and took less time to make. He charges $15 (USD) for Nidhogg and apparently nowadays, $15 for an indie game counts as exorbitant. I know that it’s comparing apples to oranges, but the idea is that other Indie games with their lower cost and lower overheads are priced similarly to Nidhogg.

Indie games are different in that it’s really up to the developer as to how much they charge. If you look at Divekick; an indie game in the same genre, it’s priced at 10 dollars, which I would argue is more limited in scope. 

It even has a similar art style to Nidhogg!

I’ve found that many people’s metric for pricing games is the amount of content available and how many hours they got out of it. This was one of the arguments against the price of Nidhogg due to only having 4 stages and one character by design. I would argue that the amount of content in a fighting game is limited by the genre. Sure you can have multiplayer, varied stages, more characters, perhaps some modifiers for changing gameplay, but unless it adds to the game in some real tangible way, those things are seen as add-ons in the grand scheme. The kind of stuff that could be DLC.

Action 52 had a tonne of content; 52 games in one cartridge! Ignoring the fact that it was $200 dollars (USD) on release, say if it came out today on Steam for 15 bucks. Would you give it a better score because of the amount of content? Would 52 crappy games that took hours to play through justify the price? At least Nidhogg is a polished experience you can go back and play again and again and continue to have fun with. It’s a short game, no doubt about that, but it didn’t stop me clocking over 20 hours in it so far. That’s almost a whole day of fun. It’s not chock full of content because it doesn’t need to be.

Speaking of fun; the most important metric, why isn’t it about fun? If you didn’t have fun with Nidhogg at the very least I could understand that. Fun is a weird one because it’s the most subjective when it comes to games. You certainly couldn’t price a game on fun, which is why  I guess it’s overlooked a little. The important thing to take away from this is that I felt that Nidhogg was worth it because it delivered a unique take on the fighting genre and wasn’t priced outside of the normal range for indie games. Its overall design and polish is top-notch and my only hope for it is that it catches on and is run at EVO.            

Last Updated: January 30, 2014

19 Comments

  1. To be honest, I got FTL, TWA and MotN for next to nothing, and they were three of my favourite games of 2013.

    As for the price, there is no way that I would pay R300 for them, and would settle for R100 max, but I’m a cheapskate, so I guess my opinion is not the correct one for this

    Reply

    • Stephen Snook

      January 30, 2014 at 15:43

      FTL was about 15 when it came out I think.

      Reply

      • Kromas

        January 31, 2014 at 08:38

        FTL has wasted more of my hours than Skyrim!

        Reply

        • Jim Lenoir (Banana Jim)

          January 31, 2014 at 08:46

          I really need to start playing FTL. I bought it a while back, but … sigh… the shame… never actually started it up. :/

          Reply

  2. Devourer of Small Bunnies

    January 30, 2014 at 15:45

    Action 52 is a screaming likeness to Hotline Miami’s artwork. I wonder if there was any link (barring the pixel art you smartasses #pre-emptivestrike)

    Reply

  3. RinceThis2014

    January 30, 2014 at 15:49

    Well if you consider that Assassin’s Creed: Liberation is $20 and is considered a AAA game (in most regards) one can see why people would say $15 is expensive.

    Reply

  4. Rags

    January 30, 2014 at 15:50

    I think regardless whether you like it not, the cost should somewhat reflect the content of a single playthrough for consistency. Nidhogg has some reviews on Steam about the game being around 2 hours iirc. That’s not really a lot of content for that price! And absolutely it should factor into the score.

    I am sure he’d sell more at a lower price.

    Or maybe, just maybe. “Indie” games are for hipsters and the price is right. 😉

    Reply

    • Admiral Chief in Vegas

      January 30, 2014 at 15:52

      I’ve clocked over 200hrs into FTL, I was quite the addict 😛

      Reply

      • Rags

        January 30, 2014 at 15:54

        Got 12 hours so far! Addictive game, but oh so damn punishing! Still need to make it through. 🙂

        Reply

        • Admiral Chief in Vegas

          January 30, 2014 at 15:58

          Yeah man, one moment you feel like Picard, the next like a redshirt!

          Reply

    • Stephen Snook

      January 30, 2014 at 16:41

      Well the single player is super short. But it’s a primarily multiplayer game.

      Reply

      • Rags

        January 30, 2014 at 20:26

        Fair enough, for me it just does not ‘feel’ like their is enough content worth for that price.

        Reply

  5. Anon A Mouse

    January 30, 2014 at 16:04

    I think people are complaining more about the value of the game rather than the price. There is a huge difference between the two and I do feel the “value for money” part needs to be incorporated somewhere in a reviewer’s scoring system. I will say it shouldn’t be more than say 15% though, as value is also fairly subjective, but at least the reader knows that value was considered.

    Reply

  6. Alien Emperor Trevor

    January 30, 2014 at 16:40

    I don’t expect indie games to be dirt cheap. I’m perfectly happy to pay $15/20 for one if I think I’ll get my money’s worth because I’m more concerned by how much fun I’m going to have. At the same time I’m not inclined to pay much for very short games. A good example is Deadlight, which I really enjoyed & would recommend, but not at it’s normal selling price of $15 because I finished it in three hours & am unlikely to replay it.

    Lower prices have also lead me to buy more games than I otherwise would have because I’m not too worried about losing $5 if I end up not enjoying it.

    Reply

  7. Robert Hart

    January 30, 2014 at 20:28

    Indi games should be dirt cheap because they are in most cases, very bad in comparison to AAA titles. Sure, you might have had some fun, but is that not the point of a game?

    I am often shocked by the price tag for some of these indi games, because I dont consider them to be even 5% of the game that you’d see pushed out by someone like EA.

    Take BF4, which is a decent benchmark game at the moment. Then compare it to the indi hit Hotline Miami. While it was a very good indi game, it is still not even 5% as good in any of those fields compared to BF4. Yet it sells for 20% of BF4’s price.

    We buy indi games not because they are amazing games, but because they are cheap, quick and disposable games. When they start busting your bank, then they have lost the plot.

    The max I’d pay for an indi game is $5.

    Reply

  8. Gideon Venter

    January 31, 2014 at 10:21

    It would have been cool to see your individual rankings for each game metric, and not just an aggregate score, which to me felt like you were tacking a number onto the game based solely on your enjoyment of the game (which is fine as one of the metrics) and not an unbiased ranking. I may be wrong. You can’t go wrong with more transparency, though.

    Reply

    • Stephen Snook

      February 3, 2014 at 11:18

      It’s how we review indie games here, one overall score, that’s not my rule.

      It’s not to say that I only just had fun with it. I liked the art style, I liked the unique gameplay in a genre that can be devoid of imagination, I liked the sense of competition it instilled in myself and friends. 9 is still the overall score, the game for me is a complete package.

      I understand your concerns though. I wish we could have separate metrics for indie reviews, but, again, I don’t run the site. I appreciate your responses =).

      Reply

      • Gideon Venter

        February 3, 2014 at 11:22

        Thanks for the feedback. I like that you get back to your readers.

        Reply

        • Stephen Snook

          February 3, 2014 at 12:08

          No problem. I’m glad I have readers to get back to =)

          Reply

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