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Comments
But people have less reason to buy it. If the digital version is cheaper, more people will buy it.
That's true. I'm not saying they should stop producing physical copies at this point in time; I'm just saying they should charge less for digital ones.
If they want to undercut the loss of profits from retail, they can do so by pricing the game more cheaply on a digital platform. If they choose their numbers right, they can make equal or additional profit digitally because they don't lose anything via the retail fee. Furthermore, a lower price could equal more sales, driving total profit even higher.
I'd say charging less for digital sales makes lots and lots of sense.
No it doesn't. I'm only half done downloading Ys Oath and --wait, never mind, it does.
^ The question then is whether to release a physical version at the same time.
The weirdest thing, to me, is when companies actively encourage people to buy physical, and I'm not talking about collector's editions here. For example, when I bought Persona Portable, I saw that you could also buy a digital edition. They cost the same price, but the physical edition comes with a soundtrack CD. So...Atlus actually spent the money to produce those CDs, in order to encourage me to buy the version that leaves them with less money. WTF?
^I think it's still necessary to release a physical edition. Probably won't be by the end of the next generation, but it is now.
Once a physical version is produced, the production costs are a sunk cost.
Here's what I think:
At that point, they have two products that are competing with each other--the physical and digital versions. Digital versions cannot "sell out", nor do you have to release sales figures (though you can). However, physical versions have a...distinctly noticeable and space-filling presence in stockrooms and store shelves, especially if they can't sell well. So while a digital version can undersell more safely (all it involves is paying the distributor some money in return for stocking and serving some files), a physical version needs to be pushed out to customers, lest they have a situation dealing with unsold stock they need to discount (and effectively lose even more money on, if we count production costs).
Does that sound right or am I missing something?
All sounds correct.
I think the solution is to not produce as many physical copies as they normally would, though I'm not entirely sure how that would play out, and it's probably hard to figure out exactly what you need to do to compensate. That might be why nobody's done it yet.
Semi-unrelated: All this talk of incentives is making me wonder what it would be like if there were an RPG where grinding made your character less powerful, through some sort of fatigue system with limited recovery.
Easy; an RPG puzzler/investigation game based on the Cthulhu mythos, where your level-ups are checked by a consistent fall into insanity. That is, levelling allows you to progress further, but progressing further means a gain in insanity.
Thing is, the more physical units you produce, the costlier, but the less cost per unit, as well. Economies of scale.
(Hey Tear, can you help us out here?)
Also, in Final Fantasy IV, there are some characters whose stats decrease as you level up (I think Tellah is a notable example), and I think stats change randomly (including possibly downward) for characters leveling above 70.
^^I was pretty much thinking of that, minus the leveling up part, i.e. you'd gain insanity from trying to fight stuff, and thus a part of the goal would be trying to get through the game while fighting as little as possible, as opposed to most RPGs, where fighting makes you more powerful.
Would probably be a good game to use permadeath, if it's short.
^Hm...that is a good point
In the long run, the solution probably is just to not do physical copies, but I don't think we're quite there yet, at least not for AAA games.
People always suggest things like this, but really it's a stupid solution to a problem that's practically nonexistent in the first place. A more natural-seeming solution would be something like what Persona 3 and 4 do, in which you have something of a time limit to complete objectives in the game and grinding takes up time that could be used for other things (social links, in that case, though it could obviously be applied to other games).
Really though, grinding isn't a problem in itself. If people have to do boring things to make their characters more powerful, then the problem isn't that they need to make their characters more powerful, but that your game is boring in the first place!
^^ Or even if it's not; what if there were multiple playable characters?
I wasn't really trying to solve a problem so much as do something interesting.
In that case, you'd have some other issues to deal with in your game. In particular, it's really difficult to make it more fun to not fight enemies than to fight them, and punishing your players for having fun is usually a bad idea. Not that a good game couldn't be made out of that concept, but it'd certainly have some interesting challenges to overcome as far as designing it is concerned.
Interesting thought, but then dying would make you more powerful
That's true. It would definitely need to have solid gameplay in areas besides combat.
You could also design the combat to be clunky and counter-intuitive.
Somehow, when the problem is "non-combat is usually less fun than combat," I don't think "make the combat not be fun" is the right solution. Rather, you should really focus on finding ways to make it fun to not fight things.
Combat being clunky can work in horror, but either way, a game needs to be engaging in some area if you want people to play it.
Stealthy mechanics would be the obvious go-to option for a game about avoiding combat.
It worked there.
I'd like to design a JRPG that gives the player a time limit for something (and what DYRE says about Persona 3 and 4 seem a bit like it).
You can't give the player a firm time limit for something, unless you absolutely prevent them from saving or otherwise getting themselves stuck in an unwinnable situation. For example, if you have "after X amount of time, the world will be destroyed" and the final dungeon takes Y amount of time to complete, so if you've spent more than X - Y amount of time dillydallying and doing sidequests, your save file is now fucked.
One possibility might be, instead of "after X amount of time the world will be destroyed", you have "the faster you reach the final boss, the weaker he is because he's less prepared".
Instead of giving the player x amount of time to beat the entire game, divide it into chunks that each have their own time limit. If the player fails to do one part in time, just have them restart from the beginning of that part (possibly allowing them to keep some or all of the things they acquired the first time), and maybe have them miss out on some optional stuff if they can't complete each part the first time.
At least, that's probably how I'd set it up if I were designing a game like that.
You'd have to make it lots and lots of little chunks, or somehow give players a way out if they fail it. Otherwise it might become too frustrating.
Not necessarily. There's some pretty hard data showing that putting a Steam game on sale increases the number of units sold by something insane like 4000%. That's why even brand new games start with a small discount on Steam, because it's very possible for developers to make more money with a lower priced game.
Consumers are attracted by the term "sale" and the green "X% off" text.
They are also attracted by not having to pay as much, though.
So...finished Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. That was very WTF, though not as much as in 2.
Revelations is 2 gigabytes smaller, so it probably won't be too long.
I mean, simply listing $39.99 as a base list price isn't as good as listing it as $59.99 base list price with a 33% off discount.
Good god, the most recent Jimquisition is insufferable beyond belief. He's genuinely arguing that it's completely fine to slap a name of a game franchise on a game that is has nothing to do with that game.
Because you know, franchise don't actually imply what the game is going to be about or anything.
Where can I buy Steam wallet giftcards?
^Gamestop.
^^^I kinda wasn't sure whether to agree or disagree with him. I mean, on the one hand, a game that's allegedly part of a series but really unrelated to it can be good in its own right, so it shouldn't be automatically dismissed, but it's still almost invariably just called that as a transparent cash grab/marketing stunt, which definitely isn't a credit to it.