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Not Telling
Posted by However, it seems some members here are in dire need of some serious truth bombs, about the 'choice' in sales and humble bundles, straight from the mouth of the devs which you are stuffing your words into, the things their pr wont let them say:
"And lastly, the worst, most hideous truth at all, and there’s a bit of history behind it.
You are worthless to us.
What? Did he just say that? I? Your horsing customer? You just said your customers were worthless! Wii you!!!!11!1!! I’m never buying anything from you again! I’m even going to uninstall all your games you ignorant self-important beige quilt! How dare you speak to me, your customer, like that?
Woah there, inflamed of Tunbridge Wells. Let’s just rewind a second and analyse that statement for a moment. How did we get here? Let me count the ways.
Once upon a time, back in the early 2000s or so, games would sell for about $20 or so. Some developers did really well at that price point – I mean really well. Most of us didn’t do that well, and made beer money, but we carried on making games anyway because that’s what we liked to do, even if nobody wanted them. When we got a customer we were able to treat them like royalty. Apart from there not being that many of them, twenty bucks is a pretty reasonable chunk of money and you should damned well expect it to work properly. Of course, 99% of the time, when things didn’t work it was just because the customer had rainbowty OEM drivers that were simply broken. (Interestingly I don’t ever hear of people taking their laptops back to the shop – which remember cost $500 or more – and yelling at the salesmen for selling them something that didn’t work). So what would happen was we spent a not insignificant proportion of our time – time which we could have been making new games in and thus actually earning a living – fixing customers computers. Note that we weren’t fixing our game. We were fixing customers computers for them. It’s a pretty tedious affair. When the same problem turns up 20 times in a day (or even, during a sale, 200 times), and the answer is always the same, that’s the very definition of tedium. So we jokingly used to say that we sold you a game for a dollar and then $19 of support. That’s actually pretty close to accurate when you work out the time spent fixing someone’s computer for them. We relied on enough sales going through without problems to come out on top slightly, though the reality was that we never actually did.
Then Steam came (and to a lesser extent, Big Fish Games).
Things changed fast. So fast that in other industries it would have been seen as a cataclymically disruptive event. The upshot of it is, within 5 short years, the value of an independent game plummeted from about $20 to approximately $1, with very few exceptions. Steam is great! You can sell loads of games! But only if they’re less than $10. Technically Valve don’t actually dictate the prices we charge. Actually, they do. Utterly. It’s just not talked about. In fact technically, I don’t think anyone’s allowed to talk about it.
Then came the Humble Bundle and all its little imitators.
It was another cataclysmically disruptive event, so soon on the heels of the last. Suddenly you’ve got a massive problem on your hands. You’ve sold 40,000 games! But you’ve only made enough money to survive full-time for two weeks because you’re selling them for 10 cents each. And several hundred new customers suddenly want their computers fixing for free. And when the dust from all the bundles has settled you’re left with a market expectation of games now that means you can only sell them for a dollar. That’s how much we sell our games for. One dollar. They’re meant to be $10, but nobody buys them at $10. They buy them when a 90% discount coupon lands in their Steam inventory. We survive only by the grace of 90% coupon drops, which are of course entirely under Valve’s control. It doesn’t matter how much marketing we do now, because Valve control our drip feed.
Where does this lead us to?
You are worthless to us.
Where once you were worth $20, and then you might have become a fan and bought another 4 games off of us for $20, you were worth $100. We only had to fix your computer for you once, as well, so the next four games amortised the cost of the initial support. If we were lucky you were a gamer and already had drivers and liked our stuff and bought the lot. Sometimes you’d tell your friends and maybe one of them would buy a game from us.
But now?
Now you’re worth $1 to us. If you buy every one of our games, you’re worth $5. After Valve and the tax man and the bank take their cuts, you’re not even worth half a cup of coffee. So, while we’re obsequiously polite and helpful when you do contact us for support, even if it’s just the same old “please install some actual video drivers” response, you really should be aware that you are a dead loss. Even if you buy everything we ever make again. Even if all your friends buy everything we ever make again. You just cost us money. Not just fictitious, huge-piles-of-filthy-lucre indie-game-developer who made-it-big money. All our money. We barely scratch a living, like most indie game developers. You quite literally cost us lunch because the shop sold you a computer with broken software on it."
- Raiden likes this
