Games Aren't Numbers

Geoff Gibson observes that there appears to be a ceiling for the price of indie games.

...if Machinarium sold for just $10 more, a price I would still pay for the game, many gamers would instantly be turned off of the title. Not because they don’t feel the title is worth their money, or even because they don’t think it’s worth $30, but, rather, because they are accustomed to getting indie games at super cheap prices, despite how much money, effort, love, and creativity was put into the title.

As a consumer, I have an almost innate inability to sympathize with this. I rarely buy a product and ponder afterwards about about how great it would have been to spend more on it, that would be crazy. Nonetheless, Gibson isn't without a good point:

I just wish there wasn’t this stigma that if it’s an indie game it can’t cost more than such and such; especially when I’ve seen much crappier games come from big publishers and selling for twice as much.

He's right, indie games are unfairly stigmatized. If I stop for a moment and look outside of my own world as a consumer, I can see that prices aren't just about how much money I can save. They're about competition, and right now indie games are simply not allowed to compete with an AAA retail game.

As Gibson (and I) mention, a $20 indie game and a $60 retail game can easily have the same amount of game time available. The oldest argument defending the high price of games is that they offer a high amount of time compared to other kinds of entertainment, but for every new cheap indie game that gets released that argument becomes more and more irrelevant. So what exactly do you pay for when you buy a game for $60? Apparently not a lot of people really know for certain, but here's my personal opinion as a consumer:

• Ten to twenty hours of time spent in front of a screen
• A disk
• A box to put on you shelf
• An instruction booklet you will never read
• All of the trailers you watched
• All of the trailers you didn't watch
• A dozen press events
• A thousand blog posts on topics such as a debate over which platform's version of the game is best
• A million discussions between friends and strangers about whether or not this game is better than last year's $60 purchase

The reason why lots of people see $60 as a fair price is that they buy far more than just ten hours of play time, their purchases are either directly or indirectly supporting the culture of hype revolving around the games. It's fun to be excited, to watch trailers, and to get pumped about release dates. Sites like Kotaku are popular for a reason, people like to get wrapped up in the culture games create. Is this a good thing? The six million people who bought Grand Theft Auto IV during the first week of its release seem to think so.

Well I say all of that is for suckers.

In the past year I haven't purchased a single game for $60. Every one has been either on sale, second hand, retro, or indie. The most expensive purchase I made was for a new $50 Wii game. Indie and retro games don't have the culture of hype big budget games do, and the little they do have comes free of charge.

Gibson suggests that indie games deserve to be sold for high prices like any other game. My counterargument is that those high prices aren't deserved by any games. We consider a high price tag on an indie game as overpriced because it is overpriced. It's overpriced on a big budget game as well, but the publishers' marketing departments have ways of making us forget about that. Low indie prices shouldn't be judged against the $60 standard, indie prices should be the standard, and you don't have to take my word for that.

While indie games are being discriminated to an extent, envying the success of the latest hot release in GameStop isn't going to help anyone, it just validates that overpriced culture of suckers. I like the indie and retro game culture the way it is, prices and all, and I hope it continues to flourish and expand. The way indie developers refuse to play by the rules of the big companies is what we love about them. Indie games are the new punk, so just throw your middle finger at those evil corporations.