{"id":1742,"date":"2014-01-17T15:58:17","date_gmt":"2014-01-17T15:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/?p=1742"},"modified":"2014-01-17T15:58:17","modified_gmt":"2014-01-17T15:58:17","slug":"game-pricing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2014\/01\/game-pricing\/","title":{"rendered":"Game pricing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Awesome article from Greg Costikyan<\/a> and yet, a bit obvious right? It says a lot that we need to discuss how to be ethical with F2P games when the main advantage for developers is sustainability of their jobs which translates into not screwing over users. How would you be against that? I don\u2019t know but I\u2019m glad that the word is out and generates comments. Because F2P is an important business model, not just for games. It\u2019s getting better.<\/p>\n

But I tend to prefer the \u201cPay Once, Play Forever\u201d model discussed in a Jason Rohrer blog post<\/a> on game pricing, the race to the bottom in app stores, to the back to back Steam sales and super lucrative bundles.<\/p>\n

Jason wants to get money on day one because it makes sense when you\u2019re working on a game over a couple of years. The simple fact that we in the industry feel that it\u2019s normal to go on and on without revenue is crazy. Also, \u201cfree\u201d means assholes trolling you and making you feel miserable after some hard work. We see those comments on app stores all the time.<\/p>\n

Games doing well with this POPF business model (Minecraft, Terraria, Garry\u2019s mod) all share something though: they\u2019re almost like tools. They are not just games, they let people create and make stuff. That\u2019s very interesting because not only those games are ethical in their pricing, they also allow their users to not just grind or escape, but build and design things.<\/p>\n

It means that once you have your game core concept pretty solid, a prototype, you should think about how to monetize that shit while being fair to both you and the user. You need to balance out your evilness and it\u2019s a pretty cool game in itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Awesome article from Greg Costikyan and yet, a bit obvious right? It says a lot that we need to discuss how to be ethical with F2P games when the main advantage for developers is sustainability of their jobs which translates into not screwing over users. How would you be against that? I don\u2019t know but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1742"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1742"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1743,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1742\/revisions\/1743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}