Fun with Pierre Begue, creator of Knights of the Chalice

[Alex]

People who've never heard about your game are more likely to buy it for 5 bucks once they hear about it on a major site, than they are to buy it for 30 bucks when they don't hear about it.

True, but this all brings us a step closer of only having indie games worth $5 in first place. Which is, I think, HHR's point.

 

[Infinitron]

People who've never heard about your game are more likely to buy it for 5 bucks once they hear about it on a major site, than they are to buy it for 30 bucks when they don't hear about it.

True, but this all brings us a step closer of only having indie games worth $5 in first place. Which is, I think, HHR's point.

And just what is wrong with an indie game costing 5 bucks??? You always start small in life, man. You need to earn the right to charge more than five bucks for a game. You do that by making money with your five dollar game, and using that money to make a bigger, better game that you can safely charge ten dollars for. Then you use the profits from that game to make a twenty dollar game. And so on.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Which is, I think, HHR's point.

And my point is that 4 years after release, his game that is known only by a handful of people probably does so well that it sells 1 copy a month (and that's a generous estimation), while putting it on friggin GOG would suddenly give him a crazy spike with no costs and strings attached.

 

[Surf Solar]

Does he do games for a living or is this just a hobby of him?

 

[Rake]

No one has said anything about price. Pierre himself hasn't said anything about price. So where do you get that idea from?

Making games available on GOG or Steam, also means putting a lot of pressure down on prices, and conforming to extravagant sales with huge discounts. I remember before Jeff Vogel put his games on Steam, I read countless people who didn't want to pay $20 or $25 for a game on his site because they kept saying it was too much. In what kind of world do we live if we get scandalized at a game that is polished and full of content that sells for $25? Playing the games of the digital curators only gives digital curators more power, perpetuates the race to the bottom cycle, and it's we who get worse products in the end.

Many indie games are good, but most fall way short of their potential, simply there's not enough money to implement what the developpers want.

He could get his game of Steam and sell it for a 100$ if he wanted. It just wouldn't sell a single copy. Your problem isn't with the digital sellers but with the audience. The fact is that a game like KotC is niche. The people who give a shit for it they propably bought it already in the price he sold it. There is no way a typical steamtard to pay 30$ for a game that isn't "shiny"/from a known-mainstream dev etc. These people will buy it if it's cheap enough and half of them will forget they bought it without playing it.
But 50000 5$ sales are better than 5000 25$ ones.

 

[FeelTheRads]

People who've never heard about your game are more likely to buy it for 5 bucks once they hear about it on a major site, than they are to buy it for 30 bucks when they don't hear about it.

True, but this all brings us a step closer of only having indie games worth $5 in first place. Which is, I think, HHR's point.

And just what is wrong with an indie game costing 5 bucks??? You always start small in life, man. You need to earn the right to charge more than five bucks for a game. You do that by making money with your five dollar game, and using that money to make a bigger, better game that you can safely charge ten dollars for. Then you use the profits from that game to make a twenty dollar game. And so on.

Not if people would start expecting a 5 dollar game to be of the same quality as a full price one. Then you won't get anything. And we're already pretty much at this point.

Edit:
Of course, whether that's because of Steam-like pricing or because games just get shittier and shittier and people don't want to spend that much on them, I don't know.

 

[Infinitron]

Not if people would start expecting a 5 dollar game to be of the same quality as a full price one. Then you won't get anything. And we're already pretty much at this point.

That's an exaggeration. 15 dollars, maybe. Not 5.

 

[felipepepe]

Steam doesn't push prices down, the competition with other Steam games does it. If you're making yet another indie retro platformer, obviously you can't sell for 3x the price the countless others are asking for. But if you have something really special, such as KotC, you're free to price it anyway you want.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

From Pierre's own mouth, in the one and only post he made in this thread :
http://af.gog.com/forum/general/did_anything_happen_to_gogs_indie_intiative/page2?as=1649904300

And concerning the price, I would want the price to be at the level that maximises my income, just like any other developer would. Maybe when you've made your own RPG, we can talk again about cost and price?

Which totally doesn't reek of hurt ego.

 

[tuluse]

Stop being so easily led astray by HHR's strawmen and mis-direction.

Pierre did not say anything about pricing concerns with his talks with gog. This is entirely in HHR's head.

The only developer we know who posted about his exact dealings with steam (VD) has said they let him set the price he wanted.

Prices don't have to be static. You don't have to sell a game for $50 or $25 or $5 ONLY. You can start with one price and change it to another. So you can get all higher sales from people who want to pay that price, then get more sales from people who want to pay a lower price.

There is plenty of evidence that some people at least are willing to pay more than $5 for a game they like (or expect to like). Kickstarter is a pretty big one.

 

[Alex]

Well, I guess you could call the desire to see this or that game of yours sell, or become known, ego. But if so, why is it any worse a reason than money?

Because he talks about money in the same post, duh!

Sorry, Bee, I am having a little trouble explaining myself today. What I am trying to say is that, while money may be important to the situation, it might not be the whole point o the deal. Mr. Begue may well have thought he was doing something interesting and innovative, or that was somehow worth of people's time. If he grew attached enough to it, it is easy to see why he would want to see it "succeed". Now, maybe that isn't it, maybe he really made a silly mistake out of hurt pride, but it is hard to know that if we can't ask him his motives.

Also ego != wanting your game to become known. Ego = being unwilling to acknowledge no one cares about your game despite your own forums being the evidence to the contrary, and locking threads because of that.

That did come off as petty, I will admit, but that doesn't invalidate all his decisions up to now. I mean, people can be petty sometimes, while not being childish most of the time. What I am trying to say is that a single incident shouldn't damn him for the whole issue.

Uhm, I'm just relying on facts here. The game didn't sell = fact.

The conclusion I meant is that his game was solely made for selling, and that he therefore fucked it up. Of course, the game didn't sell well enough, and he certainly "fucked up" in getting more funds from it. But if that wasn't the whole purpose of the game, he may have succeeded in some kind of personal goal. In which case, saying he fucked up, without any qualifiers, would be a bit mean (which I thought was what you were doing, sorry if I misunderstood that).

Why do you think he would be interested in putting KotC on a "portal" if there was no BotS in first place?

Because of money, obviously -- which is, again, his own reason in his reply to VentilatorOfDoom -- and also because he's working on KotC2 at the moment and could use the publicity.[/quote]

Well, to be fair, he admits in that thread he would like to have both games in distribution sites, but like he said himself, he "cares" about BotS. Which means that this isn't just an economic decision.

People who've never heard about your game are more likely to buy it for 5 bucks once they hear about it on a major site, than they are to buy it for 30 bucks when they don't hear about it.

True, but this all brings us a step closer of only having indie games worth $5 in first place. Which is, I think, HHR's point.

And just what is wrong with an indie game costing 5 bucks??? You always start small in life, man. You need to earn the right to charge more than five bucks for a game. You do that by making money with your five dollar game, and using that money to make a bigger, better game that you can safely charge ten dollars for. Then you use the profits from that game to make a twenty dollar game. And so on.

I have no problem with indie games costing $5. I have a big problem with them all being worth $5.

 

[FeelTheRads]

has said they let him set the price he wanted.

But don't you have to agree to have your game is those super-sales or whatever? Honest question, I don't really know.
And really, you see plenty of people who don't buy anything unless it's in one of those sales. What happens if everybody would just wait for those sales?

 

[Stabwound]

This is getting dangerously close to the fallacy that piracy = lost sales.

It's been mentioned here as a perfect example: hasn't Vogel made a killing by offering his games on Steam and the Humble Bundle compared to selling them solely through his website that looks like it's not been updated since 1995? The KoTC website is no better.

Him selling his game only through the website for $25 is like releasing a music CD and only selling it at a run down, dingy corner record store and refusing to let it be sold at Walmart/iTunes/Amazon/etc. It doesn't even seem to be a matter of principle, because he talks about money in that thread and he's obviously interested in making a profit from his work.

His argument is that no one can tell him what's best to do because we're not in his position, but it doesn't take a magician to come to the conclusion that he's making peanuts off of the game by selling it the way he is now. I think it just comes down to being egotistical and (understandably) proud of his work, even if that means being in total denial of the fact that his business model isn't even close to ideal.

 

[Lorica]

Or it comes down to people being entitled and wanting all their games for nearly nothing, no matter if it is financially viable for those who take big loans and all the risk for it.

Is it entitlement to expect that a product in a mature market costs less than when that market was new? That it needs to be priced competitively?

Perhaps risk should be scaled to reasonable expectations of return, rather than return manipulated to reward risk.

 

[Infinitron]

I have no problem with indie games costing $5. I have a big problem with them all being worth $5.

Well, indies still have a wide range of prices. For example, Frozen Synapse, a game released in 2011 that has very simple graphics is still being sold for 25 dollars. It helps that it is virtually the only game of its kind.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Well, to be fair, he admits in that thread he would like to have both games in distribution sites, but like he said himself, he "cares" about BotS. Which means that this isn't just an economic decision.

Okay, it looks like we're reading it differently. In my reading, him "caring" more about BotS means BotS hasn't been selling well enough and he wants to give it a monetary boost via a GOG distribution deal. Which is what he says in that thread in the first place.

According to you, however, he "cares" about BotS because he's attached to it in a creative way.

 

[Shadenuat]

Is BotS that bad?

 

[Mrowak]

Well, to be fair, he admits in that thread he would like to have both games in distribution sites, but like he said himself, he "cares" about BotS. Which means that this isn't just an economic decision.

Okay, it looks like we're reading it differently. In my reading, him "caring" more about BotS means BotS hasn't been selling well enough and he wants to give it a monetary boost via a GOG distribution deal. Which is what he says in that thread in the first place.

According to you, however, he "cares" about BotS because he's attached to it in a creative way.

Looking at this case, it's a major bit of both. We just cannot understand how he can't wrap his head around the idea promoting the product he cares about through the product that already is recognizible.

 

[Alex]

Well, to be fair, he admits in that thread he would like to have both games in distribution sites, but like he said himself, he "cares" about BotS. Which means that this isn't just an economic decision.

Okay, it looks like we're reading it differently. In my reading, him "caring" more about BotS means BotS hasn't been selling well enough and he wants to give it a monetary boost via a GOG distribution deal. Which is what he says in that thread in the first place.

According to you, however, he "cares" about BotS because he's attached to it in a creative way.

I don't see much merit in BotS, myself, but I still think it is pretty cavalier to assume that this means there isn't any.

I have no problem with indie games costing $5. I have a big problem with them all being worth $5.

Well, indies still have a wide range of prices. For example, Frozen Synapse, a game released in 2011 that has very simple graphics is still being sold for 25 dollars. It helps that it is virtually the only game of its kind.

Sure, I am not saying the situation looks like that (yet, at least). I was just mentioning that I think his point is that better indie games would only be possible if the gaming culture started becoming more acceptive of paying higher than $50 prices, instead of less. Therefore, any blow to aggregation sites like Steam or GoG,where games are frequently underpriced, would be a good thing. I dunno if this is strictly right or not, but I kinda see some logic behind that. In part, that is why I was, and still somewhat am, excited about Kickstarter.

 

[tuluse]

But don't you have to agree to have your game is those super-sales or whatever? Honest question, I don't really know

I don't know for sure either, but I don't believe so. I think Valve has ways of pressuring publishers to take part without outright demanding that they do.

And really, you see plenty of people who don't buy anything unless it's in one of those sales.

They're likely already not buying kotc, so what's the difference?

What happens if everybody would just wait for those sales?

I feel like if you can't convince people to spend more than $5 on your game, you probably have a bad game.

But lets not lose sight of what happened here. Nothing to do with pricing or sales. Everything to do with gog not wanting to sell his rts game, which he thinks he is entitled to sell.

 

[Crooked Bee]

I don't see much merit in BotS, myself, but I still think it is pretty cavalier to assume that this means there isn't any.

I do not assume there isn't any -- I don't care much for RTS's and I haven't played BotS myself.

It's still pretty weird to not recognize there is a market for KotC and want to sell BotS but not KotC regardless.

 

[FeelTheRads]

I feel like if you can't convince people to spend more than $5 on your game, you probably have a bad game.

Not necessarily. I mean, if it's just a matter of waiting for a sale, why would you even pay full price? There really aren't that many people that care about supporting the developers. And even if they do, they figure, hey, they sell it for this price it must mean it's still profitable.

Everything to do with gog not wanting to sell his rts game, which he thinks he is entitled to sell.

Well, yeah, I didn't say insisting on selling one but refusing the other isn't a hard-headed move and fuck knows what's in his head.

 

[J1M]

People who've never heard about your game are more likely to buy it for 5 bucks once they hear about it on a major site, than they are to buy it for 30 bucks when they don't hear about it.

True, but this all brings us a step closer of only having indie games worth $5 in first place. Which is, I think, HHR's point.

Slow down.

Consider a 'good' AAA game costs $200,000,000 to make and market, and charges $50 a copy.
Now consider a 'good' indie game that costs $200,000 to make and market, and charges $5 a copy.

AAA game needs to sell 4,000,000 copies to break even.
Indie game needs to sell __40,000 copies to break even.

That's just 1% of the sales of its competitors. At 10% of the price.

$5 for an indie game seems a perfectly reasonable price to base an industry around, especially if that is a sale price, because most people will pay $10-15 for them.

 

[Alex]

I don't see much merit in BotS, myself, but I still think it is pretty cavalier to assume that this means there isn't any.

I do not assume there isn't any -- I don't care much for RTS's and I haven't played BotS myself.

It's still pretty weird to not recognize there is a market for KotC and want to sell BotS but not KotC regardless.

Well, ok, I guess that makes perfect sense. I just thought it a bit unfair to see everyone criticizing him in his absence. Sorry if it looked like I was trying to pick a fight with your or anything.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Well, ok, I guess that makes perfect sense. I just thought it a bit unfair to see everyone criticizing him in his absence. Sorry if it looked like I was trying to pick a fight with your or anything.

Aww, you're too non-confrontational, Alex

It's all about Pierre's priorities, actually. Nothing more, nothing less.