[QUOTE=laserpanda;49643381]That's why it's silly that the article claims that their sales were dealt a heavy blow. The people who pirate games probably weren't going to buy it anyway.[/QUOTE]
Idk, I can imagine many people wanting to try a game before buying it for several reasons.
I prefer demos and trials over trailers.
A demo is what is needed. Price can stay the same.
People looking into the game will either see screenshots or trailers, maybe see some gameplay outside of that. From that, if it were me, I'd be settling on the "neat art style, the puzzles sound interesting, pretty cool little indie experience" at that point and be more than a little surprised when I see the $56 price tag.
Playing through it now though (a friend grabbed it ASAP after following its development and after hearing about it from them I've been giving it a shot since). There's easily [I]at least[/I] 20 hours of genuine game play if you only do only what is necessary (without cheating yourself, of course, and best if you've gone in blind). This is taking me ages, and I've even been sharing progress back and forth with the aforementioned friend.
It isn't a short experience with a few puzzles here and there, and it doesn't take a while because of game enforced delays or anything -- you're free to run from puzzle to puzzle throughout the island, the majority of the time you'll spend will probably be looking for puzzles, solving them and exploring for the sake of exploring (or the previous two points!). Play times will vary significantly, but I stand by my 20 hour minimum estimate for a legitimate playthrough. There's a lot of content, and a lot of that content can take a while for you to complete, but that'll vary from person to person.
Only issue with a demo is that it wont show the playtime scope of the game, but its much better than either having people avoid it all together, or forcing more adventurous people to go in blind after dropping $60 on the reasoning that they can get a refund (and aren't refunds to the steam wallet only, anyway?).
Could totally show at the end of your demo run what % of the actual game you just attempted, though -- that'd be funny. I'm not sure if they'd prefer engineering the demo with different puzzles so as to not detract from the actual game when you start, though -- would be pretty eh if you get in game and realise this next segment is what you completed in the demo. A lot of extra work, though.
Great game by the way, shame about the piracy, but given its current performance on Steam, and that its out on PSN and soon to be released on iOS and other PC platforms, I'm pretty sure it should turn up a success.
Game is pretty expensive, if the price was lower there would be less pirates sailing towards it.
But a pirated copy isn't a lost sale.
This guy is just having a twitter meltdown because after four days he didn't recoup his[B] six million[/B] dollar investment.
[QUOTE=thrawn2787;49644889]But a pirated copy isn't a lost sale.
This guy is just having a twitter meltdown because after four days he didn't recoup his[B] six million[/B] dollar investment.[/QUOTE]
"It seems The Witness is the #1 game on a certain popular torrent site. Unfortunately this will not help us afford to make another game!"
"I'm glad that a lot more people will be experiencing the game! But I also want to be able to make another comparable game next! Just sayin'."
Hardly a meltdown. He hasn't told anyone to suck his dick and choke on it.
I'd be sad that it was really popular on piracy sites if 1. the price wasn't so high, and 2. if piracy actually equaled lost sales. As it stands, Blow hasn't gone full Phil Fish (angry rage on twitter) or David Cage (verbally challenging reviewers who just "didn't get it"), so he's still in the clear for me
I feel bad for the guy. I loved Braid, but at $40 this game is a tough sale for me. I'm not really a puzzle gamer, so idk if I want to spend that much on something I'm not sure if I'd enjoy
Well I loved Braid and I love Myst but $40 is way too much. Some kind of demo would be great for an full price Indie game.
[QUOTE=Swiket;49644957]"It seems The Witness is the #1 game on a certain popular torrent site. Unfortunately this will not help us afford to make another game!"
"I'm glad that a lot more people will be experiencing the game! But I also want to be able to make another comparable game next! Just sayin'."
Hardly a meltdown. He hasn't told anyone to suck his dick and choke on it.[/QUOTE]
Which streamer was it that had three [I]million [/I]views? And he had quite a bit more tweets that you conviently ignore defending DRM and blaming pirates for poorer sales than he expected.
I saw this on youtube and thought about picking it up. 40$ came at a total shock. No way. Nuhhuh. And i think many of my friends thought the same. Thats a bunch of potential revenue lost from people who want to play your game but dont want to pay 40$ for it. 20$ pricing wouldve been a lot more reasonable.
[QUOTE=bdd458;49634167]Demos are expensive to make. It's not just chopping a bit out and releasing it.[/QUOTE]
I mean have you ever played the HL2 demo? Or the L4D demos?
HL2 is just the trainstation and Ravenholm.
L4D was just a bit of No Mercy
iirc L4D2 was just some of The Parish with weapons and shit cut as well.
You don't have to do it like the Stanley Parable where it's a separate custom demo-built level.
[QUOTE=usaokay;49647693]I think developers say "it's costly to develop" because there is a high chance that the player might not like the game if they try it themselves.[/QUOTE]
i dont understand this line of thinking.
if you make a demo of a piece of your game that you think best represents it or is a fun piece of it, and you're worried that people won't like it
then maybe your game really isn't worth the price point you set it at.
even if your game is total garbage your demo should be centered around something that'll pull the player in and trick them into thinking the rest of the game is good.
A lot of high profile games of all kinds have had demos, and for those where demos were difficult to make, there have been trial periods where you could try the game for, say, half an hour.
[QUOTE=DeEz;49642610]Overpriced or not, it doesn't excuse piracy.[/QUOTE]
You, and a lot of people in this thread miss a very key point when thinking about sales.
Piracy is a medium for users to get and try something they would've never used to begin with.
Say, Metal Gear Solid V released, it costs at very cheapest 40 euro from a random key website and 60 euro at Steam. I'm not a fan of MGSV series.
So, if the game is pirated, I get to check it out and MAYBE buy it if the content I will get for buying (multiplayer, for instance) is worth it.
If not, I still skip it with losing my interest.
Long story short, kids: If your product does not justify its price for a user so he prompts to pirate it, it is a problem with the product, not the user, because the user feels he won't be satisfied for 60 euro.
Imagine a world, where our economy is in the same state of affairs, but instead of "60 euro gold standard" for AAA titles, the games cost at most 10 euro a pop?
Especially in some countries (Namely, Eastern European such as Latvia, Russia, Estonia, Ukraine etc), what the hell is 60 euro for them, when the average wage, [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_average_wage]according to Wikipedia[/url], is €136. Let that sink in for a second.
[QUOTE=thrawn2787;49644889]But a pirated copy isn't a lost sale.
This guy is just having a twitter meltdown because after four days he didn't recoup his[B] six million[/B] dollar investment.[/QUOTE]
This thread alone is proof enough that people would be more interested if the game was 20 bucks.
[QUOTE=usaokay;49647693]I think developers say "it's costly to develop" because there is a high chance that the player might not like the game if they try it themselves.[/QUOTE]
But that's going to be negated by refunds now being a thing, it wouldn't surprise me if "it's costly to make" is actually code for "we can't be bothered".
[QUOTE=markg06;49642356]This is exactly why demos need to make a comeback, for something like this or open world games just have it as a timed demo like they used to be and have the saves carry over, especially if there's as much content as people are saying in it.[/QUOTE]
Just Cause 2's demo was actually more fun for me than the base game just because the time limit. I would try to go as far as I could in the time frame.
[QUOTE=Destroyox;49648600]Just Cause 2's demo was actually more fun for me than the base game just because the time limit. I would try to go as far as I could in the time frame.[/QUOTE]
Just Cause 2's demo was so great that it had it's own modding scene before the game was released :v:
[QUOTE=Ganerumo;49647970]This thread alone is proof enough that people would be more interested if the game was 20 bucks.[/QUOTE]
Well duh. People would be more interested in [I]any[/I] $40 game if it cost 20 instead.
The thing with piracy is this:
I'm certain that not all piracy equals lost sales.
While some of it may be, there are people pirating this who would never have bought it in the first place, and probably will not do so.
There are also those who would never have bought it previously, but now consider buying it because they feel like doing so - it may be a good game, and worth them thanking the developer by paying for the game.
OF course, this is all speculation but one based on intuitive logic. What we need is some data here so that we may form a consensus. I'm not here to make value judgements and I really do not care about the ethics of pirating - I simply care about the economics of piracy.
Lol you guys speak like the majority of the pirates do so to try the game before buying it or because it's overpriced.
99.8% of these pirates would have pirated the game no matter what, because that's all they do with all their games.
[QUOTE=Dark RaveN;49647764]You, and a lot of people in this thread miss a very key point when thinking about sales.
Piracy is a medium for users to get and try something they would've never used to begin with.
Say, Metal Gear Solid V released, it costs at very cheapest 40 euro from a random key website and 60 euro at Steam. I'm not a fan of MGSV series.
So, if the game is pirated, I get to check it out and MAYBE buy it if the content I will get for buying (multiplayer, for instance) is worth it.
If not, I still skip it with losing my interest.
Long story short, kids: If your product does not justify its price for a user so he prompts to pirate it, it is a problem with the product, not the user, because the user feels he won't be satisfied for 60 euro.
Imagine a world, where our economy is in the same state of affairs, but instead of "60 euro gold standard" for AAA titles, the games cost at most 10 euro a pop?
Especially in some countries (Namely, Eastern European such as Latvia, Russia, Estonia, Ukraine etc), what the hell is 60 euro for them, when the average wage, [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_average_wage]according to Wikipedia[/url], is €136. Let that sink in for a second.[/QUOTE]
You assume that I am of the opinion that piracy = lost sales, which I am not.
[QUOTE=thrawn2787;49645916]Which streamer was it that had three [I]million [/I]views? And he had quite a bit more tweets that you conviently ignore defending DRM and blaming pirates for poorer sales than he expected.[/QUOTE]
[media]https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/692832343174877184[/media]
[media]https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/693202768136253442[/media]
That's it for his tweets on the subject.
Other than that, there's just his replies to people's replies (questions + suggestions) to those. He's not blaming pirates for poorer sales than he expected anywhere, and if anything, his responses (see the OP) are in favour of [i]DRM free games[/I]. Did find some neat tidbits on the reading these answers though -- Braid had just as much piracy, but had a demo and cost $15. He even went the extra mile to seed a Braid torrent on release which was missing a decent chunk of content (neat idea, basically a large demo for pirates), but of course that only works for a moderately short period of time.
The best solution for this would have been an easily available handcrafted demo (take a tiny chunk of the island, and condense a bit more of the puzzle content onto it, preferably different to the full game), but from what I can tell development was tight enough on time as it was.
[QUOTE=oskutin;49640550]That is what I'm hoping with INFRA, as the exposure has been low.
Even when it causes a loss of sales.
And we need to live too.[/QUOTE]
INFRA is finally out? I remember following the development quite awhile ago. I'll be sure to buy it over the weekend.
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