Strategy games, pricing, and the enjoyment curve | Hacker News Reader

Strategy games, pricing, and the enjoyment curve

positech.co.uk

Very good and intelligent article. One point I don't fully agree with is the actual cut-off price. For iOS devices I have noticed that anything above $5 has the exact effect the author described - it forces to pay more attention and cut the app more slack. Also, I would not even consider buying a $25 game for iPad. But then if it were a desktop game, I would, meaning that that magic price depends not just on the game, but also on the platform.

Yeah its a different model for mini based games and the coffin box and euro game - but in that case you are paying for physical objects as well.

XCom: Enemy Unknown is $20 on iOS, only sightly cheaper than the PC version at the time of launch, and is a more-or-less straight port of the PC game. Despite the (comparatively) high price it was in the Top Grossing list for a while.

Square-Enix have also been successfully selling $15 iOS ports of their Final Fantasy series.

I suspect a lot of the people buying the Final Fantasy remakes are people who played them years ago and are buying them to replay now because they no longer have a Playstation / SNES / the original game discs, but retain fond feelings for them. Which is all fine, but it doesn't generalise well to newer companies who don't have a long-established fanbase already.

I would classify XCom: Enemy Unknown as console game, not a PC game. But the important point is that it's not an iPad game, and as such is automatically "worth" more due to having a different anchor.

Why is that? It is a remake of a PC game, from a traditionally PC game developer, and the interface is PC-centric. It's a PC game with console ports.

The interface is far from PC-centric. It's PC-tolerable, but was clearly designed for consoles.

Firaxis initially promised separate interfaces for both platforms, and presumably for touch devices as well, but the differences ended up being cosmetic at best.

If you want an example of a dual-platform game with a PC-centric interface, the first example that comes to mind is Command & Conquer.

I think this is why iOS is crap for gaming. I have yet to find an actual good game with some depth for iOS despite having a far larger market than when a lot of the classics where put out like all those pool of radiance games. I mean Boulders gate EE had an IOS port but Boulders gate 2 EE did not despite having the same game engine.

I think the crap gaming (from our perspective) situation is there for a few reasons.

1. Mobile wasn't taken as seriously by AAA devs, and now when they try and break off to make something for iOS, it's drowned out by:

2. The horde of companies that came from Facebook which are making the games you and I deem as 'meh'. They have optimized the crap out of acquiring users and charting. Good luck if you're a developer trying to make a high quality immersive experience, because no one will find you (unless you have a brand name or lots to spend on acquisition).

3. The reality is probably that the mass market on iOS won't go for more hardcore games. They want Smurf's Village type games...

4. Many of the higher quality games we would want, end up not being done well. Baldur's Gate is actually a good example. I paid for it the first day it came out, and there was a lot of silly problems, related to controls, UI, etc... I loved it at its core so much, but it really needed more work/time :(.

Has anyone played Democracy 3? I found Democracy 2 relatively shallow and toy-like - the RockPaperShotgun "Wot I think" didn't make it Democracy 3 sound like a significantly deeper experience http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/10/31/wot-i-think-democ...

Yes, I hadn't played Democracy 2, but I was going to buy Democracy 3 on a whim, instead when I found the high price I pirated it.

I got well past the initial hour mentioned in the blog, but after about the third hour or so my interest waned, it is pretty shallow and to an extent just feels like you are 'playing' a spreadsheet with the occasional random value thrown in.

I hope this doesn't sound too disparaging, since I did have fun for the four hours or so I played, but I wouldn't call it deep strategy at all, and I would have felt pretty let down if I'd paid full price for it.

I bought it. I couldn't get it to run on Linux so I spent a couple of hours on Valgrind figuring out what went wrong where.

I finally gave up and figured out that all copies on Steam's servers were bad (they had some AU/NZ server issues back then I believe), so with some hackery I downloaded a previous version.

I played it. It was great. But as the other commenter mentioned, it is pretty shallow. It's easy to "beat the game". The challenges come from one self though.

For example, to win the game in any country except US, the easiest course is to direct that country to be a socialist utopia. One of the challenges I set myself to win was to make it a religio-anarchy type of of government. That's when the game gets fun IMO.

Also, US is challenging no matter what your plans are.

I have vague memories of trying the Democracy 1 demo, found it promising, buying the full game, and finding that the demo was basically 90% of the full game. No extra depth - and the demo by itself was shallow. I didn't bother with Democracy 3 because of this 'burn'.

Secondly, we have sunk costs. If you buy a game or $1 and after 5 minutes you are stuck, bored or confused, who gives a fuck? Just uninstall it. But what if you paid $25 or even $50? At that price, you often ‘force yourself’ to keep playing

Nope. If I'm bored or confused by a high-price game it just gets binned. There's a ton of other stuff out there. Make a mental note that the publisher of the game is probably crap in terms of future purchases. The days of sticking with a game because there's no other options are over, thanks to digital distribution, broadband, and a glut of games.

Psychologically speaking you are more likely to attempt to get results from a product the more you have invested to acquire it. You may bin games if their price is comparatively nothing in your daily budget, if you routinely buy designer clothing paying hundreds a garment you only wear once then a $50 game might be nothing, but if you paid $25,000 for a flight simulation setup you might use it more than once before throwing it in the trash because you can so easily next things.

The argument is interesting, but most of my gaming experience contradicts it. E.g. dwarf fortress, nethack, crawl cost all zero and I've spent more time in them then in most pay games.

I think the $0 price point is extremely different from $0.01 or more. It's an entirely different category in our minds. We don't think, "this game is so cheap that it's free", but rather, "this is a game that the author decided not to charge for."

If you're looking for a good strategy game, check out Dominions 4. It's probably the deepest strategy game around and is very thematic.

http://www.illwinter.com/dom4/

It's worth noting that this game also has a "high" price point.

By "high price point" you mean roughly half of a typical Xbox game?

I mean 25€, which is slightly higher than the $25 the article is about.

Another indie that followed a lot of this logic is Kerbal Space Program. I'll admit I pushed through the learning curve because of the price and really found it very rewarding.

Does anyone know good Civilization like game? I played Civ4 and Alpha Centaury a lot, but it is getting old. Civ5 does not work for me.

I'm an old Civilization fan, and recently I have enjoyed playing Paradox's game (Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis and Victoria). They touch the same spot that Civ5 wasn't able to touch.

Seconding this. The latest Europa Universalis game is eating all my time while I conquer South-East Asia one nation at a time. Imagine a Civ game with twice the depth and ten times the run time.

My neglected partner hates it.

If you're not afraid of a space settings, Galactic Civilization 2 + extension by stardock is a must have, cost pretty much nothing and runs anywhere.

It is a 4x in space not exactly the same as civ / ac, but it is very generic yet complete, similar to what civ 4 + beyond the sword is in its branch, and the general idea is the same: you start with a base planet (city), you have to expand your area to more planets (cities) all the while dealing with diplomacy and wars against several opponents ranging from nice and friendly to war mongering slavers.

And if you end up liking the genre, there are a lot of other 4x available with specialization in each specific area (sword of the stars, endless space, ai wars, sins of a solar empire, stardrive, star ruler, ...)

PS: and if you have never tried it, the mod Rise of Mankind + A new dawn breath a lot of new life to Civ 4 beyond the storm. The extent to which it deepens the game is unbelievable.

+1 for stardock strategy games and an owner of Galactic Civilizations also.

I think I've bought nearly all of their history games on steam. Victoria 2 is great if you want a unique military/economic strategy game that focuses on 1840 to 1920. When I get bored of playing one of the larger players in imperialism, I delve into the "what ifs" and play as a more minor 19th century power like Italy, The Ottomans or China. Arguably, I had more fun bringing Japan into the industrial era than I did colonizing Africa with the UK. Also, uniting Germany is also quite fun. Plenty of great user mods out for it as well.

If you have an interest in 1920 to 1950, hearts of iron 3 is great. You can even import your end game from Victoria to it and continue playing an alternative reality 20th century.

Galactic Civ is turn based while Victoria and Hearts of Iron are continuous time, where you can speed up or slow down (or pause) time. It's a little weird at first if you're used to turn based, but the game flows much better as there aren't 5 minute pauses in gameplay unlike civ5.

Have you played vanilla Civ5? 2 extensions and particularly Brave New World added a lot to the game, making it more deep and interesting. I wasn't a fan of vanilla Civ5, got pretty bored after some games, but with the extensions I could enjoy it much longer.

Yes, the two expansions add a ton of game mechanics that bring much more depth. However, I've found that the only time I really enjoy Civ5 is when playing with friends as we backstab each other. Unfortunately, the AI in Civ5 is pretty poor, with harder difficulty levels simply giving the AI various cheating advantages.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the average user buying $1 apps on a whim is a different audience than the user willing to spend >$5 on an app.

I've purchased $5+ apps that I've binned after not being impressed (even after being swayed by reviews). But I'm regularly buying strategy games that are priced that way.

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