I get it, most of the games are from $1 to $4, but I don't understand why. Either you pay $1-4 for a dumb little game with no depth, or you pay $16 for a quality of game that used to cost $50, when hardware was less advanced. Why?
I could have a superior experience with a SNES emulator.
Further, depth of a game has nothing to do with price. False dichotomy. The choice isn't between cheap games with no depth and expensive games with depth, the choice is between high value and low value.
There isn't a $16 value in what SE is putting out. There's not even a $5 value.
This is what you wrote. I haven't been a gamer for a long time, other than some $2 and $5 games, so I'm on your side.
I'm trying to understand why we're not interested in paying $50 for a game anymore. I have a stack of them at home, I paid $50 in 1990's and 2000's money for them.
I agree that you shouldn't pay $50 for a rehash of some old game that was never designed for touch, on a platform that doesn't provide really any other options for input control.
I'm just trying to understand why nobody is putting out NEW games that you would pay $50 for. Nobody is even targeting this price point. Is it because distribution channels are so much cheaper, and there aren't as many middle-men trying to take a cut? Is there some deficiency in the platform to explain why they /can't/ sell us games at the $50 price?
I'm not talking about Candy Crush Saga. The consoles are still successful at selling new games for $50+. Nobody is doing it for Android or iOS as far as I can tell. Are we waiting for NVidia Shield and Ouya, or is there some other reason why nobody is producing for this platform any new, original games of high quality that you would pay $50 for?
I'm making a 2D JRPG right now - first wave of platforms being PC/Mac/maybe-Linux, second wave being mobile and tablet devices. The PC version will be priced between $15 and $20; the mobile one will by necessity end up around $8-$10 because that is the ceiling that people seem willing to pay for games (and not a lot of them at that).
From where I sit, the mobile market is largely quality-inelastic (unless you measure quality on 'reactivity of your Skinner box') and while I'm porting my game, I wouldn't bother otherwise if it wasn't solely a learning experience for me. Even if I was at an AAA shop I certainly couldn't justify spending the sort of money necessary to "validate" the existence of a $50 title on iOS.
I see now that's not what you wrote at all, but that was the point that drove my response.
Since there is more people buying those games, a popular game can be profitable at a lower price now than a popular game could have been profitable at in the past. There is also no mark-up through as many distribution channels. There's no physical shelf space necessary, there's not the same sort of publisher relationships needed. A team (of any size) can create a game and publish it directly.
So because of changes in distribution and an increased market, the price should go down due to reduced expenses. But the other side is that many of these changes also reduce the barrier to entry of new developers. This means that there's more competition which means that the price will go down due to reduced margins from competition.
It's not so much that it's $1-4 for a dumb game and $16 for a quality game. It's that people sell quality games for less than 5 dollars and still make money. It's also the perception that "this game was already made". Chances are the people who are buying it have already played it because these rereleases are generally for fans of the game. So you're paying again for a game that's 20 years old. Does it make sense to pay more than a new game?
That said I'm in total agreement that the biggest thing about it is form factor. People don't buy SNES rpgs on the phone because phones aren't the best way to play SNES rpgs.
Phones have a small screen, long term playing on such a small screen causes eye strain, phones have touch screens, which are great for angry birds, because it's a very intuitive use for touch. Touch screen gamepads are not intuitive, and occlude the screen. Phones are always on you which is very handy for games that you want to pick up or put down, but not so important for marathon sessions. Phones have batteries which need to be considered, so again, you want to avoid the marathon gaming sessions.
The reason we have so many casual games on the phone is because the phone is the ideal target for casual games. Games that you can pick up and put down. Go and play a level of candy crush saga on the toilet. Go and shoot some angry birds waiting for the train. I've tried to play some RPGs this way and you might get through a minor segment of a story line or some plot exposition on the can before your legs start to get numb.
You often find $60 PC games for sale. We haven't moved to a point where games are all $1-4. We just have moved to a point where casual games are $1-4, and bigger games demand a different delivery method than a little phone screen and substandard (compared with the alternatives of a console or PC) hardware. If you're going to pay $60 for a game, you're probably planning on putting some real time aside for it, which means sitting at your desk or on the couch. When you get an app for the phone instead, you do it because you might get some use out of it when you can't spend the time to sit at a desk or on the couch.
Now many people are shelling out just as much for tablets and phones (or through subsidy plans, eventually paying as much as for TV consoles). Today, I have a Wii Mini which was $99, pay extra for more controllers, $10-30 a game since mostly all Wii games are used, or at least are priced as used... and I couldn't be happier that there's no way to hook it up to the internet and Pay-to-Play.
I wish that some of the games were more casual, but from a small sample, the Lego LOTR game is engaging, multiplayer, and really just couldn't be done at all on a small screen with a touch interface. Same goes for Just Dance, or Michael Jackson Experience. Still I can't help feeling like the makers of games for iOS and Android are sandbagging the market. It is about depth for me, and I honestly can't say that I've seen a lot of Android games competing on a much higher level than even the crappiest Wii games that I got for under $10.
Then again, I haven't paid more than $7 for any Android game.
I played Zenonia 2 on my iPad when I first got it and it was pretty solid.
They've now released a few more Zenonia games for several platforms at this point.