Price haggling is often made possible when there is little or no intermediaries. This is often not the case. To take the supermarket example, even occidental producers are neck-deep in debts and difficulties because of how supermarkets take the buying price down and have themselves comfortable profits.
Then again, it’s true we mustn’t be blind to the price factor and keep some criticism about it. Some people will buy a product because they badly need it or to be in the first ones, other may be willing to wait for a price drop.
It’s actually much less than that, though I don’t remember exactly the figure. Steam charges more if the editors want the game on the top page. They sometimes offer a few hours free of charge top page for some.
[quote=“Kichae, post:59, topic:2973”]
Consumers! And isn’t price one of the things consumers need to consider when making purchasing decisions? Isn’t it one of the consumer’s major roles, and one of their only powers, in the modern retail marketplace? It’s not like price negotiation is always an option these days. Or even an option on large, automated, online markets.
Plus, extend your question to other consumer items:
Who are we to tell car manufacturers that we won’t buy their cars that they invested years of their lives in unless they reduce the price?[/quote]
Yes, it is. But to exagerate this entitlement behaviour a bit: You don’t go to Mercedes and tell them you won’t buy their high end car unless it’s the price of a VW Polo. You simply don’t buy it. You could question whether a car is a high end car and justifies the price, but all these analogies don’t quiet cut it, because games are a luxury/commodity item with value that’s largely detached from the production cost. Otherwise the AAA games would cost hundreds of $/€/. And in the large scale of things, they’re not that expensive for a commodity item to start with, even at 60€.
If we personally feel that the price is unjustified, we don’t buy it.
I don’t think anyone here is actually at Hello Studios, or emailing them, or Sony for that matter. We’re kinda hanging around outside some other car lot, talking amongst ourselves about how much more expensive that new Mini Cooper is than we were expecting it to be.
[quote=“hrobertson, post:65, topic:2973, full:true”]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGXDCV9HiZ4[/quote]First video that kinda explains it, tho i would prefer a raw gameplay footage thing. It does seem like a nice game and i am actually considering buying it. Not sure at this price tag tho.
As far as I can see, the whole price tag ‘discussion’ is a bit of a fallacy. Most peoples that are moaning about No mans sky not being worth 60$, are the same people who’ll happily buy the new which often offers way less content than the previous version (which also tends to get lowered in price dramatically due to the new entry’s release). If the amount of content is right, then paying 60$ shouldn’t hinge on the dev being an indie studio or not.
I mean, from what I can tell, NMS offers more content than Elite: Dangerous did at release and possibly more game content than vanilla Battlescape will ever have, yet many people (myself included) happily coughed up the extra bucks for both games (and/or are waiting for the pledge upgrade system to be implemented, so that they can cough up even more money to the dev *hint, hint*).
What makes a Battlefront 3 worth more money than NMS? Because it ‘looks better’?
There are a LOT of high expectations for this game, and Sony is capitalising on that hype. Probably because they know there is a risk the game won’t be as great as everyone expects it to be.
Actually i like NMS way more than EA’s Battlefront which is a very shallow game with pretty graphics. This seems to have more depth. I won’t preorder NMS because i have not seen anyone making a video of of actual gameplay. I’d love to see TotalBiscuit or MikeB to do an in-depth review on it.
exacly, totaly right, actual full gameplay video we couldn’t see, way to easy stay into expectations and then receive a reward as gift for christmas or birthday with 7-18-20 years then joy disappears very quickly and then you realize that just getting old…
You know when people complain that an open world is unfathomably littered with NPCs all of whom have odd little quests just for you to add some sense of progress and direction? This is what you get when you remove that.
Not saying it’s a bad thing - it works fine for Minecraft for example - but without the crafting aspect there’s not much in the way of literally building your own experience, you simply have to meander between worlds, and I’m not sure that’s enough to engage me for over ten or so hours which might justify purchasing it.
With that said though, it looks refreshing and I love space games as much as the next person, so I will likely pick it up when it goes on sale (that ship is not a decent pre-order incentive).
I guess it’s more the stomach feeling of some people that the “AAA” offerings are made by sometimes hundreds of people, with that much more complex assets etc. as well sa work invested into it and far higher production values. For some people more realistic and complex assets (sometimes incorrectly labeled as “mature”) are also associated with higher value.
That’s an inconsistent measure in itself however. Considering games by small teams are often in the 10-20$/€ range, extrapolating this using the involved team as measure would mean “AAA” efforts had to be attached with astronomic price tags. Yet, people somehow seem to assume that “AAA” has to mean 60$/€ +/-. (While publishers disagree of course and are already pushing this into the 100$/€ +/- range using season passes and DLC. ) And it doesn’t take into account that “AAA” offerings may mean 8-15h rollercoaster ride campaigns with more or less tacked on multiplayer, while well crafted indie games may easily net you far more play time but are of course rarely fully voice acted or feature cinematic campaigns.
My only real problem with them is in the end where they say “they expect that 99.9% of the universe that they have created will never be explored… millions of people might play no mans sky and each of them will probaly see 1 planet and that’s not even 0.1% of what they built in the game”
When using procedural generated content you can’t really say that they “built” anything unless they’ve gone to planets and custom engineered certain things. I mean, I’ve made a name generator that can generate a few million combinations of names, but I have only supplied the generator with a few hundred possible combinations, it doesn’t really mean that I’ve built any of the end result names (in my opinion at least), some of them might be really stupid like Steve Steve Stevensson (sorry if anyone has that name though).
I mean, I’m kinda excited for the game, absolutely, but it seems people are a bit too excited and overlook a bunch of things when looking at the game.
I would disagree on that point. They certainly build something, which are the algorithms building the game’s world for them. As well as the assets used by those algorithms. I would go as far as to argue that what they’ve done - if it turns out to be convincing - is a lot harder than the traditional “building” of assets. We will most likely recognize familiar building blocks used by their algorithms after a short while. But if their generation is done well, we might find creatures and planet/surface formations/shapes thousands of hours into the game, that we’ve never seen before. And if it’s only a certain giant creature’s body type and coloring, that has so far only appeared on tiny creature variants.
That’s something you cannot possibly achieve by hand crafting assets. Of course, it is to be expected that some hours into the game, practically everything you see will be familiar to some degree.
Your example of name generator is quite insufficient. You underestimate the mathematics behind a 3D world generator.
The land must look plausible at first. Second you may want not to have hot sand desert just accross that snow part. Third, the content must fit inside that procedurally generated land.
Oh, there’s much to consider on that point, my friend.
EDIT: and as says @Burny, the fourth point to consider is having enough diversity so that a type of biome does not ressemble the other, for instance a luxurious vegetation biome can be different from one planet to another.
I think that’s an important point. A video game, just like any market commodity, is priced at whatever the seller believes the market will bear. As a retail item, it has a lot more price stickiness, if only because consumers in the west have become accustomed to retail chain prices being sticky and basically non-negotiable, but at the end of the day it’s all just one giant game of chicken between the seller and the consumer.
But still, the games are priced based on the value the publisher believes customers will perceive it to have.
The thing is, a big part of NMS’s marketing to date has placed the game squarely in the “indie” box, and “indie” comes with different value expectations than “AAA”, whether that’s fair or not. “Indie” has become a genre, just like in music. The indie music listener would likely be nonplussed if someone supposedly breaking out as a new indie star unironically released a heavily produced bubblegum pop album.
But “indie” games also don’t get console releases, and console games sell within a usually rather strict pricing framework. So there’s some conflicts of expectation taking place here. It’s not as bad as with the Occulus Rift pricing (where Occulus should have just kept their lips sealed about possible launch pricing in the first place), but it’s definitely causing some tremors as peoples expectations snap quickly into new places.
Battlefront, on the other hand, was always placed firmly in the “AAA” realm. People new they were going to be paying $60-$70 for it because A) it was coming from EA and a publisher owned studio, B) it’s an established IP, and C) it’s a licensed IP. We’ve been differently conditioned for those types of games.
Again, rightly or wrongly.
(Ok, mostly wrongly. These conditioned expectations are probably a big part of the reason why publishers continue to be so consistently able to get away with screwing over both customers and developers.)
Gamers really are a bunch of cheapskates. The game looks awesome an it certainly look like it worth 40 quid. An it certainly look like we are getting a lot more content for 40 quid than many other games offers.
Anyone else find it hilarious that people are complaining and procedural generation on a forum about a game that will be using a tonne of procedural generation.
A game whose price on Kickstarter was one-third the price of NMS, you mean? No. It doesn’t seem that funny at all. Doubly so considering the scope of procedural generation in Battlescape (single system, a few dozen worlds), and the fact that we actually know what kind of gameplay Battlescape is offering up.
$60-$70 is nothing to scoff at. That’s a day’s pay for some of us. Not everyone is in a position to just throw that down on an unknown entity. So, calling people “cheapskate” because you’re privileged enough to throw down that kind of money on a whim is a little uncalled for.
I’m one of the people that called it expensive and at the same time I have paid much more than forty quid for both Elite Dangerous and Infinity Battlescape. With those games the value for me has been the feeling of participation in the development process. With No Man’s Sky I will be “just another consumer” and my perception of value for money is different.
One definition of whether NMS will be value for money could be based on whether it can compete well in terms of entertainment value with other games available for the PC. For my gaming preferences I find that there is a huge amount of much less expensive but equally entertaining software available. On the other hand the value of something can be just as readily described as the amount that people are prepared to pay. Using that definition I’m sure that there will be very many people happy to pay for what I consider to be an expensive product. (I have the same bemusement about Apple products.)
building a 2D game is several orders of magnitude easier than doing it for 3D mesh models, and add the PG part, where bazillions of bugs are your worst enemies, where a solid engine building is important, and takes a lot of time.
Joint 2 pixels and joint 2 mesh models are in 2 different “dimensions” if you catch my drift.
I’m not defending NMS itself, but the development effort that takes for programmers to build a game, and there are not many gameplay videos, but the ones available are more than enough, planets look like manmade even tho they are 100% PG, i don’t like the art but it’s pretty well done, the engine seems good enough to build a great experience, if the game doesn’t pull it out, it’s most likely the devs fault for not using the engine they built the right way, and i think the lack of multiplayer options is a big killer, but time will tell.
As great as this game looks, and I’ll almost certainly buy it unless they totally mess it up, one concern I have is over the scale of the planets. They just look…small! Perhaps its the incredibly short period of time it takes to go from orbit to surface but it seems like those mountains you see whizzing past are tiny in comparison to your ship.
) And it doesn’t take into account that “AAA” offerings may mean 8-15h rollercoaster ride campaigns with more or less tacked on multiplayer, while well crafted indie games may easily net you far more play time but are of course rarely fully voice acted or feature cinematic campaigns.