4 ms·

I would pay $40-60 for an AAA console or PC game, not for a random mobile game. For that, $10 is about right.

Noos 9y ago
but if you want the sim city experience, you want a AAA game. It's just not profitable to make that kind of game for $10. So you're never going to get it. If you only want to pay $10 for a mobile game tops, you will get what that $10 is worth; a 4-5 hour experience with little replayability, but has great graphics and is fun. Someone is not going to recreate a AAA title that had millions of dollars put into it in their bedroom for maybe 23k people to pay $10 for it, or even less.
- stingraycharles 9y ago
  I don’t expect game mechanics as refined as SimCity, or graphics like that. All I want is a sim game that doesn’t land me into a brick wall after a day because they want me to pay to expand my territory beyond 100 square foot.
  - cwyers 9y ago
    And if it was worth it to do that for ten bucks, someone probably would have already. But mobile app consumers are incredibly price sensitive, and so you see the market dominated by crap and F2P, and sometimes even F2P crap.
    - stingraycharles 9y ago
      So you think this is an actual requirement, rather than game studios just trying to maximize ROI by going after the whales using F2P? I simply find it hard to believe game development suddenly became so much more expensive in the last few years of F2P rise. Isn’t this just about a whole industry discovering an opportunity, and accordingly a new standard of expectations of money to be made ?
      - cwyers 9y ago
        When was $10 for a SimCity-like game ever viable? Even if you say that you can live with reduced graphics fidelity and functionality, that's still a lot of work involved. I don't even think the original SimCity was $10 in 1980s dollars. I guess the canonical example of "you can deliver a premium gaming experience on phones for under $10" is Minecraft, but unless you can sell the volume Minecraft is, you need to make more per user than they do.
        CydeWeys 9y ago
        There are lots of amazing mobile game experiences available that cost under $10 for a one-time purchase. I don't understand why you think they must all necessarily have AAA budgets in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. One person or a small team of people can easily make an amazing game.

Noos 9y ago

but if you want the sim city experience, you want a AAA game. It's just not profitable to make that kind of game for $10. So you're never going to get it. If you only want to pay $10 for a mobile game tops, you will get what that $10 is worth; a 4-5 hour experience with little replayability, but has great graphics and is fun. Someone is not going to recreate a AAA title that had millions of dollars put into it in their bedroom for maybe 23k people to pay $10 for it, or even less.

stingraycharles 9y ago
I don’t expect game mechanics as refined as SimCity, or graphics like that. All I want is a sim game that doesn’t land me into a brick wall after a day because they want me to pay to expand my territory beyond 100 square foot.
- cwyers 9y ago
  And if it was worth it to do that for ten bucks, someone probably would have already. But mobile app consumers are incredibly price sensitive, and so you see the market dominated by crap and F2P, and sometimes even F2P crap.
  - stingraycharles 9y ago
    So you think this is an actual requirement, rather than game studios just trying to maximize ROI by going after the whales using F2P? I simply find it hard to believe game development suddenly became so much more expensive in the last few years of F2P rise. Isn’t this just about a whole industry discovering an opportunity, and accordingly a new standard of expectations of money to be made ?
    - cwyers 9y ago
      When was $10 for a SimCity-like game ever viable? Even if you say that you can live with reduced graphics fidelity and functionality, that's still a lot of work involved. I don't even think the original SimCity was $10 in 1980s dollars. I guess the canonical example of "you can deliver a premium gaming experience on phones for under $10" is Minecraft, but unless you can sell the volume Minecraft is, you need to make more per user than they do.
      - CydeWeys 9y ago
        There are lots of amazing mobile game experiences available that cost under $10 for a one-time purchase. I don't understand why you think they must all necessarily have AAA budgets in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. One person or a small team of people can easily make an amazing game.