[casual_games] Price as Signal

[Lionel barret De Nazaris]

You overgeneralize. Some game are a commodity, some are not.
That why license are worth so much money. They represent the fact that 
the game, movie, book has escaped from the commodity world.
Games have content, some unique feel that's true, but until your 
customer feel that way, your uniqueness is not very useful.
Until you have a game that is considered as unique *by your customer*, 
your game *is* a commodity.
Before this point, your customers are buying your game as they would 
have bought an other game.
That why marketing, branding, and customer relationship is so important.

Being unique is quite hard, Being good is not enough, you need to be 
very good and very special.
(Of course, being too special means you're risking being arcane...)

And in the end, people have only a limited amount of money and time. So 
they have to choose even between Unique items (book, games, etc).
Being cheaper (or perceived so) is factor of choice, an easy one.

-- 
Lionel Barret De Nazaris
=================================================
Gamr7.com > http://www.gamr7.com
Gamr7's Blog > http://creatinggames.blogspot.com/


Joe Pantuso a écrit :
> I have to disagree with the premise here.  Games are not a commodity 
> any more than books or movies or music are.  They aren't generically 
> interchangeable the way a true commodity (memory chips, potato chips, 
> poker chips) are, they have some uniqueness about them.  They have 
> content.
>  
> For this reason the article linked about pricing in movies and music 
> holds some truths for games as well.
>  
> A metric I don't 100% subscribe to, but that I know many users do use 
> mentally because I've heard it espoused, is the "Cost per 
> hour".  Sometimes this is measured in movies.  If it costs $10 to see 
> a 2 hour film, and I'm going to get 5 hours of game play out of this 
> game, than $25 is a reasonable price.
>  
> The reason I don't totally buy into that premise is it doesn't apply 
> to casual games the way it does to more hardcore games.  A casual game 
> may only have 10-30 minutes of 'gameplay' in it, but will be played 
> for dozens of hours by many users.
>  
> In the casual space many of us try to price at an 'impulse buy' 
> level.  What that level is varies from place to place though. 
>
>  
> On 12/14/05, *Lionel barret De Nazaris* <lionel.bdn at free.fr 
> <mailto:lionel.bdn at free.fr>> wrote:
>
>
>     Because you have competitors (people who make games with the same
>     perceived value as yours) who would underprice you if they
>     can.  If you
>     cannot set the price in the same price range as your competitors then
>     you're dead.
>     And how do you decide ? you look at your production cost and the
>     estimated lifetime of the product, the estimated number of game
>     you will
>     sell. Those variables decide if you can lower your price and turn a
>     profit in a *reasonnable timeframe*.
>
>     It's true that we have almost no inventory cost, and no
>     manufacturing (i
>     mean copy) cost, so in the long term  any game will make  a
>     profit. But
>     who can wait 2 year to have a return on investment ? Even waiting cost
>     money.
>
>     --
>     Lionel Barret De Nazaris
>     =================================================
>     Gamr7.com <http://Gamr7.com> > http://www.gamr7.com
>     Gamr7's Blog > http://creatinggames.blogspot.com/
>