8 réponses à ce sujet

[pastypus]

 Love the game and a fan of BioWare but these TINY $5 downloads suck!  Cant wait for the expansion but the isignificant downloads are a waste of money and time. I would rather pay for a good expasion any time instead of these quick and worthless downloads.

[David Gaider]

pastypus wrote...
 Love the game and a fan of BioWare but these TINY $5 downloads suck!  Cant wait for the expansion but the isignificant downloads are a waste of money and time. I would rather pay for a good expasion any time instead of these quick and worthless downloads.

Tell you what. As soon as people stop wanting additional content, who are willing to pay for it, we'll stop making it.

Lucky for you, we can do both. There's an expansion coming next month, so if you'd prefer to save your money you can wait for that instead.

[David Gaider]

Mordaedil wrote...
I was going to not buy RtO, but then David Gaider showed up in my toilet while I was puking after drinking too much and told me if I did not buy RtO, my testicles would shrivel in and fall off like rotten fruit.

You must have still been drunk.

What I told you to buy was some Sani-Flush and a good scrubber. Geez.

Modifié par David Gaider, 08 février 2010 - 08:36 .

[Ferret A Baudoin]

Wait. We can force people to buy stuff at gunpoint? Why didn't anyone tell me that? Let me go grab a gun and check it out. I'm sure nothing bad can come out of that.

[David Gaider]

Darkga wrote...
It's like buying a car and them charging you extra for floor mats. Yes, they are cheap in relation to the car. Yes, you don't NEED them. But they used to be included in the price of the car.

The implication being that the car was a bare model that came without floor mats, and should have been there in the first place, yes? Not a fully-loaded car that already had floor mats as well as A/C and a sunroof? Were these new floor mats even made when you bought the car? I'm not sure where this analogy is going.

So, yes the OP and I are allowed to be disappointed at Bioware and not agree with everything they push. And I'm voting with my wallet... I took the money I would have spent on the two DLCs and bought and entire RPG game (The Witcher) new for $12. I'll be playing that until the REAL DA:O expansion comes out next month.

Great! And the people who want the DLC in the meantime can buy it! Everyone's happy!

I don't see the problem.

[David Gaider]

Darkga wrote...
There is no problem, only feedback. I enjoy being a Bioware customer, and I'm willing to pay my good money for your good content. But when I feel like I'm being taken advantage of, it makes me more likely to seek alternatives. If I'm in the minority, then you have nothing to worry about. If I'm in the majority, then this may be a opportunity to change you content stategy. Maybe a yearly subscription service that gives us access to all Bioware DLCs? Maybe people who buy the Collectors Editions should get DLC for free? There are opportunities to make money without some of your customers feeling like they are being "nickel and dimed".

Fair enough. As you say, there are many customers to listen to on this topic.

[David Gaider]

the_one_54321 wrote...
In point of fact, it isn't broken logic, despite your obvious sarcasm. It's not our fault that the industry has developed a really stupid way of pricing their games. I'm going to take the hit later down the road because they didn't charge enough for the innitial release. I would have been happy to pay $70 for DA:O. But they didn't charge that. Not my fault. I'm not going to stop expecting fair prices from them just because so many gamers are such completely thoughtless and foolish consumers.

Just to clarify: are you suggesting that if we did charge $70 for DA:O we would then be obligated to provide any new content created afterwards for free? Or that we should have charged more for DA:O to make any DLC created later seem more reasonably priced?

Modifié par David Gaider, 09 février 2010 - 06:04 .

[David Gaider]

the_one_54321 wrote...
Free is perhaps going a bit too far, but it's along that line of reasoning. $5 for an hour or less is unreasonable and I'm not going to pay it. Essentially my thoughts are that you charged too little at the start and are now trying to make up profit margins with further sales. The results are painfully short bits of content for unreasonable prices.

I see the dialogue has gone further, but I'll just respond to this one point and then move on out of here. This isn't really my department, after all, so I don't want to make it seem like I'm the person to talk to with regards to making these decisions. I can, however, speak as a developer in general.

My point is that prices are set according to what people are willing to pay for things. You keep comparing the value to the price of the original, full-length game -- but it doesn't work like that. DLC isn't a full-length game. There is an upper limit to how much someone will pay for a full-length game, and that's pretty well-established and (unfortunately) hasn't changed much in many years other than to go down. Retail expansions, when they first came out, also caused a certain amount of consternation. It's smaller in comparison to the original game, but so is the potential audience -- and now there is an expectation as to what an expansion will cost, much like with a full game. DLC is still relatively new. Digital distribution allows a developer to provide content much more quickly to gamers who both want it and might still have the game on their hard drives. Should it be priced in comparison to the original game? Not any more than an expansion is.

Is it profitable? Let's hope so. That's the idea with any product we put out, isn't it? If you want to argue that a publisher should lower the price so they can sell more units and thus make a bigger profit, maybe they'll listen. But if you want to argue that the price should be lowered because you want it anyway and yet don't want to pay as much for it, I'm not sure where that's supposed to go. If enough people feel it's not worth their time, they won't buy it and the publisher would naturally need to either change the price or the content. But if we're making content that people want (which is the idea, for us developers) at a price that they feel is the equivalent purchase to a cup of coffee (the comparison, after all, is not product but what they expect to get out of that much of an expenditure) then that's what the DLC is worth. Very simple.

So the price is no more related to the amount of content than the price for the original game was. A 20-hour RPG costs as much as a 40-hour RPG. You'll have to decide for yourself if it's worth it for you, as with any game (full-length, expansion or DLC) and you're free to say it isn't and vote with your dollar -- but if your argument is that it should be cheaper simply because it's short then I can only respond by saying that's not how prices are set. Some people like to say that's unfair, but that only really applies if you have to buy it. The "if you don't like it, don't buy it" argument gets dismissed a lot around here, but I've yet to see an argument against it that doesn't smack at least a little of entitlement -- intended or not.

But that's just my two cents, much like your own. Reasoned feedback is always helpful, and I appreciate the thought you've put into your posts.

[David Gaider]

Wournos wrote...
It's rather difficult to know if it's "worth it" unless you have bought and played it. Just saying.

How do you know if anything is worth it? For someone who spends time on a game forum, one would think you'd be better informed prior to a game's release than most. It seems that a great number of people have no trouble determining what's worth their money, even based on limited information. After release, the available information on it can only increase. The onus on deciding whether it's worth buying or not is yours, however.

Modifié par David Gaider, 10 février 2010 - 07:34 .