ORIGINAL: Perturabo
No. The second half of 1990s dynamics were that customers would get info about games from gaming magazines and their demo CDs.
Anyone who has read such a magazine would be aware of existence Talonsoft games and would be able to check out the demo.
I remember playing demos of their Battleground games in 90s and of many other wargames.
It didn't make them any close to being popular. Simply, wargames were always a tiny niche when compared to shooters, "strategy games", simulations and RPGs.
Maybe the main difference between now and then is that there were still some specialised reviewers in magazines that knew the conventions of the genre and could judge its value for a fan of the genre, instead of dim-witted cro-magnons that would go on and on about how turn-based games are outdated, about how 2d games are outdated, about how everything has to be a cinematic experience, etc. etc. etc.
Now, this is an interesting comparison, but I don't think it's really very valid for one very simple reason - sheer, unadulterated, massive volume.
Steam has, at this very moment, four million gamers online. This happens
daily. These gamers are constantly checking out what’s on the store page, clicking through it to see if there’s anything interesting in the “What’s New?” section. While the big billboards up top don’t always show everything as much as they might deserve, they do generally appear long enough to announce a new game, and any new game is guaranteed a week at least of sitting right up there on the front page, waiting for anyone curious to check it out.
Let’s assume that just one percent, a teeny, tiny one percent of everyone on Steam checks out a niche product, like a wargame, and finds it interesting. That’s 40,000 customers right there and then, and while wargaming may be niche, I truly and sincerely doubt that it makes up no more than 1% of the gaming population. Even if we remain conservative and kick it up to 5%, that’s 200,000 customers. Sure, you couldn’t compare such numbers to big names like Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed, but it’s still quite enough to make a comfortable living for a niche developer.
That is, I should think, an incredibly different beast entirely from advertising in monthly or weekly gaming magazines back in the ‘90s, back when gaming itself was still a fairly small industry and still suffered from the stigmata of being for the “immature,” and where not everybody who played games subscribed to magazines or checked out everything on them. Wargames don’t need to be popular to be successful – they just need to tap into the enormous, thrumming pulse of gaming in general and siphon off the smallest section of that aggregate to become more successful than they ever could have been a decade ago, which is what a great many developers within other, even smaller niches have already done and proved to be successful. The main thing that appears to be stopping that would be the price, hence the debate here.
ORIGINAL: Iain McNeil
The sales data I refer to is specific data for sales of games, day by day, that we own on all these platforms, not generic publicly available data.
On tablets, we were told that our pricing was wrong for Battle Academy. "You can't charge more than $5 for an app." We were apparently crazy. This was the opinion of the press and the public.
However, our experiences suggested otherwise. Against significant pressure we stuck to our plan and went with a $20 price point making it one of the most expensive apps in the hundreds of thousands of apps in the store. It was a huge success and charted around the world hitting #1 in 20 or so stores in board/strategy games categories (I forget the exact number). The success has enabled a team to work full time on the release for the last year producing regular updates, 1 new expansion and 2 more in production. It is also ensuring the development of BA2.
The sales data did not tell us tablets would be successful - that was based on other research. The sales data told us the right price point to release at.
Again, thanks for taking the time to answer my questions – I hope you’re not too bothered by them? That said, I’d like to point out that this is a pretty good example of what I’m trying to get at. Your data exists entirely for the games you own, which you are selling using your own pricing strategy with little variation (because you’ve already proved it works). While this certain allows for a degree of success, how are you then so certain that other approaches cannot and will not be just as successful, if not more so? In other words, if you have not tried much in the way of significantly different approaches, doesn’t your data primarily prove simply “What we do works” as opposed to “What we do works
better than any other approach”? Doesn't your data mainly prove that doing what you currently do will achieve results like you currently achieve, and little else?
Take for instance Battle Academy. You are indeed right to be proud of your success in reaching the number one spot for strategy games across multiple stores. It’s quite the achievement. But given the more accessible, simpler interface of Battle Academy, are you really 100% certain that you couldn’t have gotten the number one spot for games, period, across multiple stores had you reduced the price? It isn’t War in the Pacific, after all, from what I could see – it’s fairly simple for anyone to get into. One of the major barriers to entry for newcomers to wargames is how complex they are, but Battle Academy appears not to suffer too badly in that regard. What, then, makes you sure that you couldn’t have swept the field entirely with reduced prices?
I do not claim, mark you, that I could GUARANTEE such success had you lowered the price, but I do ask this – what is your rationale behind such a feat being completely impossible, given that you’d already managed to achieve remarkable and unlooked for success with what you’ve already done?
