I wonder if the final, low price here will end up empowering consumers more or instead just reduce quality. HN often laments the rise of free-to-play games with IAP, and I wouldn't be surprised if even more of the industry tends towards that with this change.
That said, hopefully I'm wrong, and this change will decrease prices for consumers, increase sales and revenue for developers, and make everyone happy :) (But that doesn't seem likely, IMO.)
> That said, hopefully I'm wrong, and this change will decrease prices for consumers, increase sales and revenue for developers, and make everyone happy :) (But that doesn't seem likely, IMO.)
I very much hope that would be the case instead of turning Steam into something akin to App Store with thousands upon thousands of "free" games and their cheap clones riddled with advertising, boosts and so on.
I don't think 'free' is going to beat 'supercheap' any time soon. If anything 'free' is going to suffer at the hands of 'cheap': people have come to expect IAPs from 'free' games.
No, I don't expect F2P+IAP games to dominate the PC industry. They are a completely separate market segment from so-called "hardcore" or "AAA" gamers. It's like asking if Youtube would kill the market for Hollywood movies and TV shows.
There's pretty much no way a race to the bottom benefits gamers. This has already been shown by what happened on the iOS and Android marketplaces, and the effects will only be worse on PC and consoles:
The existing industry is pretty much built around higher prices for games, and the things that come with them - large amounts of content, replayability, polish, story components with voiced dialogue, cutscenes, etc.
There are many developers who are able to subsist happily on sales numbering in the tens of thousands, because they can charge a reasonable price for their game while developing it on a low budget, while on the other end you have studios that sink hundreds of millions into AAA video games that they sell for $60 + additional DLC packs down the line. Both of these types of games exist in the same industry, roughly occupying opposite sides of it. In the mobile market, both of those game types get suffocated by the manipulative F2P games that milk as much money as they can out of players before they churn.
> In the mobile market, both of those game types get suffocated by the manipulative F2P games that milk as much money as they can out of players before they churn
No. In the mobile market, high production games have mostly failed because it's the wrong medium for them. Low budget, high quality experiences exist and are successful if you look for them (Device 6, The Room, etc). But that place is NOT the top grossing chart, any more than the best food is found in the largest restaurant chains or the best music is in the MTV top 40.
That said, hopefully I'm wrong, and this change will decrease prices for consumers, increase sales and revenue for developers, and make everyone happy :) (But that doesn't seem likely, IMO.)