So past my bedtime. 3.5 hours of sleep, here I (hopefully) come.

Ho hum. I fell immediately and lightly asleep upon arriving home this evening, squandering most of my prime "futzing around on the internet" time. Shameful.

I took a look at Rock Paper Shotgun today, which for the most part I've been avoiding, and came across this link to a lighthearted, simple little rant on indie pricing. Here's the link to the gag, which has a comments collection an order of magnitude smaller than the RPS link-to.

Now I haven't really weighed in with my two cents on indie pricing, and this strikes me as as good a place as any to make an attempt.

Firstly, let's assume that we're only dealing with gamers interested in indies (games made by very small teams with very small or no budgets). Now let's assume that some percentage of these gamers are absolutely unwilling to pay for anything other than AAA, premium console and PC content. Maybe if the buzz is right we can win some over here or there, but for the most part, no dice. Their interest extends as far as free. Then let's envision the perfect indie customer; exclusively indie, and perfectly comfortable paying on an unlimited sliding scale. In other words, if the designer can articulate why their indie is worth $60, this hypothetical buyer will plunk down their credit card and buy it without much anguish.

Now let's ignore all of those, and focus on me.

Because I'm about smack dab in the middle. Almost all of what I play is free. I have enough great experiences within those limitations that I'm perfectly content. Until I read about something that other (seemingly intelligent, discriminating) people are claiming is a transformative experience. A "benchmark." A gem. A game-changer. Whatever. Genuinely progressive is I suppose what I'm trying to say.

And $20 or less.

So now we come to what the pricing rant was trying to poke fun at. The idea of the "mid-tier" being a problem. $.99-9.99 being low, $10-19.99 being mid, and any other being high. In my closed-off little world, higher than $20 means AAA or boutique, the latter one perhaps not even existing. If Apple's design/pricing structure applied directly to a piece of game content, let's say.

[I have to take this opportunity to engage in a vigorous bout of Apple bashing. Aherm. Okay.]


Now. Apple is important in this, because the (shitty, terrible) App Store has shown that the $5 and under space is viable territory, provided you can get an enormous hype ball rolling. Spider, Eliss, Canabalt, Flight Control. Plenty of others.

Damn. I thought about where I was going with this, and it isn't complicated enough to take a lot of time in just getting there. I will pay, on the spectrum I've laid out, for a game that feels "fairly" priced.

This has come up recently with two "premium" indies (not free, and not iPod-level prices) that I elected not to buy; Saira and VVVVVV. Both are designers I love, with past works I've greatly, deeply, and lengthily enjoyed. I want to want to buy these games.

I just can't convince myself I think they're worth the asking price.

The biggest thing, really, is that they're Windows only.

They get so much right. Good demos, a fairly tight design (although the demo of each also gave me certain reservations, which I'll come back to), real personal... they're crafted. That means a lot to me. Really it does. I genuinely believe in products like this, and want to support them.

And the big flaws, for me, from each demo, I can overlook. Hell, I'm willing to believe that maybe, with a little time, they'll grow on me enough to not be as big of issues as I think, or that the reward outweighs my complaints. (I don't care for the "puzzling" aspects of what I saw of Saira. VVVVVV feels a little more floaty and imprecise than I want a razor-sharp, sadistic platformer to feel, aside from the fact that I think a two hour estimated completion time feels like far less than I expect for $15.)

I can get over all that. And I don't need them to be a philosophical and artful triumph, like Braid, or even Glum Buster (free).

But I need them to run in my native operating system.

Which, humorously enough, was what I was bitching about the very first time I consciously wrote about indies. Take my money! I know there are good reasons why it's hard. But presumably it's not impossible. And... that's why I'm willing to pay you what, for me, is my top-tier rate. Without bickering or complaint. Even if it takes longer to port, and even if I think the rate's a bit steep. Hell, even if it's a little steeper than the Windows version. Tell me that it cost you X much to pay someone to port it for you, and OSX customers have to pay a buck more to offset that, and I can accept that.

For figuring that out for me. And letting me put your awesome game in my already overcrowded Dock, to look at, to come back to, to struggle with, to revise my opinion of, to evangelize. I mean... this is good business, right?



All images shamelessly stolen from the near perfect NCOTB. Ah, another Blogspot user that cares about nice layout and clean design. Be still my heart.