What are you really paying for? - A look at the content of games Part 2

In the last post, the topic of DLC has sparked a large amount of comments (3 is quite the feat for this blog!), and they bring up great topics for discussion.

Smartphone Games

Love them or hate them, smartphone are permeating society, one study shows that 50.4% of United States consumers own a smartphone^[1]. Of course, video game developers, mostly independent studios, have taken interest in developing games for this now prevalent platform. Typically the games are cheap, and in some cases free, and in my opinion, the quality of the games really reflects the saying "you get what you pay for". Needless to say, these games seem to please people, and in some cases like Angry Birds, the games have spawned merchandise, so there's no way that I could ever ignore that these games are clear exceptions to the topic of this blog - they're produced relatively cheaply, costing anywhere from $10,000 to $250,000 USD to produce ^[2], and just to take the success of Angry Birds into consideration: from a development cost of $140,000 USD, it grossed $70 Million USD as of March 2011 ^[3]. A figure like that is the dream of the professional industry.

Smartphones for the professional industry

Of course, independent game developers can't have all the fun, right? Professional development studios have started to produce games for smartphones, as well. Of particular note here is Capcom, whose most notable (read: notorious) foray into the world of smartphone games is a remake of RockMan X (originally for the Super Nintendo), and most recently, RockMan XOver. Unfortunately, finding the cost of either of these games' production is relatively impossible, so I cannot speak for how much Capcom has made off of it. However, pertaining to one of the comments in the previous post, the remake of RockMan X allows players to buy the armor upgrades and weapons as DLC without having to get them in-game. To answer the question of how I feel about this form of DLC: it's a bit of a cash grab. When the game was released on the Super Nintendo, a password system was implemented to make it easier on beginner players. From a non-business standpoint, there is no reason to implement a system of asking your users to pay to unlock a feature in a video game, especially when it's something you could just wait to find or unlock later.

Digital Distribution

One of the comments in the previous post asked how I feel about Digital Distribution, which is the concept of selling a product purely as its software and not as a physical copy. From a business standpoint, this is an excellent model. Nowhere in this model does a company have to pay for packaging, shipping, reseller costs, and if they're selling their products through their own service (such as Nintendo's eShop), the company doesn't really even need to spend money on advertising. In the case of services like Steam, it's extremely useful for independent developers to get their game out in the public eye at a relatively low cost to the developer (although, the share of the revenue that Steam gets from sales is kept secret). However, from the standpoint of a collector such as myself, services like this bother me, since not only does it strip you of the ability to own a potentially collectable item, I worry that eventually physical software will leave the market for good. Hopefully, enough consumers will want to get physical goods in exchange for their money to perpetuate the distribution of physical copies of games.

Next time, we'll go back to the past to continue the theme of exactly how much you're getting on your games in comparison to the games of the past, and exactly how it's affecting the industry.

[1] Nielson, May 7, 2012: America’s New Mobile Majority: a Look at Smartphone Owners in the U.S.
[2] Carter Thomas: How Much Does it Cost to Develop an App? (Accessed November 27, 2012)
[3] James Brightman, March 9, 2011: Angry Birds 'One of the Most Profitable Games in History'