sagethor: Games are like most things we buy, like a car. They decrease in value.

A car is one of the worst thing to buy new because it lost so much value. However the first seller won’t sell you a brand new car with no mileage at 85% of the original price. To get that you’ll have to deal with a car that you’ll probably need to put some $$$ in it.

Games going from $20 to technically $0.01 are a bit more extreme I think as you’re not buying something already used by someone else. You still get the same thing as 1 year ago. Comparing games between them is tricky as a good game remains good over time. When you can pay $0.01 you don’t have any reason to go for a more recent games with say better graphics.

Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green : Eventually people started to compete on price, and there was a race to the bottom. Now nearly all games are 99 cents, the cheapest the iPhone app store allows, as everyone raced to the bottom.

At first iPhone apps were a gold mine for some apps. And then more and more apps appeared to the point it’s so damn hard to get noticed that you don’t have much choice to use aggressive pricing so it stopped being that gold mine it was.

I’m wondering if the same thing is not happening to indie games. Indie games are more and more among “pop consumers” so it seems either you have to come with a brilliant piece of work or use some kind of gimmick pricing just to get noticed (because we’re more and more each day and building games is probably way easier than it previously was).

So are indie games becoming the same as the iPhone market? We’ll hear about a dozen big players that are releasing amazing work and it’s becoming harder for the others to get noticed. So indie games are now competing against other indie games while they were previously competing against “big players”? Forcing such ridiculous pricing …

I don’t quite like the word “compete” here as it’s not really the point but considering there’s a maximum amount of cash you can pull out of consumers’ wallets you can’t expect them to buy everything either even if they’d like to.

Of course, it’s hard to make a lot of profit at that price point (given that Apple takes a chunk of that 99 cents for itself), so people have been adding in additional content, or making the 99 cent version the “lite” version, etc. But, there’s a siren’s call to try to compete on price when you’re new and any sales are good sales and do the minimum price.

As for games from big companies, I’m not so ashamed to be cheap. I got a few games when they were on deep discount (kind of wish I had gotten Mass Effect myself when it as cheap). This has been how the retail system has worked for a long time, anyway. Wait a month and the price drops after a while. Just be careful about some of the rarer games (like Atlus console titles), otherwise you might miss out.

sagethor: Games are like most things we buy, like a car. They decrease in value. I remember buying Battlefront for around 60 bucks. The question is… are we patient enough to actually wait for something? Many times, I try to wait, and I end up not wanting to buy it anyway.Games are expensive in their “new stage” because it’s like a “new frontier” for the buyers. A main problem with games – the players play it out, too quickly. Fresh content gets stale quickly. Of course, having a team of developers really helps. Of course, you do not. It’s actually amazing how fast you’ve gone, in my opinion.I have actually tried making a game, with a free engine called Eclipse… Didn’t go too well…  

Same here as long as you aren’t trying to make a mmo and even if you are gamemaker is still best.

Games are expensive in their “new stage” because it’s like a “new frontier” for the buyers. A main problem with games – the players play it out, too quickly. Fresh content gets stale quickly. Of course, having a team of developers really helps. Of course, you do not. It’s actually amazing how fast you’ve gone, in my opinion.

I have actually tried making a game, with a free engine called Eclipse… Didn’t go too well…