Quote:
Originally Posted by sandman2575
While I sympathize with wanting to save a few bucks -- who doesn't want to -- it might be worth appreciating for a moment just how incredibly fair OOTP Developments has been when it comes to pricing this product. When you consider what many boutique developers charge for games that have a dedicated but relatively small consumer niche -- take most strategy titles on the Matrix site, for example -- $40 is a low price. A very low price. $20 is essentially giving it away, for all the work that has gone into its development. These guys don't have the resources of Sega or EA, which routinely charge $60+ for their "AAA" titles, which often are games you play for a few hours and then forget. From a perspective of price-to-hours of enjoyment ratio, $40 is pretty absurd -- absurdly low.
I'm not saying I want OOTP Dev. to charge more, although I would certainly pay more for this game. It's just, when I see these threads about "is OOTP worth the $20?" it's just pretty jaw-dropping.
Yes. The game is worth $20. There are 7 days in a week, the earth is round, and the pope Catholic. It may be a lot for some to pay, but look at it from the other side too. If I were Markus and co., I'd frankly get pretty pissed seeing threads like these.
I hope Steam will bring in many new customers, even if it means selling the game at a discount for OOTP Dev. But it's unquestionably one of the not very fair (from a dev. perspective) side-effects of Steam and digital distributors that routinely have sales that we've started to reflexively think, "Is it worth the 50% off price?"
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I agree
Seriously though, we have not changed the price in 14 years. It was always $39.99 and then $19.99 during the offseason. During the same time, prices for most other goods have doubled (at least over here in Europe... together with the bad exchange rates Dollar / Euro), so what we do is essentially earning less each year because of inflation. We have thought about increasing the price for several years, but so far have not done it because we didn't want to upset our loyal customers. We will have to do it eventually, but it won't happen in 2014, that's what I can promise. However, since we have a rather great feature in store for OOTP 16, it is pretty likely that we'll have to increase the price for that in 2015.