I agree with pretty much everything said regarding DLC, but one thing is kind of sticking in my throat.
...Yeah, you got Sleeping Dogs for about $5. Yeah, there are games you can get for your cell phone for $1, or free. Hell, one of my favorite time-wasters is Condando, a free Android version of the card game San Juan. (I'd call that a plug, but I have nothing to do with the game's development, and it's free, so...)
But is that really the scale we should be judging other things on?
I've bought a treasure trove of titles from Steam sales, some of which I still haven't gotten 'round to playing. Also Humble Bundles, which are now not-infrequently offering AAA, commercial games that still sell elsewhere for $20, $30, or even their original market price of $50-$60 a piece, for... Well, there are minimum bids in some campaigns, and it depends if you want to consider the price of the other games in the summation or take a dodgier tack and assume you're playing that minimum for the one game on the list you really, really want. Still, $5 is a defensible description, and in some campaigns, it's less. Sometimes much less. There's a bundle on now wherein if one wishes to shell out $125, one gets 56 games. That's a little less than two-and-a-quarter per game. At that point, you're pretty much buying games in bulk.
On one hand, that's an awesome value. On the other, well...
I snorted and sneered with the best of them when EA went on about Steam sales "cheapening intellectual property". It was a dickish statement, painted in tones of richest sneering beancounter-bureaucrat. But I increasingly wonder- how does a developer like United Front, clearly struggling already, stay in business when the game they counted on bringing them back into the right side of the balance sheet at $40-$50 sells for $5? And how do more than the tiniest handful of independents get noticed when the big names are selling their games that way?
At a certain point, do we maybe have an obligation instead of saying "Pah, this game sells for $10 when I can get a match-three game on my iPhone for $0.99" to say "Wow, this game took a fifty people eight months of their lives pouring their hearts and souls into it, maybe that's worth a little more if I don't want AAA games and match-three games and almost nothing in between"?
And, yeah, there are plenty of bloated games that spend way too much money on unnecessary chrome to make their five hours of repetitive gunplay look like more than they are. But think of a game like Sleeping Dogs. Think how much time and effort must have gone into developing the map alone, never mind the AI, or the skins, or the fighting system. I really don't think it is a $5 game.
I don't expect the sentiment to be popular, and in the interest of full disclosure, I do a little semi-pro game development on the side, so the issue strikes a bit close to home.
