So here I am, staring at the new Indie Royale bundle. It costs €2.10. When I first saw it, it cost some €1.50. That's a pittance for four games. But I can't bring myself to buy it.

I only really want Gemini Rue from the bundle. What I do not want is to own three more games I don't really care for; I own too many already. And I also do not want to play through Gemini Rue knowing that the most the developer could have got out of my purchase is a completely laughable €0.50. What it makes me want to do instead is to go to the developer's site and buy the thing for the €7.50 they ask there.

It's a weird feeling. As if the prices have been dragged so low recently they lost all meaning. Oversaturation of the market, or something. The games cannot really have a value of €0.50. There's way too much work in every single one of them. It just makes no sense.

Or perhaps I'm just too tired this evening. I don't know. Anyone else feels the same?

The thing is, the developer of Gemini Rue might make more out of 30.000 €0.50 sales than out of the 2.000 for 7€ (boy, I hope my math is right here). Those "super promos" and the like are often a huge profit because literally thousands of people buy a game, they wouldn't buy otherwise.

I had no big intention of ever buying one of those games ( I already have Sanctum), maybe Gemini Rue, maybe. But know I gave them 10 quid which they would never have seen without it.

Plus, this deal will make some huge PR for Desura.

Edit: on a similar topic, our beloved and oh so handsome Gabe Nevelle:

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/experiments-video-game-economics-valves-gabe-newell

I paid 3 eur for it just for gemini rue. Didn't even check what are the other games. Hope they are fun

so yeah OP. Don't agree.

and seeing as I played only 17 hours on a computer since September 10th. I won't even touch those games this year... or maybe even next.

Edit: having problem accessing their website and my game purchased. anyone else having that?

Yeah, I think I can relate to this. Somehow the more games you get, the less you really appreciate them individually. And 2 euros seems awfully cheap even for Gemini Rue alone.

I mean, you wouldn't have to download the other three games, of course, and you could pay more than the minimum, and maybe SimonG is right that it's profitable for the participants in the end. But it's still a weird concept; for some strange reason it seems to play more on solidarity with the cheapskates than with the indie developers. If the developers get more from you, they'll get less from the others ... (Well. not quite, but the math is too complicated for me tonight to make any sense of it. ;) .)

. Yes, the connection seems to be pretty unstable. It took me some time to even load the website, with several "Not found" messages until I finally got there.

Well, I think it depends on the size of the market. Surely something like Windows that a dozen thousand people spend 3 years working on is worth more than 300 EUR. More like a few hundred million or a few billion EUR.

Similar with games... If I was a dev and was selling my game to a single person, 30,000 EUR for a Braid-quality-wise game would have been the fair price. But because I'm trying to sell licenses of the game, and not the actual game, to a 100 million potential buyers, I need to lower the price for them to be attracted to my product.

Yes, the idea is to bring people to buy the game that normally wouldn't, so increasing the total number of sales and hopefully maximizing profit. Also there is this strategy called price differentiation, i.e. you adapt the price to the buying power of the customers (i.e. regional prices can make sense or promos).

On the other hand this strategy is risky. You are in danger of loosing full price paying customers to the cheap versions. Who would still buy the game for a 7.5$ if he can get it cheaper in a bundle for 2$? Probably not many (although Bazilisek seems to be the exception).

So the profit can actually decrease if you educate your customers that games are cheap, have to be cheap and that you can always wait for a promo.

Or see it from the customers perspective. I am a customer. I can play only so many games per year. I have money. I am willing to spend them on games or something else. If games become cheaper I will however not buy more of them because there is no more time to play them. Instead I will just spent less and the profit they make of me will go down.

At some point I might have pity with them and start donating to the developers, because I feel they charge not enough. ;)

What I would do on Baziliseks place, I would buy several bundles and then gift them to anybody who like. That way you ensure, the turn over of the company is increasing while bringing the maximum number of games to the people.

Oh yes, this could also be seen as a measure of success. Maybe some developers want that their games are played on a maximum number of computers. So they set the price deliberately a little lower than neccessary to achieve maximum profit.

In general I think that a price of 5-25$ per single good game is good. If its a casual game than more in the range of 2-6$. A game that costs only 1$ cannot be a real game.

Gemini Rue is great. Sanctum apparently is really fun. The other two? I dunno, I'll find out later.

Yep, that's pretty much what I wanted to say originally, bundled in a single sentence. I'd like to learn that skill one day.

And yes, I know Gabe claims this can work, but then again, he's talking about numbers that are in a completely different league. As of right now, some 19,100 Indie Royale bundles were sold. That's not very many. Remember Steam has a userbase of several million people.

It's hard to judge without solid figures to back it up, but I really feel they are doing themselves a disservice. Undermining prices on their own market.

There are some interesting comments of famous indie developer Jeff Vogel about indie game pricing. In one of his posts he writes that indie games should either be too cheap (so everybody buys them) or too expensive (so only true fans buy them). But then he also went down with his prices lately. It's interesting to see how he changed his view over the years and why. Anyway his writing is very entertaining. I link some of them.

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/04/indie-games-should-cost-more-pt-1.html
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/04/indie-games-should-cost-more-pt-2.html
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/06/indie-games-still-too-cheap-getting.html
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-some-indie-games-made-money.html
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2010/09/indie-games-should-be-too-cheap-or-too.html
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2010/10/should-games-sell-for-donations-or-is.html
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-all-our-games-are-now-cheaper.html

Regarding the actual bundle. I am not interested in these games, so I cannot take part in it. But I remember buying Machinarium for €5 back then. €5 for a good game (indie or not) is a perfectly good price.