Nick Gravelyn

Let me start by getting what will be considered the “obvious bias” out of the way. I am an MVP. Probably everyone reading this knows it. If not, now you do. That said I have no obligation to like what Microsoft does with XNA or Xbox LIVE Indie Games. So when you read this, rather than commenting “ur just a slave to micro$oft”, please just leave. It’ll just be better for everyone.

So by now pretty much every XNA GS developer targeting Xbox LIVE Indie Games is aware of the new price tiers. What used to be 200, 400, and 800 is now 80, 240, and 400. This has caused a bit of outcry around the web and rather than continue to debate and argue in the forums about it, I figured I’d just make my stand here and let it be. So let’s just take each little point I can think of starting with…

$1 Games

One notable addition is the new 80 point price which is basically $1. Consumers are cheering, a lot of developers are dropping to it, and this all has some people worried we’re going to hit a race to the bottom a la the App Store. I don’t think this will happen because of the way games are listed on the service.

On the App Store, the Top 100 lists are made completely and solely based on download counts. Nothing else. Therefore pricing at $1 has the ability to generate thousands more downloads and boost you up the list where, upon reaching the top few slots, you are looking at a few thousand (up to 10,000 according to some for the #1 slot) purchases per day. That’s a lot of cash which makes it really attractive to even big studios to drop to $1 and pray they make it up the list.

On XBLIG, the Most Popular list (the closest thing to a Top 100) is not based entirely on purchase counts. Microsoft won’t say exactly what goes into that list, but the community has figured that it likely also takes into account release dates (to favor new titles a little bit) and trial downloads as well.

Given that, the impact of having a cheap game does not have as massive of an impact as it would on the App Store. It’s one of the largest flaws in the App Store and I’m glad XBLIG doesn’t have that.

To Raise or to Lower

One of the lesser argued points is a problem facing current 200 point games. They are in a position where they either have to drop from 200 points to 80 points ($2.50 to $1) or raise their price from 200 points to 240 points ($2.50 to $3). Some people feel this has screwed them over because they either take over a 50% price cut or raise their price 20%. Personally I don’t think raising the price $0.50 is going to really piss anyone off (and if it does, I personally think they’re an idiot since you can go ask for change on the street and get $0.50 in probably two minutes). I also think most of the games out for 200 points are probably better suited for the 80 price point, so dropping might not be the worst thing in the world for them.

Personally I would drop Bloc down to 80 points and add it to all the new countries, but since the Metacreature account is no longer a premium account, I have no access to change any of that. I haven’t decided whether it’s worth $49 to get a quick subscription and make those changes. I might do it just to do it so that more people can get at the game. We’ll see.

Where’d my $10 Price Go?

This is the big area of contention. The cries of “OMG Microsoft killed my business” can be heard everywhere from the XNA forums over to TIG Source and probably a few places in between.

To start, I don’t really know why Microsoft killed the 800 price point. My guess is that they wanted to separate XBLIG from XBLA in a very distinct way and removing the overlapping price point is probably the most blatant way to do that.

Do I think this is good for devs? Of course not. It’d be great for developers to continue charging a price they deem fair for their product. That said I don’t think the endless complaints I see everywhere are necessarily justified.

Argument 1: Now there’s no reason to put effort into my game.

I saw this one and about laughed out loud. To generalize, some developers have taken the mindset that if they can’t charge $10, then clearly they should just make a bunch of crap they don’t care about and shovel it out. They seem to forget they can still charge $3 and $5 for their games which isn’t really that bad of a price. The notion that it’s $10-or-nothing is not a problem with the system; it’s a problem with your way of thinking. Just scale back your grand idea into something a little more condensed and make it fit the $5 price point.

Argument 2: We’ll never see the next Braid on XBLIG.

Maybe not, but then I think it was going to be years before we saw it (if we ever saw that) anyway. Braid took years to make and cost a few hundred thousand dollars. Even on XBLA I’ve heard he didn’t make enough to recoop all costs and since has released on PC and Mac (I believe). If he couldn’t recoop on XBLA with more marketing and press than any XBLIG is likely to get for some time, why would anyone in their right mind want to take that same risk with XBLIG, a channel with substantially less marketing and fewer users? It was insane to think you’d make such a game and be profitable on XBLIG even with the $10 price point.

Argument 3: There’s no point in XBLIG anymore. I can’t make my magnum opus here. XBLIG is dead to me.

I guess whatever floats your boat. Sure you might not want to pour two years into a game for $5 a piece, but maybe that just means you should rethink some things. Maybe make a few smaller games for the $3 or $5 price. Maybe do some episodic releases where your $10 or even $20 game is broken into a series of $3 or $5 chapters. Sure it’s not the ideal for you, but I just don’t see why there’s this “if we can’t have $10 price points, I’m done” attitude.

Conclusion

Basically I think the new prices are good. Should you spend two years making a single game and expect XBLIG to make you a living? Probably not. But then you should never release a single game and expect it to make you a living on any platform. But I think consumers (who ultimately matter) will be happy that they can get some games at a lower cost. I think the 80 point level is a great place to do some one or two week games and drop them out there. The 240 point level is great for a one or two month project. And then the 400 point level is still there for your 4-6+ month projects.

This new pricing scheme has me interested. I rarely have time to work on games so taking on any large project is really out of the question since I’ll get bored after a few weeks since a few calendar weeks really only equates to a couple days of development. But with the 80 price point, I could make a game in those few weeks and put it out for $1 for the world to enjoy. Now to see if I can even keep interested for a few weeks to finish a game…