Monument Valley loses 5* ratings to 1* ratings for charging for additional content

I lost interest in the mobile market a good while ago when all this Freemium nonsense started. I have several iOS devices and also completely lost interest in playing any games on it. I am not a fan of the Free To Play movement and never will be. Nobody should work for free and get a few penies for Ads. To me this feels like being a bum on the street waiting for somebody to stop by to throw some coins in my bucket. I wish Developers would stop chanting "Yes that's what gamers want" when in fact this is a myth.

 

Thomas, no truer words were spoken. I'm right there with you. It's gotten to a ridiculous point, which is why I think to stabilize we will start to see a shift to more premium models. I read gaming news daily and it really appears as though some companies with a public face are shifting over to a premium model for a variety of reasons. I still read about the backlash stories from consumers, but I feel like that's just adjustment pains....it's a transition and not an easy one for a lot of folks to stomach. In the end I think this falls on the app stores themselves...better curation, better transparency, better categorizing or an entirely new way of categorizing. I feel like the app stores are the ones who can help reintroduce the appearance of value to consumers.

 

I talked with someone yesterday who said he never pays for apps/games, and a big reason was that he didn't think he had the time to really put into it if he did buy one.

I think there's a lot of mobile users who want to partake in app and games on their devices, but they never bought games or software before, so why should they now when they are just wanting to dabble in it and not purchase something. Does that make sense? But then of course if they did find something that really perked them up but it wasn't free, they have an internal struggle with it, haha.

 

Not at all. That's the word on the street, but this impression mostly comes from people who are comparing it to not having a QA process at all. Compared to other QA processes it's pretty darn light.

 

Words in your title on iOS have the highest priority for search. So, some people use titles like, "Match three crush solitaire battle gems defense". I've used crazy long names a few times, though in the end, it didn't help that much. Lately, I've been targeting one or two target keywords, like: "Gratitude Habit" or "Tap Happy" or "Christmas Crush". This works better than a shotgun approach. I now have several apps in top 5 for great words like 'Gratitude', 'Happiness', 'Marriage', etc. Christmas Crush is already top 10 on Android for those 2 keywords which makes me REALLY happy.

Gigi

PS - Links in my sig.

 

Ha ha cool. Good to see there are ethical approaches that work for good ranking. Switching gears back to the OP's discussion. I read in a Gamasutra article that some of the devaluation of mobile games vs console disc titles is from resale value. With a disc you have that physical resale value whereas with digital mobile content you have no physical disc. So the consumer thinks of it as almost a disposable thing of no physical value after it's purchase.

By the way back on the Apple QA thing. I have been through console game QA with Electronic Arts on a few games. It was months and months of constant bug quashing and improvement. Thousands of bug fixes with a massive QA team in Canada sending me at least a hundred bugs a day. I can see how Apple's QA process is on the lighter end

 

Another example of corporate greed, very nice move, Unity gives them so much exposure and now they taking advantage of this to make more money. I guess I cannot blame them, but Im already sick of there pricing streogy.

 

Who are you referencing with this?

 

Dunno Andy. Seems kind of random to me. I guess there's some kind of streogy behind it.

 

Im not referencing anyone, I thought it was a excellent game and I seen videos of them featured on the Unity site and winnder of many awards. I agree with this, but of course Im one of the shocked customers who does not agree with the price plan. It almost reminds me of Candy Crush -started of a awsome product, now the aim is to make as much money as possible out of the customers, Candy Crush Soda, oh wow a clone of the first game.

Please monument valley do not go down the same path.

Anyway my opinion, and some times you need to see it from corporate view

 

Well, my first thoughts on the issue are, what's the other side of the story?

The price for the DLC is more than half the cost of the original game. Does it increase the gameplay time by 50%? That's the sort of logical, economic thinking that many people apply.

Not only that, you also have to consider the length of the game. It's been described as a short game. Given the wealth of available free content, a paid game in such a market really has to offer a lot in terms of gameplay and lifespan. People who pay for a game and complete it very quickly are going to be left feeling short changed, they're going to want more.

Offering that more, but then charging for it, is a sure fire way to piss them off.

My second thoughts on the issue; Please for the love of god do not link to gamasutra, or anything owned by gawker. use some sense man.

 

It's common sense really isn't it.

 

It's easy. They have a successful game. If the complainers outnumber the non-complaining buyers then they cut the price of the add-ons.

 

In terms of MV: The devs really aren't out to make as much money as possible. Those that played the first set of levels asked for more levels, so they made more (And they are even better than the first set). It probably took their team 6 months to make the new set of levels, of which they all probably worked full-time on them. Should they not charge $2 for you to enjoy the result of half a year of craft? Or should all developers work for free now?

Oh yeah, and $2 to be able to experience more content of one of the most brilliantly designed and beautiful games on the mobile market place really is an extremely small price to pay.

 

Yep I agree with all that. But game development for a living seldom is about justifiable price, it's about a market so saturated, with so much choice, that entitlement is the norm. And that's never going to change. The key is to prevent it from happening in markets that matter more (the budgets are higher). If it gets to console then it's practically game over because nobody's going to do big budget stuff for a risky return.

Otherwise we'd never have hollywood blockbuster movies, and just more episodes of hollyoaks, neighbours and other shovelware cheaply made for tv tat.

 

Here's that direct linkage between value and play time again. I don't understand where that comes from.

Would you prefer games that were longer but of overall lower quality? Because that's the logical response to this line of reasoning. Given the same time and budget, if the developers have to make more content just to satisfy some arbitrary desire for length then the only way to achieve that is by cutting quality in some way or other. Content has to either have less design effort, less development effort, or get arbitrarily padded out somewhere. At some point, a designer has to ask "what will make this game longer?" instead of "what will make this game better?" And then people won't complain that it's short because they'll be too busy complaining that it's boring. Or, more likely, they won't even bother to play it.

On that note, if you're complaining that a game is too short then a significant part of what you're saying is that it was so good that you want more of it.

 

I was actually waiting for you to reply with something like this as naturally this is a forum full of devs and one has right to defend them. This is failry standard arguement you have just bought forward. I expect indie devs to work like this, but not devs working for big game studios or limited companies.

Are the developers not on set salary?, no matter if they work how many years on a game they get monthly pay. In there contracts they probably have pay rises but this will not happen instantly and may not even happen as funds needed to grow company. Apple pays to a company account in turn HR to staff.

Example: So you telling me that you work for Unity for 6 months and you not get paid until you release Unity 5 as its worked on so long and people wanted it. Similar arguement, Im not here to argue just people need to remember that devs are not the ones at the end who have power to set the price of anything, i been speaking about company and no particular person in general, as I do not know who makes such decisions in Mv

Its real cheecky of monuement valley, i stick to my original arguement and not bothere reply anymore: MV released excellent game, made lot of money, more than they expected, the press exposure and Unity exposure allowed em to do a cheecky price bump and in turn make more profit and thats life for you, make more and more money.

 

A bunch of people worked for months on this. The fact that they are a company is irrelevant. This cost that company months worth of employment costs plus overheads to create a product which is now available for you to buy. For some reason you think it's "cheeky" to charge for their efforts, purely because you purchased a different product of theirs in the past and liked it?

Edit: It really seems to me like you're under the impression that being a "company" somehow stops them from being a group of human beings. Whether they're incorporated or not, the fact remains in any group of people attempting to make a living by working together (ie: any "business") that each individual's work has to bring in more income than they cost to employ. Doing several months of work for free doesn't typically help achieve that, and warm fuzzy feelings don't pay the bills.

 

Again your missing the point, simply because it sounds like your putting Unity Devs (the team your all playing for) and CEO/Directors/Investors into one category. Its clear to me you have not worked for a big company from your statement.
Aim of any big company is to get the development done at cheapest price and make maximum profit from finished product. In big industry the devs do not even mix with senior members who run such organisations.

This is not a discussion about personal developer lives and there work. This is a dicussion about pricing of a expansion pack and why it has been set to the price it has.

Its clear from user ratings that a large customer base was not happy with the pricing and I bet you each developer did not have a clear say in it.

 

I think the most significant part is "I feel like I didn't get enough value for my money".

 

Five nights at fredies 2 is top paid and #12 in top grossing (with no IAP).

 

Then i will attempt to explain

wrong.

Playtime is not about how long it takes you to race to the end credits. It's about how long the game entertains you, and how much time you personally put into it.

My favourite game of all time is the Civilisation IV mod: Fall From Heaven. I've literally played it for more than 3000 hours, at a conservative estimate. It has never become boring, and it never will.
In fact, all of my top ten (maybe top 50) games, are of a similar nature. They endured in my playtime for a long time, and in my memories for even longer.

On the other hand, take, for example, Just Cause 2. A ridiculously vast game to be sure, but padded to hell with copypasted content. Once you've seen one backwoods asian village and one radar installation, you've seen them all. The fact that the map is the size of scotland is largely irrelevant. I have no interest in visiting it all, i got bored traversing over it and quit less than halfway into the story. The thousands of hours of playtime the developers expected/offered was never there for me, and as a result it was not a long game.

A game ends when you stop playing it, not when the developer decides it's over.

Now the problem with story and puzzle driven games, is that they are types of content which rely on mystery and novelty. You can only really complete them once and then there's rarely an urge to do so again. It is possible in some instances, where a story is incredibly well written, or has branching choices, or nuances you may have missed the first time round. but that's not the case most of the time. Similarly, puzzles are boring once you've solved them once.

Taking on a game that deals with that kind of content is your choice as a dweveloper, but you too must bear the responsibility that comes with it. When your content is not reuseable, you need more and better of it.

By contrast, games based around combat, for instance; you can kill the same enemy a thousand times. In most cases this will quickly become boring. But the better the engine, the simulation, the toolset/weapons and the contexts/environments, the longer it will take to get bored of that same enemy. Killing that enemy fifty times each with 20 different and uniquely functioning weapons is unlikely to get boring. That's good recycling of content, and such things can therefore be produced differently.

Epic RPGs, such as the final fantasy series, have not struggled with this problem. You can still tell a story and have good puzzles, while blending in many other types of gameplay too. I never truly got tired of the snowboarding minigame in FFVII, and the "save the world from the meteor" quest was always there whenever you wanted to go back to it and inch things along.

If you really just want to tell a story and nothing else, perhaps you'd be better off making a movie, or writing a book.

Different genres have different expectations. But when you make your bed, you've got to lie in it.

 

I feel i have to provide a counter argument to this.
Say someone is paying people to break rocks. They want the rocks broken.

You can spend twelve hours breaking rocks with a pickaxe, and maybe end up with six broken at the end of the day, and a sore back.
Another guy is using a pneumatic drill, a bulldozer, and micro explosive charges. He works for four hours, and breaks a hundred rocks.

Which of you do you think is going to get paid more at the end of the day?

Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it, and what they get out of it, not the amount of work the creator put into it. Working hard does not mean working smart. Hard work in and of itself, is not worth anything, only the result of it is.

 

...honestly, id 1 star ALL games with microtransactions... (in my mind, not that id actually press 1 star button)

but, expansions are okay...

as long as its not day 1 DLC... to me, game is instant crap and ill never care about those games..

 

This hits the nail on the head. So... the question becomes why do people expect so much for free or a tiny bit of money?

It seems odd to me. Personally, I wouldn't complain about paying such a tiny bit of money to get twice as many levels for a game that I enjoyed. It just makes no sense. Well, okay that is not true. It makes sense if the mobile market is so flooded with games that there are several other games of the same type with the same quality and more content for a lower price (possibly even free). If that is the case then game developers have just shot themselves in the foot so to speak.

I have always thought it was dumb for people to work on highly polished products and then release them for free. Every time someone does that it just helps to push expectations higher and higher and further cement the view in the users minds that "game dev must be really easy. Otherwise, why would people release quality stuff for free." Just my view of it all.

 

Yes, I'm putting them all in the "human being" category. And no, I'm not missing your point, your point simply doesn't give any logical reason that these people shouldn't charge for their work. The fact that they are a company doesn't magically mean their work doesn't have to generate income anymore.

 

And yet your examples directly support what I said. You've got an excellently designed game that can be replayed endlessly, and a questionably designed one with loads of padding that you don't play because it got boring.

And then you go on to explicitly accept the difference in content requirements for different styles of games, followed by:

So hand-crafted and story-based games should just cease to exist because their price is necessarily at a premium and they're at their best the first time through? This suggests to me that you think movies are a waste, too - virtually all movies suffer both of those flaws far more than any video game!

Yes, you do have to reap what you sow, but that works both ways. If you want a game with unique content - like a story based game, or hand crafted puzzles - then of course it's going to cost more for a given length. And personally, I'm more than willing to pay that extra, because I want the human-made aspects of game content, I value it.

And, you're absolutely right that value comes down to the market, not the developer, but so far the market has in fact borne the cost of MV. The complainers are vocal, yes, but to my knowledge both the base game and the expansion have been successful, despite the length of both being quite well known.

Of course people want more of a good thing. We always do. And that's the type of game I personally want to make - the ones that people want more of when they get to the end, not ones such as your second example where you get bored part way through.

(While I clearly disagree with parts of it, I do think Nanako's post was great discussion. That's why I hit the "Like" button. )

 

Supply and demand. Basic economics.

Now here you're making the odd statement that higher standards are a bad thing. really? If that were the case we'd still be living in caves. Technological advance is iterative, and things must always get better and improve objectively.

This view is not the problem, it's just evolution. The problem is merely that it is currently untrue. THAT is the flaw which unity is trying to correct, and succeeding imo.

Without increasing standards, there is unlikely to be an increase in the quality of games. People are not generally inclined to take unnecessary risks when they have a profitable niche.

As the demanded quality of games increases, so too does the wealth of tools available to create them. The asset store is quite an exquisite example of this. making a game now is easier than it has ever been, and it will get easier still in future.

Making a GOOD game is still hard, it always has been, and always will be. because that definition is a constantly moving goalpost. That is how things should be.

 

Perhaps FFH was a bad example then. Let's go with dota. A single map endlessly reused. four spells per hero, used countless times too. A tiny pool of miniion models that are constantly reused. Valve did add a lot of vidual content with the sequel, but originally the content was all carefully structured balance and clever recycling. It still clocked up millions of man-hours among players.

Games which have a core story with a lot of other gameplay too, are fine. But games which are pure storytelling? yes, i personally think they have no place in the industrry, i don't buy or play them, i find the concept silly.

I do, in fact. I watch a very select few tv shows and almost no films

great! presumably there's enough of your mindset to support that niche market, but graphic adventure games are long since passed the heyday of their popularity, and i'm quite happy with less of them personally

There's no such thing as bad publicity. I'll guarantee you this incident has skyrocketed sales.

This is why i'm kind of unsure on the very concept of an ending.
Given the long development cycles, i don't think it's necessarily good or worthwhile to leave players wanting more. They may frantically want more for a week or two, there will be no more, they'll be disappointed, and they'll have a bitter memory when you release something else in a year's time. i'd rather my audience play and drink their fill to their heart's content, because it's still pretty rare and unlikely for any game to sustain someone for an average development cycle.

but when something comes out next year, they can look back and remember they spent three months of their life on the last one, and are more likely to be loyal, imo.

 

Striving for continual improvement is a good thing however higher standards can definitely be a bad thing if taken to extremes on only one side of the equation. For a game developer, a higher standard of customers would be those who appreciate the work they have done, want to pay for a game they enjoy playing and would eagerly pay a small fee for providing additional content. It goes both ways.

 

I'm a ridiculous Civ fan so I fully appreciate the concept of play time here There's nothing quite like setting up a manual game and going for world domination. I think Gandhi's got it coming.

 

Exactly. Design time.

Who's talking about graphic adventures in particular? I'm talking about any kind of game where the play duration (regardless of whether or not it is a hard end point) is strongly related to the amount of hand-crafted content - human crafted story, levels, dialogue, challenges, unique enemy types, puzzles, etc.

Of course, but lets not forget that it was wildly successful before this "issue" came up, and that it was wildly popular despite its short length being well known.

You mentioned supply and demand, before. Consider that the specific type of content and gameplay available in Monument Valley is in rather short supply elsewhere in the mobile market, and that it's success indicates that a reasonable amount of demand must exist.

 

Quoted for emphasis. As game developers we should always remember this.