Is Hollow Knight Silksong's 'cheap' price a problem for other indie games? Devs and publishers weigh up its impact | Eurogamer
Is Hollow Knight Silksong's 'cheap' price a problem for other indie games? Devs and publishers weigh up its impact
I think at a certain point we need to accept that this isn't sustainable.
And by "this" I mean money flowing directly into the pockets of the rich. People would very much hedge £30 on a game if they didn't need to budget so much of that money to pay off megacorps. And devs could easily live of £20 per sale if they didn't need to pay part of their profits to those megacorps.
Sorry for going all Redditlemmy "grr capitalism", but that's the issue here and all this Silksong "drama" is just a smokescreen.
I think you got the most level-headed take here. It really is about capitalism and the fact that gaming is now a mature market, which means it is now sufficiently saturated in the stink of capitalism and megacorps, just like other media industries. In a world where we weren't all being squeezed from every direction, games would probably cost less and Silksong's price wouldn't seem like an outlier.
You’re 100% right, but it’s also a problem of devs underpricing themselves. They’ll work for 2 years on a game and then set its regular price at $5, which actually limits its reach (shoppers see the price and skip over it, thinking it’s low quality) and helps make a race to the bottom that’s already destroyed the mobile market.
Silksong isn’t going to upend the market, some of the quotes are silly, and it’s not underpriced since they were going to sell millions upon millions of copies anyway. But the wider discussion of pricing is important since lots of developers don’t seem to understand the larger picture.
This reads an awful lot like a bunch of less successful devs being jealous. Make a good game and the price is a lot less important.
The market is so saturated that lots of good games have a hard time even getting noticed. Just making a good game doesn't automatically mean success.
There are definitely a lot of consumers who will gladly pay $20 for Silksong because of the hype and pedigree surrounding it, but would never take a chance spending that much on a game that hasn't had that kind of hype train surrounding it. Which does make sense, without the hype train you don't know if a more obscure indie may or may not be worth the $20. But then that tells us that it's the hype train that matters here, not just whether or not the game is good.
You basically have to be a developer and marketer to have even a chance of success in the current market and even then you could be the best at both and simply not have the luck to go viral and only get a few hundred sales. So much of indie game selling is creating things that can go viral now hence the absolute proliferation of "freind slop" games because it's so easy for moments between two popular funny content creators to go viral.
The price of one game is not a problem for the price of another game. Make better games, or learn to market them better. Silksong's hype is nothing short of a crazy marketing success, and its price is indicative of a dev team that wants people to actually play and enjoy their game.
Also, I think it's been made very clear that people would have been willing to spend more for it. Make a great game, and you'll likely receive the same reception. And sure, charge $30 instead, and people will buy it if your game is good.
Wanted to check the price on Steam and I am not sure what is going on but the New and Recommended thing below the giant banner for Silk Song had Silk Song in it but the price shown there was only $12.49 while the game's actual store page says $19.99. 🤨
Meanwhile Nintendo:
Will Eurogamer figure out how 'quotation marks' work?
Silksong is $20. Stardew Valley is $15 (and getting yet another free update soon). There are a lot of great indie games out there that won't break the bank and are made by creators who have a passion for what they do.
I thought it already had its final update
Don’t think it was ever mentioned it’d be final. Just that they’d be more focused on their other game’s development and not to expect any more until it was finished.
Anyhow - the dev has recently mentioned an update is coming.
We've had the final update, yes. But what about second final update?
Sure, but what about its final (1) update?