How to properly price casual games
(Please note: I’m all for supporting casual and indie game developers, but I’d rather support three of them at Magnetis price than one by buying Eufloria.)
Explore posts in the same categories: Computers, GamesTags: casual, casual games, eufloria, game, game development, Games, indie, indie games, magnetis, pricing, right, wrong
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Living with technology 
01/02/2010 at 00:03
Don’t know of the quality of either of the games but I completely disagree.
01/02/2010 at 01:40
You’d have to elaborate on that!
01/02/2010 at 13:33
I disagree too.
#1 – “How to properly price casual games”
Eufloria is not a casual game, it’s a strategy game. Game sessions can be rather long.
#2 – Magnetis is a very good game and I believe it’s indeed priced properly, but so is Eufloria. I don’t think 16.99 is too expensive just because you label a game as “casual”? Would 4.99 also be the right price for Wii Sports then?
Gamers really did become cheap asses in the last 2 or 3 years. 🙂
01/02/2010 at 22:13
Glad to see some debate on this. 🙂
I guess it all boils down to how much you find a game to be worth. After playing through the demo of Eufloria I found the game mechanics to be weak, a big portion of the game about simply waiting while you spawn more troops. Then there’s also the complete lack of proper unit control (can’t set rally points, can’t select multiple planets.) and lack of Multiplayer.
This is what makes the game casual, the complete lack of any kind of advanced functions. But unlike many other strategy games, which can be played without knowing all of the rules, tricks and still enjoy it, Eufloria does not give players who want to do more than mind-numbingly sit around for 20 minutes to watch flowers grow a possibility to do something about it.
Also, for the Wii Sports analogy to be correct, you’d have to multiply 4.99 times five, because it contains five games, and the price of roughly 25 sounds reasonable to me.
23/10/2010 at 14:22
Yeah, that’s not really smart on their part. not many people are going to spend what? ~$20 USD (here) to play some casual game like that unless it’s really REALLY good! and then it wouldn’t be a “casual” game would it? no. it would be a real video game and you would be purchasing it. That aside.. have you tried minecraft?