David is a very talkative and honest person on his accounts. No wonder he says it straight. Dusk, then Iron Lung did bring him a reputation, he can’t be confused for a random greedy dummy, as he does deliver as a dev and I can’t remember him causing frustration in his fans.
I rather like what he said. It is completely reasonable in my opinion.
Here is his full response:
“Yes, no f**king shit, I make games for a living,” he said. “If I didn’t want to earn money from them I wouldn’t charge money for them. I like the business model of ‘I want money so I make something that I think is worth money, and you pay me that money and you get the thing, and we’re all happy’ That’s it. There’s nothing complicated or hidden here.”
“If you don’t think the things I make are worth the money I charge, that’s completely ok,” he added. “Don’t buy them, or wait for a deep sale, or go the sneaky route and get them for free or whatever, and please tell me that so I can adjust the prices for whatever I release next.”
To save you a click its a VR game and the article sounds like it was written by AI. They mention the game’s name in every second sentence and there is no review, just praise how good it is. More like an ad article.
Right? At that point, if you're making drama out of it, you're either pirating on misguided principle alone because you're Ayn Rand's petulant zombie, or you didn't have that money to burn anyway. Your account is at zero.
Here I was, thinking it would be some insane hike like a $12 game jumping to $50, for "pirate it, then" to even be a meaningful response. No. It's a $2 increase from...the equivalent price of chicken nuggets.
Yes, the beyond Skyrim ppl want to replace them, but still:
This is one area where AI will lead to many cool things. Yes, AI voices don't sound as cool as real ones but modders usually work for free and can't afford good voice acting, so they'll either do it themselves with shoddy quality and questionable acting that sometimes even makes the product worse, or avoid it at all costs (ever questioned why so many mods used letters and notes as story devices compared to main games? That's why).
AI voices can be a middle ground for exactly that purpose.
It’s also worth remember that “AI voices” don’t always mean tts. RVC is also rising technology: you just need a single modder with decent skills in voice acting, and he/she can make act the whole cast of characters (man/woman, young/adult etc.)
I mean, this is kind of a scummy thing to say. Nobody really would have cared about an increase to $8 from $6 for the game, but a person with the attitude that this developer has by saying what they said will probably not be conducive to getting more sales. Should have just not said anything.
People are so used to being lied to that they get angry when you tell them the truth instead, even though they already knew the truth.
I’m half joking, though. Part of what makes society work is all the things we do to put a nice facade on things that are ugly. If we all went around telling the hard truth all the time, everyone would be angry at everyone.
All that said… Basically saying “I underpriced the product of my hard work and I’m correcting that” shouldn’t be that shocking. Especially when tempered with “Go pirate it if you want”.
I get what youre saying but to me there is far too much sugarcoating today. I much prefer being a bit more honest. That doesnt mean be an asshole though.
Would you feel better if he blamed inflation and Covid and the evergrande supply chain issues like every other business on this planet? And they’ve doubled and tripled their prices. He only increased his by 33%
He's effectively trying to get a raise. I don't see this any different from asking a raise from your boss at work. I mean, if you don't want more money from work, that's your problem, not his.
I dont have a problem with him wanting more money, it’s just his incredibly abbrasive attitude. How he said what he said just comes off as needlessly rude. If he had just raised the price without saying anything, people probably wouldn’t even bat an eye. I mean, its $2.
To say “well pirate it then” is just aggressive without cause. Thats something you say when you raise the price from $6 to $60. Not for a $2 increase. Unless you have a chip on your shoulder/ incredibly abbrasive personality.
Mixed feelings on these hacks. Obviously the people that do them suck. But at the same time, props to insomniac for not paying them.
These hacks also usually drum up hype or notoriety of the game for free which I’m sure is offset by the cost of new security, but still. And assets and other stolen data will be hard to reuse and the code and pre-release build are all pretty useless since no serious dev will ever use that stuff. So unless there’s something im missing, they’ll be fine. My main concern would be protecting the personal data of employees and account data.
This is to showcase what they have to encourage them to pay up, but yeah I agree. All I’m thinking is it looks fun and it’s not even a legitimate teaser.
Not knowing anything about the game, $8 for a PC game is not unreasonable, though raising the price after the fact is a little questionable and it sounds like the dev mispriced his original creation and is trying to correct for that. Though, if he had called it “early-access” and then doubled the price it would just be accepted as normal.
And get 4x as much runtime. But it’s not apples to apples; movies aren’t interactive, and I’ve spent way more on games that weren’t worth either their price or the time to play them through to the end.
Those generally have better quality/effort. Most of these cheap horror experience games look absolutely terrible (and wouldve 20 years ago as well) and last an hour at most of you aren’t brain-dead. At least a movie is generally two hours
I mean, it can be argued that games depreciating their value overtime is not a natural phenomenon set in stone, but rather a way to squeeze more sales out of the product once it stops being the latest, hypest thing, and everyone who really wanted it already has it.
If you accept that, then it is not hard to accept the opposite: a game that starts not being the hypest thing, and thus needs to start at a low price because nobody really wants it; but then becomes the hypest thing due to some unforeseen factor (in this case, getting a movie based on the game), and thus appreciates in value because people now really want it.
From that perspective, I honestly don't see an issue with it, it's just staying consistent with the rules that give us lower priced sales in the first place, this is just the rare situation in which it works the other way around.
I’m pretty sure the price of the other From Software games (Dark Souls titles especially) went up after Elden Ring got super popular. And I know my interest in them did as well (I’d only played DS1 prior). Seems like a reasonable market reaction to demand, but damn there went my hopes of getting them cheap for my patience lol
On the opposite end there are games like Terraria which was inexpensive from the start and in bundles and everything but grew to like 10x it’s original scope, I think somehow without a major price bump.
I was just responding to the fact that OP simply appended “[AI voices]” as if they were trying to lead people to believe that the AI voices were final.
I don’t think they were being sarcastic. What you provided was genuinely important context. It changed my perspective of the headline and OP’s ammendment. I would also consider it essential knowledge. Thanks
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