Deep discounts don't "devalue" games, they bring in massive increases in revenues when done correctly. For example, in a particular experiment that Valve performed a 75% reduction in price resulted in a factor of 40 increase in gross revenues. It's hard to argue with numbers like that.
Oh I'm well aware. I work on games that have sold on Steam and have been featured in both daily deals and prominently featured during their blowout summer/winter sales. The massive increased revenue on those days is undeniable. The question is what happens to user behavior over the long term. I'm personally guilty of not buying a new game because I know it'll be deeply discounted in the very near future. I know many others think the same way now.
A $60 title being discounted to $15 and seeing a 40x revenue spike is pretty cool. One of the most amazing indie game packages of all time earning a team of devs less than $1 per bundle sold is somewhat worrisome to me.
You have to realize there are people (like me, for example) who never (well almost never!) buy games at full price. I either look for used one, or wait for discounts. I have no urge to play most of the games - I do make an exception once in a while, like when a new GTA comes out. But that's it.
I mean it's the same for every product. The first computers were ridiculously expensive before becoming ridiculously cheap. It's all about the cycle of "early adopters" then reaching the mass market. If you want to reach the mass market with your games, it's much easier to do so by lowering your price. Doing TV marketing works, too, but it costs so much money it's not even for the same league of games. You can only do TV if you expect to sell several millions of it.
Anyway, back to my point: not all gamers want to spend 60$ in the first place. Some won't. So they will either buy your game at 5$ or never buy it. The rest is all about lost opportunities.
Agree with this.. I may be an extreme case, but I never buy games, veryVERY rarely play games at all, and I've bought three of these bundles. Too good of a deal to pass up for even the possibility of future enjoyment :) (I pay like $10 or so).
Seems like the people that play games would have already bought and enjoyed the most appealing of these sometime in the past couple years. If they see this bundle and take the opportunity to pick up the ones they didn't care as much about on discount, that's a win for the developers. And for people like me who would never buy or play them otherwise, I get it cheap and the developers get at least some money from me (and an email address to market to :)).
Doubt there's many hardcore gamers who've passed on the full price games in favor of waiting years for these to be bundled and discounted. So these bundles seem like an amazing way to eke out a couple hundred thousand extra dollars from an audience that you wouldn't otherwise have reached.
Yes it would be nice to make more money per sale but that metric is misleading and not necessarily relevant. We know from over a century of economic study that demand and price are not independent variables, in fact they are tightly related. The humble bundle model of selling games well after launch and letting buyers set the price strikes me as a fantastically effective way to both capture consumer surplus and to increase demand. The incremental cost of each sale is incredibly low compared to the total revenue, so per sale revenue isn't as relevant as total revenue.
I find your '$1 per bundle sold per dev team' metric disingenuous because it glosses over that a lot of those single dollars will be from buyers who have already paid full price for that teams game
Deep discounts don't "devalue" games, they bring in massive increases in revenues when done correctly. For example, in a particular experiment that Valve performed a 75% reduction in price resulted in a factor of 40 increase in gross revenues. It's hard to argue with numbers like that.