No Game Today – Just a commentary on the Casual PC Downloadable Game Market
Just an update, I need to get the power adapter for my netbook so I can get the posts that I wrote on the road out. The games covered include NCAA Football 2009 and Triple Punch. Today however I want to speak on the state of how screwed up the Casual PC Downloadable has become.
It started when I saw a discussion on a LinkedIn group that stated how the Facebook game and Free To Play (F2P, but some also refer to titles as Freemium) games have destroyed the download market. This was a hard statement to even consider since the play mechanics of an F2P game vary greatly from the established downloadable game types like the match-3, hidden-object, and time management. It’s like saying that iPhone shovelware is going to destroy the home console market, the only corrolation is that they are games.
I would leave it at that, but then I saw that a relatively new release was already marked down to $6.99 within two weeks of the release. A year ago, this would have been the norm if subscription based game clubs were taken into account, but over the past year, games have just be devalued from $20 to chicken scratch, for various reasons, but I have my finger pointed in one specific direction, which really was the price point and distribution changer all wrapped up in one website.
It’s now hard to determine how to monetize on a PC downloadable game, with price points reduced to near nothing, portals grabbing their share of the next to nothing, and rising production costs to meet consumer expectations with exceptional assets and licenses. Potential solutions include using the connected advertising model to monetize on the back end, upselling to have a non-connected experience, outsourcing, or reducing the trial period from a time based period to a defined demo experience. The thing is, the change needs to take place, and happen soon in order to save ourselves.
