Mad Rantz

The second issue of the IGDA Casual Games Quarterly is online now. I didn’t catch the first one during my recent hiatus, but I did find a couple of interesting bits in this one. First is some demo and price point testing iWin performed. Basically they say that (a) people are willing to spend $30 for a casual game (especially if the consumer is already willing to spend $25 for the game) and (b) shipping your game with a sixty-minute demo might not be the best route to take.

With regards to (a), I think their data is a bit skewed because they used a very well-known IP for the game they tested with (Family Feud). It’s tough to say for certain, but it would certainly be interesting if someone else could perform the same sort of testing with a popular game on one of the casual game portals and publish the results.

On (b), I think that this is a very obvious conclusion, one which you don’t really have to make a study to draw. I have seen many examples where sticking to a sixty-minute demo might not make any sense at all. The guys at Bravetree did it differently with Think Tanks, for instance, relying more on nag screens and other restrictions to impress upon the potential buyer that it would be worth it if they’d simply fork out the cash for the game.

Overall, this first article was interesting, but there was something a little annoying about it in the most general sense. It does seem at times that there are companies and people out there making all sorts of “discoveries” about game publishing on the net that actually were discovered quite a long time ago by veterans such as Thomas Warfield. Still, it’s a nice article and the more information you have at your fingertips the better.

The second tidbit in the quarterly I found mildly interesting was the stats that James Smith of Reflexive has been collecting on the RealArcade top 10 lists. James frequents the forums at Indie Gamer and is a wealth of information for indie game devs. Again, the more info you have the better, and it’s nice of James to share.