Remember, PC gamers still are willing to actually buy games, even indies.
Doing $20-40 on Steam may well be an easier, more profitable route. There are tons of F2P games on pc that are really significant, solid games. Especially trying to do so with a single player game (people play MP games for thousands of hours, single player games are usually like 10-20). I'm not saying it's impossible, but unless you're well enough funded to put in that kind of time and produce a similar level of quality following PoE as a model might be really rough. Also, they were able to raise over 2.2 million dollars in crowd funding during beta and had really significant hype due to how unsatisfied the hardcore ARPG crowd was with D3. I'm not sure how many people they had originally, but in order to float a non trivial development team over 4-5 years, they had to be pretty well funded.
Have you seen any cool ingame microtransations that work in offline games? And what would you feel about a game that had an income source be something like an affiliate program selling gaming hardware on their website.Ĭlick to expand.They developed PoE over 3 years before it was made public, then it took another 3 years of alpha/beta. This isn´t altruistic, I honestly believe that as a group of people who like making games and who want to do it for the next 10 years, we will make more money as an indy by following the PoE model then throwing up $10 games on Steam. We show goodwill by spending thousands of dollars and a couple years of development and then give away the game for free, and hopefully develop fans who support us later on, either through this game or our future games. So we decided to follow the Path of Exile model, even if it doesn´t pay off for the initial game. In both cases you can make some money, but you are going to have a small playerbase. If you put your game at $10, you are going to get muddled into a sea of mediocre small games and won´t be found. If you make a game, and put it on Steam for $20, or god forbid $40, you are going to either get compared to AAA games, or not be taken seriously at all. As a new developer without previous releases it is difficult to market a game. Have you seen any clever ideas people had to monetize an offline game?Ĭlick to expand.It is a long-term business decision really, and mainly based on how well Path of Exile did. Overall, we are making the game for fun and are not trying to become rich, so just some modest things to keep us going would be enough. Path of Exile has done pretty well financially overall, but it is hard to tell how much of that income came from ingame things that do give a small advantage ( bankbox size). The other thing we talked about is making having an affiliate Amazon page on our website, and basically tell people to help support our game by buying their Amazon stuff through our store. Donations on the website, forum upgrades, maybe some real life items like mugs, mousepads and shirts. but I am unsure if people will be willing to pay for attack special effects, vanity pets, decorations or clothing in a standalone game. Doom, Titanfall 2, Battlefield 1, and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare have all impressed.I guess Path of Exile is a decent example, but the question would be about a completely offline stand-alone game.ĭoes anyone have any thoughts on things you could do to monetize the game.
In a year that has perhaps been light on true classics, it’s still delivered some extremely solid games, especially if you’re into first person shooters. Here we round up the very best games of 2016, whether that be on PS4, Xbox One, PC, or handheld.
With a heavy push for 4K gaming (even though the PS4 Pro doesn’t offer much in the way of native 4K support) new TVs were the talk of the town, too. The PS4 Pro launched on November 10, while Xbox Scorpio was announced at E3 in June. At least we’ve had video games to keep us happy.2016 also saw the emergence of mid-generation consoles. We had more celebrity deaths than seemed normal (Prince, David Bowie, and Ronnie Corbett to name just three), Brexit, and Donald Trump becoming the President of the United States. 2016 isn’t going to be remembered as a great year for many people.