60+: Haha, I can’t imagine it’s worth it.
20-59: Buy if it comes strongly recommended.
10-19: Impulse buy if the description and screenshots look cool.
1-9: Buy if I like the store thumbnail.
0: Hahaha FUCK no this will hold the game flow hostage every few hours to get me to pay infinite money.
EDIT: YES I know proper - often Open Source - free games exist. :) OpenTTD and good ol’ Nethack are my faves
Unless it’s free because it’s open source!
Netscapes?
Clippy! What’s up man! It’s been forever! It’s me, Netscape Navigator! Remember me?
Yes, I remember you! How are you doing, Netscape Navigator?
0: Hahaha FUCK no this will hold the game flow hostage every few hours to get me to pay infinite money.
https://supertuxkart.net/
https://www.wesnoth.org/
https://xonotic.org/
https://freeciv.org/There’s been a lot of good games for free on epic, and epic still pays the dev/publisher for it, so it’s worth clicking the button even if you don’t download it and play it from thier client.
Little different for me:
$1 - 5 = $5
$6 - 12 = $10
$13 - 20 = $20
$21 - 50 = $50
$51 - 70 = $100
>$70 = $1000
That’s basically right.
$70?
I could buy a car for that kinda money.
You just reminded me of a time when $70 felt like nearly unlimited opportunities. Now, $70 means that I might get to buy groceries AND restock on spices.
God, I wish I could get groceries for 70…
Sorry, I meant an extra $70. I was irresponsibly drowsy-posting.
Bruh a single bag of groceries is like 110 rn
I usually look at it from cost per hour perspective. Tears of the Kingdom was 70 but I played it for ~140 hours, so 0.5 per hour. I’m ok with 1 per hour too but anything higher I start to ask myself “is the developer / publisher worth my support?”. Not all games can be judged by this metric though (eg outer wilds, unpacking)
So far, nothing beats the value of factorio. Mindustry (being so cheap) is a close second.
This is a really basic business concept; business 101 stuff. They definitely didn’t make it up, they’re just using it.
It works against the general population, if this particular one doesn’t, don’t get too busy strutting, there is almost certainly something else that does work on you.
Buy shit because you need/want it, not because it’s a deal.
Same reason that shit on TV is five easy payments of 29.95.
I’m willing g to spend $29. I’ll even spend $29 five times. But not $150.
The only time this breaks down for me though is that I still struggle to pay $0.99 for a mobile app I use often sometimes. Really not sure what it is.
It’s wild, I released a shareware music creation app for Windows back in 2000 and it was easy to get people to pay $29.95 for it. I now have a vastly superior iOS version and nobody’s willing to pay a dollar for it. It’s a very depressing situation for an independent developer.
Yeah. I used to have a $20 shareware product back when kagi was a payment processor. Apple introduced $1 pricing as a dick waving contest and fucked the entire indy developer community.
I originally sold my app on Beyond.com (which was originally software.net). They took 10% which didn’t seem too bad. One day they contacted me about giving my app a “freebate” – basically the app was still $29.95 but buyers could fill out a form and send it in and eventually (like months later) get their $29.95 back. Per their data only about half of buyers ever bothered to do this so it was effectively a 50% off deal. Beyond.com was supposed to give me about $10 per copy sold instead of the normal $27 to cover the freebate and they would make $5 per copy instead of their normal $3.
I said OK and they featured my app on their front page and sales went up like 100X and I was of course pretty happy. The funny part was that their accounting system was all fucked up and I kept getting $27 per copy sold even though the freebate was still in place. I actually tried contacting them multiple times about this to get the situation corrected and I could never get through to anybody who had any clue about what was going on. Eventually they went bankrupt and shut down and years later I got one of those class-action settlement checks in the mail without any explanation of what it was for. Maybe sales of my app were even better than they were telling me, I dunno. I’ve never once met a person in the real world who has ever even heard of the app so that doesn’t seem very likely.
The best bang for buck Steam purchase I’ve done is Halo MCC for 39,99€. Five great games plus Halo 4.
Getting the Orange Box for $10 back in the day has to be my all-time best.
I’m curious now if anyones selling it used that’s such a steal
Unfortunate they want to shut those servers down.
First, these jabronies need adderall.
Second, I need adderall.
I think we’re the same sort of jabroni.
For me, it goes:
0 - hell no
1 to 5 - sure why not, that’s about as much as a bottled drink.
6 to 10 - maybe once a month.
11 to 15 - better be a pretty damn good game, or I’m refunding.
16 to 20 - I’m waiting for a discount, not worth it.
21 to 60 - hell no
61+ - I’m blacklisting your company from my recommendations.
I get that this is Lemmy and users here are a certain way but calling anything over 16 dollars not worth it is genuinely insane.
I think for a good game, by a good company worth supporting, $30 is very fair and reasonable, especially if you get more than a few hours of play out of it.
We seem to spend $60 on movie tickets and snacks for two and leave the theaters after 90 minutes disappointed and never complain as a society beyond saying the movie sucked, but then going to watch the sequel because everyone else is watching it.
The only reason I wouldn’t personally spend more than $30 or so on a game is because generally everything more expensive is published by a major studio, and thus sucks ASS.
Yeah, I’m with you. There’s tons of games I’ve paid a lot more than $16 for that I would absolutely tell past me to buy again instantly. Most recently Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. $40 with all dlc and I’m over 100 hours in, enjoying every minute. Over 100 hours of entertainment from something that cost me less than an hour of labor, in what world is that not worth it?
You can always do the XKCD trick

But even this seems to have gone stale over time, as retro game prices get sticker (even going up as vintage games come back into fashion).
One thing I don’t see on this list is “piracy”, which is a bit weird if your line is $15. I find a lot of bargain bin games to be as bad or worse than FTP games. $20-30 has historically been my sweet spot
Am I weird for rounding 8 to 10??
No. 8 is closer to 10 then it is to 5
I’m Canadian, so I instinctively just round 5 bucks up to 8 bucks instead (adding exchange and tax)
It’s so odd hearing how North America doesn’t have total purchase price on the item.
So their greedy assholes that admit to price manipulation…
Do… Do you not know what price manipulation is?
I got like 40 hours of playtime from Peak before taking a break. For $8 I’m very satisfied.
Never mind, ignore original comment
$8 is a fair price for peak
Good thing I didn’t buy this game. Or continue to buy anything from steam. I got lost trying to figure out what this is even talking about, other than money money money.
I have to disagree. This quote would be super shitty talking about microtransactions, but if this is about Peak, I dont believe they have any microtransactions in their game. Its the full price of the game. And honestly, if you have friends to play it with, $8 is a steal. Its nothing ground breaking or like world changing, but it’s a fun time-waster to spend time with people you like and accomplish a goal with decent replayability.
Very replayable, goofy, and fun, worth your time, and very lightweight, though you can increase settings if you have a better rig. 1000% worth your time especially if you have a few friends. If you all turn off your common sense it becomes even better.
A reminder that you don’t need to know advanced maths to be a developer. Just call the necessary functions to do the job
Glances at this guy’s main() function
Instantly dies
I remember when I saw my first main() I just started writing code only inside of it. That seemed to work so I kept going. 20 years later I’ve only ever written code inside that same main(). I’ve changed jobs 4 times. Just… if(job==0)… or if(job==3)… Works like a charm.
I haven’t touched software development in years. Fuck that shit













