Edit: This post has been republished on Gameplanet as a feature article: http://www.gameplanet.co.nz/feature...-quality-games/


Warning: Wall of text ahead. Anyone planning to say TL;DR can just click that back button now.
Second warning: All of this is speculation. It's easy to imagine something happening within the next few years to fix the fundamental problem raised here.



So piracy is rampant, physical media is on the decline and people want the option of getting everything delivered by broadband, and they want to pay less for it. Fair enough, you might say. The technology exists, the distribution costs very little and in a competitive marketplace the consumer will decide what is a fair price for a song, movie, game, etc.

So what happens in this scenario? We can look to the iphone game market for an insight into the consequences. This comprises a section of the iphone app store and allows developers to set the price of their games, and change them at will, to respond to consumer demand.

In theory, what should have happened is that products end up at prices reflecting their quality and worth. The people making quality games should have been rewarded and the rest should have been filtered out.
In practice, what happened is that a price bar was set at the lowest available price: 99c. Barely a week goes by without some developer online writing an article about how hard it is to even get noticed at a price above 99c, and how they poured months of work into something only for someone to say "cool game, but I wish it was 99c". What happened was that the theory assumed that consumers and developers had a similar appreciation of value, which they didn't. The developers appreciation of value is largely related to the cost of making it, while the consumers appreciation of value ignores that completely and is based primarily on the benefit to them. And that's where the problem lies: the value to the consumer of something digital is almost completely arbitrary. Especially in the case of entertainment, the value is often expressed in relative terms. A game, for example, is worth a number of times the cost of a movie because it will probably last a number of times longer. A DVD is worth more than a movie ticket, because multiple people can watch it multiple times. A blu-ray disc is worth more than a DVD because it's the same thing in better quality.

But these things are generally justifications made after the fact. An entertainment product is generally priced at an amount necessary to make a profit. A game doesn't cost more than a movie because it will entertain you for longer, it's priced that way because of the costs of development, the size of the market, the demand curve, etc. And while the price is set by the suppliers, it stays at a price point that, on the whole, works for both. When the price is set by the consumers, as is essentially the case in the iphone game market, they will haggle the supplier down. And when the cost of each unit is almost nothing, as is the case of digitally distributed media, they can haggle a long way, past the breakeven point for the supplier. In the short term, the supplier will prefer a cheap sale over no sale at all. In the long term, there are two options: either much of the market can leave, or the amount of money going into a product has to drop.

Leaving the market is a last ditch resort, and most people in entertainment industries are there because they want to be. Also, a relatively small barrier to entry means that even if some do drop out, there's probably more coming to take their place. So the more realistic option may be to change the product to match the price. Or, to put it another way, to churn out cheap product and hope to strike it lucky in a see of cheap competition.

And this is bad for everyone. While people may want cheaper games, and probably a bigger range of pricing, nobody wants the quality to drop to achieve this, and that seems to be a likely result. But what other options are there? People are demanding lower prices, pirating when they don't get them and even pirating half the time they do get them. Compared to free or near-free alternatives, there's only so much you can charge. And in the entertainment markets, people just aren't used to paying more for quality. A terrible, low-budget movie and a high-budget oscar nominee (if only for visual effects) cost the same at the theatre, and the same thing happens in the games store. A new release is expected to cost roughly $100-130 regardless of quality. Look at the reaction to Activision trying to charge a premium for Modern Warfare 2, the follow up to one of the most popular and highest rated games this generation. The claim that it's almost certainly going to be better than an average game is no excuse, because the average consumer doesn't buy the average game, and hence doesn't consider it to be worth its price. As another example, look at the reaction to the "minis" released to coincide with the launch of the PGPGo. Within a day of release, multiple articles on the web make note of how they're overpriced. How so? Not because they're not worth that much (though they may not be, that's a separate issue), but because the same or similar games are available on the iPhone for less.

So when it comes to entertainment products, it's hard to charge more than the competition, and in the digital download space, it's hard to charge more than the bare minimum. This ultimately leads to what you might call a super-casual market, one dominated by what would have, in years passed, been a free flash app online, but may in future become the only business model that still works, if we abandon a physical product to help justify a price point that encourages games to be experiences instead of impulse buys.

This concerns me, and if you care about playing well-crafted, large-scale games, it might concern you too.

If anyone made it this far, thanks.

Interesting read.

I want to say more but I've not fully digested it.

I guess on a related note I was raging about how for the last 10 years I've been told Piracy increases the cost of games when in fact it has physically done the opposite, easy to Pirate platforms like PC now are the cheapest.

While console users are getting FVCKING DICKED to make up for it.

Logically the solution I see Media creators are forcing on me is apparently "Pirate or i'll fvck you.", is this what they want me to think?

Since it is now a proven, effective method of decreasing prices, will we see a glut of Pirates leaving whichever console is the least "pirate friendly" and its customer base left holding the bag in terms of price?

Thoughts?

the steam specials would say otherwise.. dropping the price made for massive increases in sales... as in they (steam/valve/developer) made more money selling the game cheaper, than selling it at full price simply due to the volume of sales the 'cheap' price caused

even games which i am unlikely to play, i still pickup when they are going for cheap.. simply because they are cheap, and i may (or may not) play the game at some stage.

I made it this far. Normally I don't agree with your points of view but if I was a teacher this would get a gold star or at least a smiley face stamp, unfortunately you'll have to make do with a

Do you think if piracy was not possible there would still be this problem?

Couldn't care less about iphone developers. They chose to develop knowing the difficulty of getting stuff onto the platform and the pricing schemes and now they get to live with it.

Activision is banking on their game being a blockbuster and pushing other titles off the market. If someone has $140 they can no longer buy two $70 games benefiting Activison and cutting out competition. (consumers will only have enough money to buy blockbuster titles)

The pspgo has to compete with the psp not the iphone. Why would any sane person buy something with less features that's not compatible with their current stuff for a higher price?

The reasons I read for retailers not stocking the pspgo was that it directly competes with the retailers, has little to no profit for selling them and costs the same price as a PS3.

Nice thoughts, but pretty baseless speculation.

The variables are too.. well.. varied.

Cloaker wrote: the steam specials would say otherwise.. dropping the price made for massive increases in sales... as in they (steam/valve/developer) made more money selling the game cheaper, than selling it at full price simply due to the volume of sales the 'cheap' price caused

It's hard to see sales as being a valid measure for the industry as a whole, for the same reasons I covered: perception of value. If you know something sells for $100 and you find it offered for $60 on sale, of course you're more likely to buy it. But if it always cost $60, and that's your baseline value, and all the other games you could be buying cost $60, then it doesn't seem as good by comparison.

9centwhore wrote: Do you think if piracy was not possible there would still be this problem?

Yes, though perhaps not as much. Like I said, having a free method of acquiring something makes it that much harder to justify RRP.

Analgia wrote: Activision is banking on their game being a blockbuster and pushing other titles off the market. If someone has $140 they can no longer buy two $70 games benefiting Activison and cutting out competition. (consumers will only have enough money to buy blockbuster titles)

Thanks for backing up my point. Here in NZ (and the rest of the western market) we immediately think "oh noes, capitalism!" as soon as someone tries to suggest their game might be worth more than a competing product. For reference, in Japan games routinely come out at a variety of prices. A big blockbuster like FF13 is apparently expected to cost around $90US, where a normal game would be around 60. And they're fine with that, because as an audience, they've gotten used to the idea that it's okay to pay more when you expect more in return.

Bt wrote: Nice thoughts, but pretty baseless speculation. The variables are too.. well.. varied.

Not completely baseless, it's based on the iphone example. And be honest, if the next generation of consoles went download only, you'd expect people to say "I don't want to pay $130 for a new release, because there's savings in not having to physically distribute something and have a retailer take their cut and so on, so I'll only pay $110. Or actually I wont, because I wont be able to sell it second hand, so I only want to pay $60", right?
And then, like Cloaker suggested, someone will try selling it for less, and because it's a special, it'll sell more. Then a few more might try and eventually it becomes the norm instead, and if you want to have a sale, you have to go even lower.

martian wrote: Not completely baseless, it's based on the iphone example. And be honest, if the next generation of consoles went download only, you'd expect people to say "I don't want to pay $130 for a new release, because there's savings in not having to physically distribute something and have a retailer take their cut and so on, so I'll only pay $110. Or actually I wont, because I wont be able to sell it second hand, so I only want to pay $60", right? And then, like Cloaker suggested, someone will try selling it for less, and because it's a special, it'll sell more. Then a few more might try and eventually it becomes the norm instead, and if you want to have a sale, you have to go even lower.

Wouldn't you agree that games are overpriced at $140 though? MW2 may be a great game, but you have to be a real fan to pay that much. No game is worth that much to me, tbh.

But I agree with the idea that games should be offered at various price points relative to quality. It should be the crap games that go down, though, not the good ones going up even higher. The trouble I guess is that publishers don't want to admit they have a crap game by cutting its price, they want to make it look as good as the next game on the shelf by giving it price parity.

I agree with what you're saying about the iPhone game market, but I don't know if it translates directly to other digital distribution channels. The problem with the App Store is that there's no real quality metric. Love them or hate them, review scores for larger games (typically) have a large impact on their success. And there are a whole bunch of sites out there right now providing reviews (and scores) for 'big' games. iPhone gaming is still in it's infancy, and until it matures it's going to be difficult, from a consumer perspective, to separate the wheat from the chaff. The "Top Apps" list on the App Store just sorts apps by download statistics. This makes it ripe for gaming. It's known that some developers have been putting games out for minimum price, watching the downloads skyrocket, then switching the price up to a few dollars, without losing their position in the top 10. It gives the impression of quality, and since there isn't really an easy way of discerning whether or not the game is any good, it works.

Now consider Steam. You can view a 'top games' list, but every (?) game also has a metacritic score associated with it. Without getting into the value of numeric reviewing, it definitely gives an indication of whether or not this game is worthwhile, which is something really lacking on the App Store. We're already seeing iPhone games getting reviewed by larger games journalism publications as they're being taken more and more seriously. It's only a matter of time before people start turning to metacritic rather than the App Store's 'Top Ten', and the problem will begin to correct itself.

Meh, the value of a digitally distributed game, like the value of any other product is arbitrary to an extent. The consumer decides whether a product is worth the price that is being asked for it, and it's their choice to pay or not to pay. Once people realise that digital distribution is the norm, which will happen in the near future, they'll treat these purchases as anything else, as long as the games are not screwed up by DRM or limiting the number of times you can re-download it, etc. So in short, no, this doesn't concern me in the slightest.

Also, I don't know why the Iphone games market is a good example, it doesn't strike me as being a good example of the other entertainment industries because the budgets of the games are so low and the target audience being casual players. So complaining about the possibility of a future casual market for all platforms and looking at a strictly casual platform as proof is not particularly logical.

Now, I agree that the quality of a product should influence its price, but I think we're seeing that anyway, particularly on Steam where the smaller, shorter or more casual games are being sold for less.

Egor wrote: Wouldn't you agree that games are overpriced at $140 though? MW2 may be a great game, but you have to be a real fan to pay that much. No game is worth that much to me, tbh.

I think that $140 sounds like a lot, but as I said in the OP, the value is almost completely arbitrary. If it's going to provide a single-player experience rivalling most games out there, a decent co-op mode and a multiplayer mode that (if this is anything to go by) will be played for years, then it probably is worth that much.
One thing that might be interesting to see in the future is multiple releases of the same product, one just offering the single player and selling for less, one offering just the multiplayer and another offering everything.

Egor wrote: The trouble I guess is that publishers don't want to admit they have a crap game by cutting its price, they want to make it look as good as the next game on the shelf by giving it price parity.

That's true, but it also works both ways. Because we're used to the idea of every game costing the same amount, a developer releasing a single-player only game that's only expected to last 8-10 hours with minimal replay value might consider pricing it lower (to reflect less content, not quality), but then a lot of consumers would see it and assume it's lower quality instead. So it's a lose-lose scenario right now. Having each game dev/publisher able to set their own prices is a great idea, provided you can rely on your customers to actually care about quality and research their purchases. That's a lot to ask.

exis wrote: I agree with what you're saying about the iPhone game market, but I don't know if it translates directly to other digital distribution channels.

That's fair, and it may well not. It may turn out that the iPhone audience (despite paying so much for their devices) simply doesn't care enough about gaming to spend more than $10 on a game, and that if something like the PS4 went download-only then its audience would be willing to pay a lot more. All I'm suggesting is that it's possible the same thing might happen, at least to some degree. The prices on Steam suggest that I might be overreacting, but in most cases they have retail equivalents to provide a value comparison with. So if something is $10 cheaper on Steam than it is on mighty ape, then it might seem like a good deal. But then what if it was only on Steam?

kapusta wrote: Meh, the value of a digitally distributed game, like the value of any other product is arbitrary to an extent.

Yes and no. All products are arbitrary to an extent, but if those products are physical then at least some of their value is dictated by the physical cost of the item. If an item has to go through a supplier chain, then the value is also dictated to some degree by how much it costs to get it to you.
But with a digitally downloaded game, the value is completely arbitrary. There is no baseline price that it must be over, and as such, it can be offered to you for almost nothing. And when you can get it for almost nothing, people can easily become convinced (via comparisons) that the value of it is almost nothing. Look at how many people you see, since the advent of napster and free methods of acquiring music, saying that retail music is overpriced. Sure there were some before that who said the same thing, but the presence of free alternatives really had a noticeable impact on peoples perception of value. The existence of the 99c price point seems to have done the same thing for the app store.

iphone market is terrible for comparing to the gaming market.

There should some set standard for gaming, based on user base of the game.


Look at Valve, the user base dropped from the WON days when they transfered to STEAM, but pretty quickly they gained millions of people because they provide pretty good service compared to when they first started, the STEAM platform on PC is what any small company should look to invest in :\

Small companies complain about piracy because there game is ****ing horse shit to the point where people don't want to pay $90+, thanks to the publishers who release reviews that say the game is "the game of the century and will go down in history books", biased reviews.


Sometimes i wonder if we're to blame as well because we ask for top quality games but are not willing to wait for longs periods of time for it to be released(thanks to the huge industry), personally quality over quantity, i'd much rather have a server where i could buy the digital version, and have an option to pay an extra $5 or so dollars to have the dvd's for the game sent to me.

Small company blames pirates > pirates blame big company > big company blames pirates :\

I think it's time most of the developers and publishers face the fact that this is not the music industry we're not looking for a random game that will only pull interest from a few thousand people worldwide, 1 hit wonders are where it's at, or 2nd times luck(cs, warcraft, quake) games that were and still are popular.

[Ne]niaz (and others), please don't turn this into another thread about piracy, especially one based on a notion of "I've played games for a while, therefore I know exactly how everything in the industry works, much better than the people who make the games, who should all be listening to me".

martian wrote: "I've played games for a while, therefore I know exactly how everything in the industry works, much better than the people who make the games, who should all be listening to me".

Exactly why the industry has issues, because they don't listen to the consumers. I'm not making it into another thread about piracy just pointing out how it is at face value.

martian wrote: That's true, but it also works both ways. Because we're used to the idea of every game costing the same amount, a developer releasing a single-player only game that's only expected to last 8-10 hours with minimal replay value might consider pricing it lower (to reflect less content, not quality), but then a lot of consumers would see it and assume it's lower quality instead. So it's a lose-lose scenario right now.

Is there any evidence to suggest that this is actually the case? Anecdotal, but the lower price of Borderlands of $99.99 on consoles at no point set alarm bells off for me. If anything, this assumption goes directly against what we've seen happening in the iPhone gaming market, where 99 cent titles are selling like hotcakes and the higher priced titles struggle to contend.

(Ne)niaz wrote: Exactly why the industry has issues, because they don't listen to the consumers. I'm not making it into another thread about piracy just pointing out how it is at face value.

Face value interpreted by someone with very limited information and a desire to over-generalise? Small tip: most people in the industry are customers. You wont find many people making games that don't play them too.

exis wrote: Is there any evidence to suggest that this is actually the case? Anecdotal, but the lower price of Borderlands of $99.99 on consoles at no point set alarm bells off for me. If anything, this assumption goes directly against what we've seen happening in the iPhone gaming market, where 99 cent titles are selling like hotcakes and the higher priced titles struggle to contend.

No evidence that I have, no. I think many games this generation have come out at $99, and it's a pretty common price point for a new PC game, so I'm not sure that really tells us much.
And yes, it does go against the iPhone market, but I addressed that in the OP. While there is a physical product and an expected retail price, the expectation is that all new products will be priced at a similar level. What's new about the iPhone market is the lack of a physical option and a new influx of customers not used to paying a hundred dollars for a game. And the market now reflects these users.



Of course the same is true of music and movies too. The casual audience, lovers of blockbusters and one-hit wonders rules there too. But in both of those cases an indie market exists too, because movies and music can be made for relatively cheap if done right. The problem in games, is that the dedicated audience, which may become the game equivalent of the indie film/music lover, is the one that expects the highest level of depth and quality from the product.

well at least we can still see market forces do have some effect, not game related but e.g. cadburys backdown from palm oil.

I think when it comes to games, it would more be a case of other companys copying another successful company who got popular through being good to the communiuty

It's already starting to drop. By this I mean piracy is driving down the demand for quality. Why buy the DVD when I can get a cam / lossy video file of it? Why buy the album when I can download a 128k mp3 of it? The mass piracy population doesn't care / are ignorant.

The tolerance of low-fi in audio-visual applications (e.g. TVs, audio) by the mass population is the issue. Ask your parents how much they cared about their vinyls. Do it. Then compare it to today. [btw, I'm not stating that vinyl is better than digital etc.. etc etc.. it always gets into a stupid idiotic fight so don't start. It's not my point.]

To quote from this article:

Quote: As he [Trent Renzor] wrote to me in an e-mail, Walk into a Best Buy and everyones obsessed with the highest possible resolution for their TVs. 1080p versus 1080i resolution, hundred-dollar HDMI video cables . . . yet everyone still walks around with those terrible quality white iPod earbuds.  Few producers in the rock world have his sense for detail and raw, sensory pleasure, and hes determined to make the listening experience as high-fidelity as possible. He went on, I want you to have the same feeling I do sitting in the studio listening to a final mix, surrounded by sound, in heaven.

In games, this is very much different. If you don't deliver what the public want, they don't buy your game. Pure and simple. the gaming industry is hugely consumer demand driven.

I think trying to predict future technologies is the realm of science fiction, and thus put very little stock in any claims, of "where the industry is going"

My biggest gripe about this speculated-by-industry-wankers digital-only future is this; I REALLY LIKE BOXES.

Seriously. There's just something satisfying about having the boxes all lined up; I still kick myself for throwing out my SimCity2000 box. I also like just having my games RIGHT THERE ready to go, except Valve products. ****s me off to no end having to forcibly download 2 gigs of patches =(

It's about keeping the power in the hands of the consumer too. I do not like having the developer force me to update, especially when I like the game the way it is. It's MY PC, we play by MY rules, or you'll find I take my business "elsewhere" (but still get your product). Though that's a bit OT, it is related to the digital distribution issue.

Yeah, I love having boxes too. Something really exciting about getting a new box, and opening it up and seeing what's inside etc.

I do wonder if piracy might be fought by increasing the quality of the physical release. Mount and Blade was a cd in one of those paper cover things. Whereas Baldur's Gate had a manual that was actually really interesting to read, a bunch of maps and a couple of other bits and pieces.

I've bought BG 3 times. If I lose my Mount and Blade cd or something else happens to it, I'm not gonna bother replacing it.

martian wrote: Yes and no. All products are arbitrary to an extent, but if those products are physical then at least some of their value is dictated by the physical cost of the item. If an item has to go through a supplier chain, then the value is also dictated to some degree by how much it costs to get it to you. But with a digitally downloaded game, the value is completely arbitrary. There is no baseline price that it must be over, and as such, it can be offered to you for almost nothing. And when you can get it for almost nothing, people can easily become convinced (via comparisons) that the value of it is almost nothing. Look at how many people you see, since the advent of napster and free methods of acquiring music, saying that retail music is overpriced. Sure there were some before that who said the same thing, but the presence of free alternatives really had a noticeable impact on peoples perception of value. The existence of the 99c price point seems to have done the same thing for the app store.

Honestly, stop using the iPhone store as an example, it doesn't translate well onto other software. I don't think anyone claims that large PC/console games should cost 99c. Now, the physical cost of packaging is something that I want to be taken away, as it's an extra that is not always needed. In fact, I don't see the point of going through that supplier chain when all it does is increase the price.

I don't understand your argument against digital distribution - you are saying that selling physical copies increases perception of value, and that may be so. But then, what I want is actual value from the things I spend money one, not perception of it. If there is an option to get it digitally for less, I want that option to be present as well, because it is frequently more convenient and, well, cheaper.

kapusta wrote: Honestly, stop using the iPhone store as an example, it doesn't translate well onto other software. I don't think anyone claims that large PC/console games should cost 99c. Now, the physical cost of packaging is something that I want to be taken away, as it's an extra that is not always needed. In fact, I don't see the point of going through that supplier chain when all it does is increase the price.

I have to use the app store as an example, because when it comes to digital-only distribution it's the best example we have. I'm not saying that the two are identical and that what happened to one must happen to the other, just that what happened to one might, to some degree, happen to the other.
No one is saying that large PC/console games should cost 99c. But they are saying that if you can get them without all the cost of the physical product and supplier chain, then they should be less. And then, if you can't sell them second hand then they're worth less again. Which leads me to...

kapusta wrote: I don't understand your argument against digital distribution - you are saying that selling physical copies increases perception of value, and that may be so. But then, what I want is actual value from the things I spend money one, not perception of it.

What I'm saying is that this concept of 'actual value' doesn't exist for something like games. Nobody needs to play a game and the digitally downloaded version didn't cost anything to make (per item), therefore how can there be an 'actual value'?
The closest we can come to defining an actual value for such an item is to put a dollar amount on how much we value being entertained for a certain period of time. But even this is relative to the alternatives. If I can get a game that entertains me for 10 hours for $50 and someone else tries to sell something similar for $60, then aren't I going to consider that product to selling above its actual value?

martian wrote: I have to use the app store as an example, because when it comes to digital-only distribution it's the best example we have. I'm not saying that the two are identical and that what happened to one must happen to the other, just that what happened to one might, to some degree, happen to the other. No one is saying that large PC/console games should cost 99c. But they are saying that if you can get them without all the cost of the physical product and supplier chain, then they should be less. And then, if you can't sell them second hand then they're worth less again.

Well if you remove the supplier chain, then they actually do cost less, as you take away the physical parts which are worth a few dollars at least. Same with re-selling, since with a digital distribution model like Steam all games that people obtain legally will come directly from the publishers, and none will be sold second hand, so in theory that should increase the number of copies sold, making it possible to lower the price. So where you look at these issues as disadvantages and causes for concern I look at them as the right ways to go about selling games. Of course, digital distribution benefits me directly, as there were quite a few good deals on Steam which resulted in me buying games I never would've heard of or bothered with.

martian wrote: What I'm saying is that this concept of 'actual value' doesn't exist for something like games. Nobody needs to play a game and the digitally downloaded version didn't cost anything to make (per item), therefore how can there be an 'actual value'? The closest we can come to defining an actual value for such an item is to put a dollar amount on how much we value being entertained for a certain period of time. But even this is relative to the alternatives. If I can get a game that entertains me for 10 hours for $50 and someone else tries to sell something similar for $60, then aren't I going to consider that product to selling above its actual value?

It does exist though, actual value is a relative term that is subjective for every player. You can attempt calculations of money spent per hour, but really, as in all gaming experiences, value is subjective. Therefore, for example, putting a crap game in a nice box and proclaiming it to be the "saviour of genre X" may lead to an increased perception of value, but for most players it will not actually contain that promised quality.

kapusta wrote: Well if you remove the supplier chain, then they actually do cost less, as you take away the physical parts which are worth a few dollars at least. Same with re-selling, since with a digital distribution model like Steam all games that people obtain legally will come directly from the publishers, and none will be sold second hand, so in theory that should increase the number of copies sold, making it possible to lower the price.

This is true, perhaps I didn't phrase it right. What I'm saying is that if the average person buys a game for $100 and half of them sell it back for $40, and the other half just hang onto it, you end up with two groups, one of which would think a copy you can't sell back is still worth $100 and one that thinks it's only worth $60. If you want to sell to all of them though, you'd have to launch at $60 or risk being ignored by half your audience in favour of another game that does. You could price it higher and hope that other group buy it later when it drops in price, but the games market as is doesn't seem to suggest that happens a lot.

kapusta wrote: It does exist though, actual value is a relative term that is subjective for every player. You can attempt calculations of money spent per hour, but really, as in all gaming experiences, value is subjective.

But that's exactly what I've been trying to say: value is subjective and relative and, therefore, can be changed when the things it's being compared to change. Most notably, if the average price of competing games drops, then yours has to drop too just in order to appear as good as it used to. That's why people can pay a few dollars for an iphone game, enjoy it, but still complain about the price: because their perception of value is relative to things which cost 99c.