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Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

I'm active in the clicker/idle game scene so I can give a bit of background:

It isn't rare lately for people to come to https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/ and discuss possible ways to monetise games. How to best implement microtransactions, opt-in ads, or even some talk lately about cripto mining.

Then yesterday someone wrote a post about the 'unannoying way to monetise', which is to make the game paid.

https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/comments/7e1u9f/t...

It wasn't massively well received. If you look at the top comments, they still prefer F2P and microtransactions. And then CH2 dropped this bomb today.

From my personal experience, I am quite skeptic about a paid model for this particular genre of games. Also, 30$ for this kind of game seems a little bit too step.

Nevertheless I wish them best. Hopefully if they are successful they will show the way for others and we will move away from these kind of predatory techniques.

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$30 isn't really steep given the thousands of hours of... ahem... gameplay. It's easily justifiable for a niche hobby purchase. I've been idling Clicker Heroes for thousands of hours and it has a very soothing mathematical zen rhythm to it. I highly recommend it to anyone who's enjoyed Cookie Clicker or other idle-type games. What makes Clicker Heroes extra special is the high-quality design and the lovely math that's gone into making sure progress is smooth and eternal. I have high hopes for CH2 and will pre-order it as a vote of confidence.

I'm at the end of cookie clicker and I honestly don't see any interesting progressions forward. I just got 350 chancemakers so now I'm just creating spreadsheets to try to time the "get xxx777777 levels on ascension".

But actually this is a feature and not a bug since I actually appreciate the sense of "I'm done for now" that lets me pause gameplay for a couple of months and wait for a new tier building or something else. I think a more polished clicker game sounds rather scary given my player profile since I could easily see myself get totally absorbed. So CH2 being $30 is good news for me personally since that guarantees I wont get caught. =)

Heh, I just used JS to get that achievement in Cookie Clicker.

I would say that Clicker Heroes is far less demanding of your time than Cookie Clicker. It's difficult to play Cookie Clicker and be mostly idle. Clicker Heroes only asks a few minutes a week to make meaningful progress. It's a different beast than most clicker games, because your game makes significant progress when you're not playing.

Considering a decent NES game cost about $50 in 1987, how is $30 too steep for a game in 2017 that provides many hours of gameplay?

IMO, a game price shouldn't be about how many hours of gameplay it provides...

$30 for a mobile clicker game just seems too much to me. I don't think it holds so much value.

NES games were a lot harder to and took more time to produce (we're talking writing the game in assembly for a lot of them) and had less effective tools at producing content than we have today.

You also had to assembly the cartridge and transport it to the retails. Hardware was not as cheap as today (nor was transport I believe).

Compare that to your 2017 mobile game which can be distributed via internet (very cheap), produced at a high level language, and you can make in less than 2 weeks with less than 4 people.

> I don't think it holds so much value.

Don't you think that a game providing hundreds of hours of gameplay does hold a lot of value for the user? Getting hours (or even days) of entertainment for $30 certainly looks like a good deal. Especially if you compare it to $8.50 for a ticket to a 2-hour movie.

It also follows the sentiment often found on HN, where freelancers and consultants are advised to price their services based on the value they provide to their clients.

Pricing is more nuanced than just calculating the expenses.

As someone who's playing the game - why do I care whether it took you and three friends two weeks, or a team of seventy people three years? That's all completely opaque to me.

To add to your point: Quality is an issue here. If you put Bastion, or Fez, or something else high-quality out, sure, $30 might be OK.

Clicker games are not nearly as engaging as those games were. It's not just the cost/hour that we should measure with, it's also the quality/hour.

Please tell me crypto mining isn't gaining any traction. The last thing we need is apps and websites trying to hijack our devices to mine behind the scenes.

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