Is "free" not cheap enough?

This is primarily anecdotal, so it's perhaps not enough to draw any conclusions from, but it does seem in line with some rumblings from other corners of the internet.

The big news is that Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story has made its way to Steam. It's a visual novel about stumbling across a Korean colony ship in the far future, and, through interacting with the two AIs who are the only 'living' remnants of the crew, trying to piece together what happened. And it's good. Very good, in fact, but this isn't a review piece. I don't really do them.

It's not an instruction. It's not that kind of visual novel.

Before I even played Analogue, what really struck me was how enthusiastically I accepted the offer that I pay for it. The thing is, I haven't played Digital: A Love Story or Don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story, though I was certainly intrigued to read about them. But Christine Love's previous titles were free. Why is it that I never touched the ones I could get for free, but was very happy to get the one I had to pay for?

Perhaps GOG.com's Guillaume Rambourg has the answer. When he spoke to Rock, Paper, Shotgun last month, he made it quite clear that he felt a certain price point was necessary to "preserve the value of games". He kept talking about the value of games, but I think he meant the perception of value, which is a bit different. Nonetheless, as sceptical as I was, I now wonder if there isn't some truth to that. It's a criticism I've heard of pay-what-you-want style bundles, too: that they effectively devalue the games they contain.

Of course, the free-to-play model has been phenomenally successful for bigger publishers, with people paying piecemeal for in-game items and new gameplay. But it's easy to see that they expect (or, at least, hope for) my money at some point. A game that is just free with no strings attached seems to awaken some sort of alarm bell in us. Put into words, it would be something like:-

Why would it be worth my time if it's not worth my money?

This is, perhaps, a vindication of the frequent lament we make to non-gamers that games aren't just for kids. Kids have more time than money, so they worry about how much something costs. We're grown-ups, though (honest we are!): we have more money than time, and while we're glad to spend that money, we want to be sure that what we're spending it on is worth our time.

Part of it is that, as authorware becomes more accessible and more sophisticated, anyone can do it, and not everyone realises that not everyone should. There's no getting around it. If people can make bad games, they will, and over time we've built up this sort of association between 'free' and the baser qualities of amateurism. There's another side to that, too. Back when I was making music, I was all too familiar with the idea that one has to have confidence in one's work before one can justify selling it. I never had that confidence in my music (but if you ever heard it, you'd know why), and so it was always free. But if the creator of a work doesn't think it's worth selling, why should the audience think it's worth anything?

Of course, I don't know if Digital: A Love Story and Don't take it personally, babe were free due to a lack of confidence, but because I don't know, there's nothing really telling me that surmising that would be wrong. (And, oh! How wonderful it would be for a smarter person than I to look at how this phenomenon plays with Barthes' Death of the Author.) But clearly, somewhere along the line, it was decided that Analogue: A Hate Story was worth selling. And that decision made me think (much as I don't want to paint myself as easily manipulated) that it might be worth buying.

An interesting outcome is that I liked Analogue: A Hate Story so much that I definitely will check out Digital: A Love Story and Don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story. The game I had to pay for is effectively selling me on games I don't have to pay for. That is so the inverse of everything that is intuitive, it's quite wonderful.

Conclusions, then? Well, as I said at the beginning, this is anecdotal, so my conclusions aren't really anything new. Primarily, it might be crass for an artist to think about filthy lucre, but we live in a world where setting a price point is the best way to communicate to your audience that you think you've done something worthwhile, and if you don't demonstrably think it's worthwhile, neither will they. Secondarily, if you must release free games, try to make them somehow related to a game you're selling. Oh, and tertiarily (is that a word?), if your independent game is bad, don't release it. You're making all the other indies look bad. The hell is wrong with you? Or maybe you should release it so everyone can tell you how bad it is. It sounds like you need that. Who are you, anyway, and why have you made me digress from an otherwise positive post just to tell you how much you suck?

Ahem. It's not exactly a three-step plan to guaranteed success, but what were you expecting?