With all the other stuff happening, we didnt notice Rimworld was released.

zinfamous

No Lifer
Jul 12, 2006
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I've wanted that for some time, but always $30 or more from what I noticed, and always early access--yes, I also noticed that it was "released" recently. was kinda hoping for an actual release sale. :D
 

Rifter

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
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I noticed, because it was on my wishlist and steam emailed me lol.

Waiting for a sale, and will jump on it then.
 

SMOGZINN

Lifer
Jun 17, 2005
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I noticed, because it was on my wishlist and steam emailed me lol.

Waiting for a sale, and will jump on it then.

The developers have said that it will not go on sale ever. So far they have held to that. If you look at it's price history they have never discounted it.
 
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zinfamous

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The developers have said that it will not go on sale ever. So far they have held to that. If you look at it's price history they have never discounted it.

well, they need to find a distribution platform other than steam, then. As much as I like their militancy over this, there is a mental trap that I have fallen into, as probably most users have, that steam exists for sales and cheaper games. I default to purchasing a game that I think is a deal--and maybe this game is great and is a deal at $30--but most humans interpret deal as "sale." :D
 

SMOGZINN

Lifer
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well, they need to find a distribution platform other than steam, then. As much as I like their militancy over this, there is a mental trap that I have fallen into, as probably most users have, that steam exists for sales and cheaper games. I default to purchasing a game that I think is a deal--and maybe this game is great and is a deal at $30--but most humans interpret deal as "sale." :D

I completely agree. The game very probably is worth $30, but not to me because I already have 300+ games in my backlog. At this point I believe I will literally never get through the backlog of games I already have, so unless a game has some special meaning to me, or offers me something truly unique, I don't buy a game that costs more than $5.
 

DrunkenSano

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Aug 8, 2008
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I've had it on my wish list for a while, definitely not buying it for $30+. If it doesn't drop to $20, no go for me.
 

Rifter

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
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The developers have said that it will not go on sale ever. So far they have held to that. If you look at it's price history they have never discounted it.

I know, thats why its been on my wishlist for over a year, its ok though im sure i can outwait them, ive got a steam backlog of over 200 games i havent even played yet.
 

OCNewbie

Diamond Member
Jul 18, 2000
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well, they need to find a distribution platform other than steam, then. As much as I like their militancy over this, there is a mental trap that I have fallen into, as probably most users have, that steam exists for sales and cheaper games. I default to purchasing a game that I think is a deal--and maybe this game is great and is a deal at $30--but most humans interpret deal as "sale." :D
If you're actually interested in this game, you can buy it directly from the developer's page. That's a DRM-free version, and you can also link it to your Steam account so it's activated on Steam as well.

Price went up to $35 now that it's 1.0 though:

https://rimworldgame.com/

If you look at the typical play time for most of the reviews on Steam, many (if not most of them) are well north of 100 hours (some in the many hundreds of hours). If this is a game you think you'd enjoy, I imagine you'd get your money's worth at $35.
 

SMOGZINN

Lifer
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If this is a game you think you'd enjoy, I imagine you'd get your money's worth at $35.

There is more to value than amount of time played. It also has to compete with other games. For example I have over 3000 hours into The Binding of Isaac, and I paid something like $4.50 for that game. I'm afraid that is the completion that they have to deal with.
 

zinfamous

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There is more to value than amount of time played. It also has to compete with other games. For example I have over 3000 hours into The Binding of Isaac, and I paid something like $4.50 for that game. I'm afraid that is the completion that they have to deal with.

yeah, value = time/$ just doesn't work with video games. I wanted to get into it, thought not, then you posted, lol.

So think about it this way: "We" have more or less collectively determined that "we" are generally OK with spending $10-15 for ~2 hour brainless movie that we will forget about by the time we drive home. So, for entertainment purposes, that puts our comparative $/hr value proposition at $5 to $7.50 per hour. ....Let's call it $6/hr.

Today, AAA, major release games release at about $60, if you aren't counting all of the day-of-release DLC and ridiculous "deluxe" nonsense. This means that for minimum acceptance of value, we should expect at least 10 hours of entertainment from a $60 product...but it's a video game. We don't tend to judge them that way. In fact, I think most would consider that a terrible value for a video game. We expect something north of 25-30 hours minimum for a single player campaign, with hopefully many more hours of late-game, replay, whatever content....assuming with all else being equal, it's actually a competent, and objectively good game (the alternative being: a $10, 30+ hour game could be considered a terrible value because it's just a terrible, lazy, broken game, or for whatever reasons).

I actually think of a game like Mafia, which is actually very short and deceptively lacking in content because of its sandbox design but general lack of sandbox content, to be a very good game, because I think it's designed very well for what it is--almost like an interactive "movie" ....which I understand that most people dislike these days. ...And I get it, but Mafia is different to me because it isn't on rails and you do have freedom to run around do unnecessary things, even though there really isn't much else to do. I think that game (Mafia II) takes something like ~12 hours to finish with a rather high percentage of content completion, IIRC.

Anyway, it's a sliding scale that can't really be defined by cost/hours, because it all depends on the game and the user. ...I also tend to consider that those AAA games that are very expensive to make, involving teams of hundred(s), generally approaching and even eclipsing major Hollywood budgets, are often sold on deep discounts, typically soon after release for many of them. Or even so, because of steam, for many years these games have now been understood to be discounted heavily on sales or down to permanent lower pricing. This never really happened when all games were media-based, or always took some year or years to reach that point. ...so you can also factor in the cost of a game that is very expensive to make and its sale price, MSRP or discounted, as part of what you consider value.

So because of steam, and the open access to more independent developers that are able to go back to classic models and release the type of games that never otherwise be made (like Rimworld)--the games may be great, and certainly the value may be there....but there is a general understanding of what someone is willing to pay for that; especially when comparing to the paradigm of how distribution and pricing works nowadays.

I think it's perfectly fine to want to pay that price if you consider part of it a "donation" to a team that did good work and you want to see continue putting out similar, quality content, but I don't think the bulk of the market will sustain that. At some point, the devs will have to figure out if they would be able to sell x more copies at a lower price than they otherwise would at the current, "permanent" price.
 

SMOGZINN

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This never really happened when all games were media-based, or always took some year or years to reach that point

I think a large part of that is just how popular video games have gotten, and the demographic they are being sold to. It used to be that there was maybe 10 AAA games made a year, and because most video game players were young, they could only afford to buy one or two of those. You played a AAA game for hundreds of hours because that is all you had to play. Now I, as a life long avid video game player, have hundreds of games to choose from. Partially because there is a dozen new games a month made, and because I have built a library of hundreds of games too play. Even if no game I was interested in came out all of next year I could happily go back and play Baulder's Gate again, or get around to playing Fallout New Vegas, or finally finish Dragon Age: Origins. I do not lack options, and that means the value of each individual game has decreased to me.
 

ImpulsE69

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All they have to do is advertise it as 30% off as $30 and people will jump all over it. It doesn't actually have to be a lower price. We've seen this happen on Steam before during 'sales'.
 
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zinfamous

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I think a large part of that is just how popular video games have gotten, and the demographic they are being sold to. It used to be that there was maybe 10 AAA games made a year, and because most video game players were young, they could only afford to buy one or two of those. You played a AAA game for hundreds of hours because that is all you had to play. Now I, as a life long avid video game player, have hundreds of games to choose from. Partially because there is a dozen new games a month made, and because I have built a library of hundreds of games too play. Even if no game I was interested in came out all of next year I could happily go back and play Baulder's Gate again, or get around to playing Fallout New Vegas, or finally finish Dragon Age: Origins. I do not lack options, and that means the value of each individual game has decreased to me.

well yeah, the industry has gotten much larger because:

--vastly larger market (no longer just grade-school boys, teenage boys, and virgin middle-aged men :D)
--distribution model has completely changed.

stamping out physical media, on a per-order basis, and shipping them to stores, paying the shelf-rental fees, is very expensive. There's a huge difference in logistics when comparing How many pieces of media you think you need to order for a first release (hoping that you don't lose buckets of money and sink the company), how many stores you can sell them in, ship them, etc etc....vs how many keys you should "release"

When people make shorty angry by saying that digital distribution means that supply is essentially infinite, they are saying that releasing digital keys is merely modeling a falsely constrained notion of supply. Like, if you wanted to model a potential supply line on a run of widgets, you could plug in an initial order of xxxk widgets and run some math on what you think that will cost getting them out to your store shelves and hopefully make a profit while not ending up with piles of unsold trash. xxxk widgets is a variable that you can set to whatever value you want...so it is essentially infinite. It can be any number. AFAIK, digital keys work the same way--they aren't a physical thing, they are just a key to own a thing. The only thing that exists is the algorithm that creates a new one. I certainly don't know everything about how this all works, but are their actual licensing limits that developers are constrained to with how many keys they can generate for their product? Obviously, printing physical media and shipping it in petrol-consuming trucks and paying for space on a shelf in some shop has real, physical constraints that are always going to factor into the supply that you can generate. I don't see how any of that limits digital key distribution (other than the basic math the limits the available number of unique hexadecimal keys....well, just add some decimals and make new keys, right?)
 

SMOGZINN

Lifer
Jun 17, 2005
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I don't see how any of that limits digital key distribution

The limiting constraint on the supply of a digital item is the work that went into creating it. Once created the supply is basically unlimited, but the frontloaded cost of creation still needs to be recouped. But the developer of Rimworld is working on the idea that their game is 'worth' $30, because they feel that way and don't want to discount it beyond that for moral reasons.

Economically it makes a lot more sense to discount it occasionally. After a few weeks it will have sold like 90% of all sales it is going to make without a large marketing push (which they can't afford) or a good discount (which they seem to be morally opposed to), and they lose almost no potential profit by discounting it at that point, which is why almost every game goes on sale just a few months after release.
 

OCNewbie

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Jul 18, 2000
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But the developer of Rimworld is working on the idea that their game is 'worth' $30, because they feel that way and don't want to discount it beyond that for moral reasons.
If people know that it'll never go on sale, there will never then be a 'right' time to buy it. Any time is the 'right' time. No buyer's remorse of buying it for full price and then narrowly missing a sale and feeling cheated, ripped off, or regretful for not waiting for that 'right' time. Here's our game, here's how much it costs. If you're interested, it'll always be available at that price. It has its pros and cons I suppose.
 

zinfamous

No Lifer
Jul 12, 2006
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If people know that it'll never go on sale, there will never then be a 'right' time to buy it. Any time is the 'right' time. No buyer's remorse of buying it for full price and then narrowly missing a sale and feeling cheated, ripped off, or regretful for not waiting for that 'right' time. Here's our game, here's how much it costs. If you're interested, it'll always be available at that price. It has its pros and cons I suppose.

That is a good point. Then, it really has to stand out as something worth that cost, forever, because at this point it is competing with peoples' time and abundant choices in that arena, and competing against itself. I'm not saying I will never buy it at that price...just that it's extremely unlikely for me, knowing the type of game buyer that I have become, in the modern era with the type of comparable games available, at the prices that I expect.

They will forever miss out on the "eh, it's $5 today only, historically great game, so BETTER GET IT!, and likely never play it!" crowd. ....and I think there are tons of those now. This type of buyer didn't exist in the era that I'm guessing these developers cut their bones playing and planning out games, am I right? But, that is also a ton of confidence that their game really is worth it, it isn't some crap like: "AI War:Fleet Command" that I currently have at the top of my steam library, purchased in 2011 as some sale bundle or whatever, probably paid ~$3, and put 20 minutes of my life into, as I am now reading what steam data is telling me.....that does mean something.

I wouldn't doubt that this game is a way better game than No Man's Sky, and actually worth the $30 cost based on the promised content and effort. NMS is also a game that I refuse to spend more than 20 bucks on. :D
 

Ranulf

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Jul 18, 2001
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Huh, I didn't know the game website offered a DRM free version, I might have bought it earlier if I'd known. I've held off because I thought $30 was too much for my blood. I'm just not feeling the urge to try it despite recomendations from many for a couple of years. Raising the finished product to $35 kinda rubs me the wrong way at this point.
 

OCNewbie

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Jul 18, 2000
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This type of buyer didn't exist in the era that I'm guessing these developers cut their bones playing and planning out games, am I right? But, that is also a ton of confidence that their game really is worth it, it isn't some crap like: "AI War:Fleet Command" that I currently have at the top of my steam library, purchased in 2011 as some sale bundle or whatever, probably paid ~$3, and put 20 minutes of my life into, as I am now reading what steam data is telling me.....that does mean something.
When the game first got its start (on Kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tynansylvester/rimworld), it sounds like it was just a single guy doing the design and programming, and then there was another guy for music. I think it's remained a very small team, so I'm not sure if max revenue has ever been a main goal. I haven't even played it yet (I bought it earlier this year - was waiting for 1.0 to release to start), but everything I hear seems to suggest it's a truly unique game, and the game that is closest to Dwarf Fortress (thought not quite as complex) with a legit GUI, etc. What sold me was the overwhelmingly positive Steam reviews, how much content there seems to be, and how it seems to be truly unique. Who knows, I may not even get into it once I finally play :p I'll probably stick with it until I get the gist of it, and I imagine at that point I'll enjoy it.
 
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Elcs

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Apr 27, 2002
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This is an absolutely fabulous game. I missed the Kickstarter due to 'unemployed' status then 'employed but no pay day before Kickstarter ended' status.

A a deep, rewarding 'colony' builder with serious feels for each and every colonist you have (and inevitably lose) and very moddable. The things the community have managed to do to this solid base game are pretty awesome on their own.

Although Steam cannot count my pre-Steam time, I have ploughed more time into Rimworld than I have any 'builder' type game since SimCity 2000/3000 including Cities:Skylines.
 
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DigDog

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Yes, i've always wanted to play Factorio Rimworld. In my opinion Factorio Rimworld is a very innovative game, 2D map exploration, resource gathering and base building make Minecraft Factorio Rimworld a truly new game experience.

JUST PLAY DWARF FORTRESS ALREADY !
 

OCNewbie

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Jul 18, 2000
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Yes, i've always wanted to play Factorio Rimworld. In my opinion Factorio Rimworld is a very innovative game, 2D map exploration, resource gathering and base building make Minecraft Factorio Rimworld a truly new game experience.

JUST PLAY DWARF FORTRESS ALREADY !
Are Factorio and RimWorld really all that much alike? I've played Factorio a fair bit, but not RimWorld. I'm under the impression that they're not very similar (other than both having Overwhelmingly Positive reviews on Steam).
 

Ranulf

Platinum Member
Jul 18, 2001
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Yes, i've always wanted to play Factorio Rimworld. In my opinion Factorio Rimworld is a very innovative game, 2D map exploration, resource gathering and base building make Minecraft Factorio Rimworld a truly new game experience.

JUST PLAY DWARF FORTRESS ALREADY !

No. Back in your hole you smelly dorf.
 

paperfist

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Nov 30, 2000
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www.the-teh.com
I completely agree. The game very probably is worth $30, but not to me because I already have 300+ games in my backlog. At this point I believe I will literally never get through the backlog of games I already have, so unless a game has some special meaning to me, or offers me something truly unique, I don't buy a game that costs more than $5.

How can you have $300+ games and not have spent more than $5 on one? You must do insane at Black Friday sales.

I sort of can’t believe I paid $30 for it during early access. I just checked it out and it doesn’t look much different than a year ago. I wonder what they changed since then?
 

DigDog

Lifer
Jun 3, 2011
13,443
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Are Factorio and RimWorld really all that much alike?
No .. the gameplay has *some* similarities. But the challenges are different.
And frankly Dwarf Fortress is mind-shattering complex, so i have no problem with people chosing a better, simpler UI and more streamlined gameplay.

But, DF is still an option.
 
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