Popular Video Game Series Tries Pay What You Want
from the experiment-away dept
If you follow the market for management "sim" sports games -- which are more about managing a sports team than about the action of playing -- Championship Manager is a name you'll likely recognize. It's a well-known football (soccer) sim, that is currently owned by Eidos (it's moved around a bit). So it's a bit surprising (but fascinating) to learn (via reader mikez) that the folks behind it are running a "pay what you want" experiment with the game. You can't get it totally for free. There's a £2.50 transaction fee, no matter what price, but from there you can pay anything from £0.01 and up. They're only running it for a limited time (until September 10th -- the day before the game is actually released). While I'm not always a huge fan of the "name your own price" deals, it's still fascinating to see a big video game company try it out.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: business models, championship manager, pay what you want, video games
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Usual arguments forthcoming
*Note: This does not reflect the actual view of the poster. Only wanted to make the statement before a real troll.
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I would almost even pay for it!!
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Re: I would almost even pay for it!!
1. Just because *you* don't like the game, that doesn't mean there's not a market of hundreds of millions of people worldwide who do.
2. It's a football management game, you don't really see the sport itself as such. I can't stand watching the game myself (though, being English, I often can't avoid it). But, I actually quite like the management sims for some reason.
3. This is an interesting test case, involving the latest in a *very* long-running and successful series of games (the first was released in 1992). I'm sure you'll get the chance to support this model with a genre you do actually like if it's successful and others follow suit. Until then, stop your whining!
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Re: Re: I would almost even pay for it!!
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Let's see if it will work.
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Given that history, this probably isn't actally a scheme to make money on this year's product, but a loss-leading plan to get people to compare their less-historied development with Football Manager's (the developers of the FM brand having taken a huge number of their fans with them to their new name and publisher).
Given that this game series re-packages and re-sells itself at the start of every football season with only a few tweaks, it's easy to see why risking one year's profits against expanded profits in future years could be an attractive proposition.
It's not always about the most-visible part of the plan, Mike...
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Additionally, as it is a text based sim, production costs on a game like this can't be that high. Even if most people chip in $5-15, the losses probably won't be massive
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Enzyte
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How has it worked out?
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