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.






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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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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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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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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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