Aquaria: best indie game ever????evr.

[Taylor]

Two years, according to the artist.

[KoKo5oVaR]

Holy shit, i just beaten the game after 14 hours and this is what i call a final boss battle.. So who else finally bought it ?

[Sentura]

i would have considered buying if the game was something along 10 or 15 bucks.. but 30? no way. i could buy a regular game for that price and it would be better spent.

[Thrik]

Yeah, that's why I said it's a shame it didn't come out when games like this were more common. Back then this was considered a proper game.

Although a proper game is more like $50-$70 here, not $30 -- that's actually not terrible, and about the same price as Team Fortress 2. Guess it depends on your tastes.

[RD]

How is this not a proper game?

[Taylor]

Not enough bloom.

[Thrik]

I just used 'proper' as a synonym for 'technologically more akin to other conventional games of its era'.

You clearly know what I mean.

[KoKo5oVaR]

I've experienced 14 non-linear hours of fun, things that i find quite rare these days in the world of proper virtual murder simulators.

[zaphod]

Interestingly, hours of entertainment provided has little to do with perceived value for many people. I know many people that buy many full price games and only get about 4-6 hours of play out of them before they go on the shelf. But they perceive more value in that small amount of time. I suspect it has a lot to do with the notion of consuming things that are popular and prominent in the marketplace. For example, my roomate has a giant collection of games, 90% of which he has only played once or twice. The value he gets out of it is in having "his collection" of games. He will also constantly crawl gamespot and buy many of the popular games when they come out. He seems to get a lot of value out of simply buying and consuming these releases even if it is only for a short period of time.

[Warby]

id by it was 15 bucks ... seriously these kind of indie games just cant expect people to shell out such high payments they gotta go for the:"curiosity "-sells and than get a word of mouth avalanche going ... i think the 30 dollar price point stands in the way of large scale success for this game

[zaphod]

what other features / elements would justify a $30 price in your opinion?

games like Zuma, Chuzzle and Peggle normally sell at $20. Do you think Aquaria is less, more, or about the same value than any of those 3 games ?

not saying you should think one way or the other, I am honestly curious what you (or others) think. What elements make a game valuable to you?

[Sentura]

i think those games overpriced, zaphod. either of them should not cost more than 10 bucks on the steam platform, where little money goes into publishing; it's a ripoff. 15-20 bucks is alright for a game like aquaria even though it might offer less actual content than free indie games like cavestory. they are shooting themselves in the foot though - i reckon they could have gotten a larger clientele by lowering their price 10 or 15 bucks, so their loss.

also to answer your question more properly, i value a game in "value", a mix of gameplay/fun and features/content; features/content actually linking back to fun as well. i reckon alot of people have the same thing - whenever they buy something, they want to feel that they got some value for their money.

[Thrik]

$10 is a bit cheap really. That's pretty much the same price I pay for my lunch a few days a week. I'd say $15-$20 is reasonable for any budget game, which is about on par with a cinema ticket.

I think $30 really isn't bad seeing as it's a long game. Cheaper games like Peggle tend to have no story and pretty much just have arcade-like gameplay, which Aquaria doesn't. I think Zaphod has a very good point with bringing up the perception of value: what exactly is it that makes Aquaria seem so undeserving of less than half the amount of money as the many shit Xbox 360 and PS3 games out there? If it delivers relatively high production values and a memorable story-based experience, is it really not worth half the price of a retail game?

I think it is.

[st0lve]

Your lunch must suck, since I buy $18 lunch almost every day

If the game is so amazing, with over 14 hours on non linear gameplay, then the game could be like $25, hell these days you pay like $60 for 5-6 hours of linear gameplay. Graphics might be better, but not as cool.

[Thrik]

God, what do you buy??

Even a foot-long Subway is only about $9 here, and I usually settle for something smaller from the supermarket. I guess a straight conversion isn't very good though as the pound is quite strong at the moment relative to the dollar.