The Castle Doctrine is basically the video game equivalent of last year’s crowning achievement that I managed to see in theaters – The Purge. The core concept is that for twelve hours a year, all crimes are legalized and the crazies with too much money can run amok and murder the people they’ve been hating all year. Alright, the game basically stops at the whole home defense/burglary concept, but after seeing it in action, I had to make that comparison.
Despite how awesome The Castle Doctrine looks in motion, the game’s creator, Jason Rohrer, has taken a stance that will easily offend lots of frequenters of Steam’s annual (and somewhat infamous) sales. Instead of following a similar pricing structure in which other developers put their games on a Steam sale to rake in quick sales, Rohrer has promised that after January 29th, his game will be full price – and it will remain full price, forever.
His reasoning behind this is that instead of a game having strong, healthy sales from day to day (presumably at full price), fans will simply wait for it to go on a Steam sale, lobbed in with loads of other games that also went on heavy clearance. He expressed concerns with this, claiming that not only does this mean possibly fewer people will get the game at launch (at full price), but they will also simply add the clearanced game to their massive backlog, seemingly to never give it a chance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OfcwdEaNzQ
He went further to say that instead of impulse buying several titles that they’ll probably never play, a fan who buys a game that he or she is truly interested in, knowing it’ll never go on sale, will ultimately end up happier and feeling more rewarded with their purchase. Rohrer even made the bold statement (as expressed in the headline) that “sales screw your fans,” and his thoughts on this are echoed with the fact that sometimes a game gets heavily clearanced on Steam mere weeks or months after its release. To fans who bought the game at full price, or even at a slightly clearanced price, this could be very upsetting.
Right now the game is available in Alpha form for $8 dollars, a price that is only available until January 28th. After this, the game will raise in price to $12 dollars until February 4th, where the game will raise to $16 dollars, forevermore. So what do you guys think – are Steam sales bad?
