Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition Q&A

Over at Kotaku, there’s a new interview with Beamdog’s Trent Oster concerning the Enhanced Edition of Baldur’s Gate II. It’s a little short, but certainly not lacking in subjects covered: in-app purchases, bugs, sales, and more. Snippet ahead:

Schreier: It was a little disconcerting to open up the game and immediately see [In-App Purchase] characters, particularly when the game alone costs $15, which is generally considered a high price for this platform. Are you guys not worried about turning people off with this stuff?

Oster: Great question, I’m going to go a little ranty on this so, be forewarned: I’m a firm believer in value and I think the $0.99 app period is ending. $0.99 was a price point used by new developers and new franchises to capture users and attention. Eventually $0.99 apps came to dominate the App Store as the race to the bottom hit the logical endpoint. The only way to beat $0.99 apps was to go free, so a number of groups went free, forcing the bottom even lower. To compensate they built apps which are exclusively designed to bleed money out of users using a large bag of tricks. To me this doesn’t seem like a good value to the game player.

From our perspective, an epic 100+ hours of adventure told in a rich rules system and built upon a great setting is worth a great deal more than $0.99. We put in the in-app purchases as a means for us not to make more money, but to drop the price point for the main game down to the $14.99 price point (the same game on PC is $24.99). With the volume of content between Baldur’s Gate II, the included Throne of Bhaal and the new characters and their associated adventures I think we’re delivering a huge value for the price, even with all the in-app purchases.

I personally have a binary view on pricing: you either want something and you buy it or you don’t want it. If you are persuaded to buy something because of a massive discount, you are getting tricked into buying something you perhaps never really wanted. If something is given to you for free just so you can be hooked into a carefully engineered money-extraction pipeline, then you need to be aware of what is happening and act accordingly. I’ve personally played a number of micro-transaction games over the years and for games I have really enjoyed, I have spent money, more to reward the developers for good work on the game I’m enjoying than anything else. I’ve also played free games where the paywall rose from the ground and punched me square in the face.

When I hit the paywall in an app and realized it is time to start throwing money to make any more progress, I very quickly lose interest. I can think of a half-dozen games I’ve looked at, played for a bit and abandoned once the pay mechanic reared its ugly head. I actually suffer quite badly from paywall fatigue and as such it becomes a clear abandonment point for me in most free-to-play games. In contrast, the Walking Dead game by the most excellent fellows at Telltale Games has a clear value proposition: you like playing the game, pay some money and get more new content. To me, episodic games are a much better mechanism for a good value proposition.

Puff, puff, now I have to catch my breath.