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[LastFootnote]

I would probably set these prices:

And how much for Super Mario Galaxy 2?

To me that's the crux of this comparison between expansions and the main set. Super Mario Galaxy 2 is just more Super Mario Galaxy. It's the same game with a few polishes and new levels. But it's billed as a game, a full-on game to be charged for. It cost $60 or whatever just like Super Mario Galaxy. You could bill it as DLC instead and then you'd have to charge way less. I can see why they didn't do that.

They didn't do it because the Wii doesn't support DLC. But the WiiU does support DLC, so they did do it with New Super Luigi U. Crazy!

Seaside isn't somehow less of a product than Dominion. In fact it's more of a product than Dominion. It's better really across the board.

Yes, you're right. The base game should be at most $3. Maybe free.

Ascension schmension. You are not swaying me with any argument about Ascension, find a different game to harp on.

You can't fool me; I am not convincing you any which way! I might as well use Ascension as my example because it's the best example available. It's the closest analog to Dominion on the app store in terms of the structure of expansions, etc. Actually, I found out in my research that any Ascension expansion (not counting promo packs) can be played as a standalone. So their pricing model makes even less sense, and yet it seems to be working for them. If it wasn't working, they wouldn't keep adapting the expansions.

It's intellectual property; the more popular it is the less you have to charge. Look around in the world for endless examples of popular cheap things and expensive niche items. The popularity and being intellectual property lets you charge less; popularity can also let you charge more and people charge what they can but that's the wrong lesson here. The entire board game industry is an example; board games would be much cheaper if they were much more popular. Compare pricing on Monopoly and a euro with similar components; Monopoly is the more popular game but is much cheaper.

Man, you can argue all you want about how you think things are or should be. The examples I showed you are the reality of the mobile market. Those were not cherry-picked examples, either. I just thought of some famous games and searched for them. Each expansion wants to be in the "impulse buy" price range, not ever so slightly above it in the "I need to budget for this" price range.

I'm really confused about why you think Dominion needs to be more expensive than these other games. The good news is that if you're gauging Dominion's potential sales on the app store by Goko's sales, you're underestimating its appeal by a factor of at least 100.

[pacovf]

I am not entirely sure of why you are trying to convince Donald though. He has no say on MF's pricing strategy, as far as I can tell.

[LastFootnote]

I am not entirely sure of why you are trying to convince Donald though. He has no say on MF's pricing strategy, as far as I can tell.

Just having a conversation. But you're right, it's not a conversation we really need to have. I think I just have a certain amount of compulsion to post opinions.

[Donald X.]

Seaside isn't somehow less of a product than Dominion. In fact it's more of a product than Dominion. It's better really across the board. And more work went into it. To me Seaside isn't DLC for Dominion; it's Super Mario Galaxy 2. You want it to be cheaper and well that makes no sense to me.

Does the fact that you must own the base set in order to use Seaside not come into play?

Once they were all going to be standalones. BGG didn't like it so only Intrigue is. Of course if you know the rules the large sets all stand alone provided you have Base Cards - and were designed to stand alone - and online we give you the base cards.

[Donald X.]

I really don't think you have anything to complain about here.

You, werothegreat, are the thing I have to complain about. I can solve that problem of course; I can just not look. It's a proven solution and everything.

There's no need to be antagonistic here.

Okay, $1 may have been a bit low.  This is why I'm not setting these prices, and why I go with Amazon's recommended pricing for my book.  But I can at least tell when something is more expensive than it should be.  Effort =/= cost.  Product = cost.  George R. R. Martin may spend 5 years each on his books, but that doesn't mean he can charge more per page than Stephen King, who pumps those babies out twice a year or some nonsense like that.  If you're worried about Dominion not being popular enough, and thus needing to be more expensive to recoup the cost, I think you're looking at it the wrong way.  A higher price is not the way to get someone who doesn't know about your game to buy it.  A competitive price is.  MF needs to scale their prices to similar products, or they're not going to sell anything.  isotropic didn't get so many players just because it was a good product - being free helped a lot.  And before you spew the whole "people like free pizza" argument again, you have to realize that what you think people should want does not reflect what they actually want.  If you don't cater to what your intended audience wants, they're not going to buy your product.  I think the fact that pretty much everyone on here and on MF's forums have balked at the $90 price tag is evidence enough of that.

The key to not being trolled is to make sure your posts are shorter than the other person's. Here my post is quite short; phew, safe. Say whatever you want dude, even crazy stuff; for sure I don't need to argue about it with you.

[pacovf]

The key to not being trolled is to make sure your posts are shorter than the other person's. Here my post is quite short; phew, safe. Say whatever you want dude, even crazy stuff; for sure I don't need to argue about it with you.

I am sure you are aware of that fact, but accusing someone of trolling is in itself a form of trolling.

...Does this make me a meta-meta-troll? Now my head is hurting.

[Donald X.]

They didn't do it because the Wii doesn't support DLC. But the WiiU does support DLC, so they did do it with New Super Luigi U. Crazy!

You've got nothing here. Yes they have done DLC now. The DLC is much less work than the games they attach to. New Super Luigi U is not as much work-put-in/content as New Super Mario Bros U. And we don't know how that went for them, if they feel like they should have made it a separate game or what.

You can't fool me; I am not convincing you any which way! I might as well use Ascension as my example because it's the best example available.

In fact when you start talking about Dominion-inspired games, I just ignore everything you say about them. I don't want to hear it and don't have to. So, whether you can convince me of anything or not, you really can't that way. If I'm missing out on great arguments as a result I am cool with that.

Man, you can argue all you want about how you think things are or should be. The examples I showed you are the reality of the mobile market. Those were not cherry-picked examples, either. I just thought of some famous games and searched for them. Each expansion wants to be in the "impulse buy" price range, not ever so slightly above it in the "I need to budget for this" price range.

I don't understand why you say this. Monopoly isn't cherry-picking. Board games really actually truly are so expensive because they are so unpopular. And if I were talking about how I think things should be, it would be no relation to any of this; again intellectual property is handled very poorly by humanity at the moment. Income from intellectual property should not be proportional to the size of the population.

Sure all products want to be impulse-buy trick-people-into-getting-it-who-don't-want-it. I don't care about that and just try to make things I like but sure. These are "expansions" but really they're full-game-size full games. I have not convinced you of that and oh well.

I'm really confused about why you think Dominion needs to be more expensive than these other games. The good news is that if you're gauging Dominion's potential sales on the app store by Goko's sales, you're underestimating its appeal by a factor of at least 100.

Here you are again acting as if I have said what price online Dominion should cost, despite only saying "not $1 for Adventures" and those other things I said that weren't numbers. If you are just keying off of my comments on Settlers, well Settlers can afford to be cheaper-than-otherwise due to much-more-massive popularity, that was the point there.

Your numbers just don't tell me anything. If you want to say "they say what people will pay for online board games" well I can be convinced that really no-one should be making these products, that no-one can make money from them, that at best they're promotional money sinks. There's a Kingdom Builder app; let me tell you, it doesn't pay the rent. Making Fun has to pay people who live in the Bay Area; I can believe that's impossible with online versions of board games. It's sure not possible at what they've been pulling in.

[Donald X.]

The key to not being trolled is to make sure your posts are shorter than the other person's. Here my post is quite short; phew, safe. Say whatever you want dude, even crazy stuff; for sure I don't need to argue about it with you.

I am sure you are aware of that fact, but accusing someone of trolling is in itself a form of trolling.

...Does this make me a meta-meta-troll? Now my head is hurting.

At some point though, you can't make your post shorter than theirs, and so you become the trolled. me safe now tho

[Donald X.]

Just having a conversation. But you're right, it's not a conversation we really need to have. I think I just have a certain amount of compulsion to post opinions.

And by "certain" you mean gigantic. But it's a star attribute for forum posters. Or playtesters.

[Donald X.]

I'm here to look at some of your delightful numbers. Maybe they meant something after all; let's check 'em out.

Catan: $4.99
  Seafarers: $4.99
  Cities and Knights: $4.99
  The new scenarios: $1.99
  All-expansions Bundle: $9.99

Seafarers and Cities & Knights are both expansions full of content. They cost just as much as the main game; I approve. The main game is $5 and well Catan is a huge hit irl, dunno if you knew that.

Carcassonne: $9.99
  River: $0.99
  Inns & Cathedrals: $1.99
  Traders & Builders: $1.99
  Princess & Dragon: $1.99
  Phantom: $0.99
  Double Base Tile Set: $0.99
  Winter: $1.99
  5th Anniversary Bundle: $4.99

Carcassonne is really successful but still a pale shadow of Settlers, almost as if that explains it costing more. I don't know how Dominion compares to it these days - Carcassonne is older for one thing - but this is getting in the ballpark of Dominion's level of popularity. The expansions are very low-content tiny things, perhaps explaining why they priced them at 1/5 of the game's cost. Except Winter, I think that's just new art. And, from the title, "Double Base Tile Set" is well nothing. Man, no Catapult?

Ticket to Ride: $1.99
  Ticket to Ride USA - 1910 Expansion: $0.99

Ticket to Ride Europe: $1.99
  Ticket to Ride - Switzerland: $0.99

Here I don't know much. I don't have Ticket to Ride; I've played various traveling salesman games of Alan Moon's but not this game. I think the expansions are just a different board? And the game does not have a lot to it. However good it may be, it's not, from a real-life viewpoint, endless playtested cards, or, from a programming viewpoint, endless programmed cards. It is not those things, it is simple rules and cards with no functionality and a map of connections you can replace with a different map.

If I had to go by this data - which of course I don't and won't - then Carcassonne was the closest benchmark, although not its expansions, they are tiny, you heard it here. However Carcasonne and its expansions would be way faster to program than Dominion and its expansions.

[Cave-o-sapien]

The problem is that digital Dominion has two (potential) audiences. There's some overlap—people who would play both—but mostly it's pretty clean cut.

The first audience is casual mobile gamers. If you're trying to cater to that audience, you want an application that runs natively on iOS and Android. For this audience:

• Production values are important, including graphics, sound, animations, and other interface details.
• The expansions don't need to be released all at once.
• It's not important to have post-game logs (or even an always-visible side log), though a leaderboard might be nice.
• Offline play against an AI is a must.

The payment model that makes sense here would be a very cheap app ($0 to $5), and very cheap expansions ($1 for Guilds, $2 for Prosperity, $3 for Dark Ages). No subscription fee.

The second audience (that's us!) treats Dominion like chess. If you're trying to cater to that audience, you want a web-based application. For this audience:

• Production values are a very low priority.
• The expansions should all be available.
• Post-game logs and the ability to collect statistics is paramount.
• An AI need not exist at all.

The payment model that makes sense here is a monthly or yearly subscription that gives you access to all published cards.

Goko tried to satisfy both camps, but they couldn't get their app into the mobile marketplace and their payment system was the wrong one for the audience they did get. In a baffling turn of events, Making Fun is now attempting the same thing.

If I were Jay, I would partner with a company like Playdek to make the mobile version for casual players. Then I would partner with Doug to set up a subscription for isotropic Dominion ($1 or $2 per month). Or if that's too much hassle, just let isotropic be free again, financed by donations. It really poses zero financial threat when it comes to the audience that Dominion Online should be pursuing, which is casual gamers on mobile devices.

I'm sort of in both categories you describe. While I once played Dominion online like it was Chess, I'm not sure I can devote that much time to it any more. But I would certainly like to play it more than I'm currently able to face-to-face with my friends.

I would love to be able to squeeze in an offline game here or there on my phone, if for no other reason than to explore the card combination space.

It's frustrating and quite honestly baffling that no one seems to believe enough in the untapped mobile market to develop a version of Dominion for it.

[LastFootnote]

Man, you can argue all you want about how you think things are or should be. The examples I showed you are the reality of the mobile market. Those were not cherry-picked examples, either. I just thought of some famous games and searched for them. Each expansion wants to be in the "impulse buy" price range, not ever so slightly above it in the "I need to budget for this" price range.

I don't understand why you say this. Monopoly isn't cherry-picking.

I was not implying or even thinking that you were cherry-picking your examples. I'm not sure why I said it other than to confirm that no, I was not in fact intentionally messing with data in order to prove my own point.

I'm really confused about why you think Dominion needs to be more expensive than these other games. The good news is that if you're gauging Dominion's potential sales on the app store by Goko's sales, you're underestimating its appeal by a factor of at least 100.

Here you are again acting as if I have said what price online Dominion should cost, despite only saying "not $1 for Adventures" and those other things I said that weren't numbers. If you are just keying off of my comments on Settlers, well Settlers can afford to be cheaper-than-otherwise due to much-more-massive popularity, that was the point there.

Your numbers just don't tell me anything. If you want to say "they say what people will pay for online board games" well I can be convinced that really no-one should be making these products, that no-one can make money from them, that at best they're promotional money sinks. There's a Kingdom Builder app; let me tell you, it doesn't pay the rent. Making Fun has to pay people who live in the Bay Area; I can believe that's impossible with online versions of board games. It's sure not possible at what they've been pulling in.

Well I have no numbers on how whether these board game apps are profitable. It seems reasonable to assume that they are or there wouldn't be so many of them (there are a ton). But maybe they don't break even and are somehow used primarily to drive physical board game sales. That would imply that the board game publisher is paying the software company, which doesn't seem likely.

Physical board games would be cheaper if they were more popular, true. But a large part of that would be economies of scale. Economies of scale don't exist for digitally distributed software; there is effectively zero cost involved in "making" each copy. If halving the price of a digital thing more than doubles the number of buyers, then the price should be halved.

Just having a conversation. But you're right, it's not a conversation we really need to have. I think I just have a certain amount of compulsion to post opinions.

And by "certain" you mean gigantic. But it's a star attribute for forum posters. Or playtesters.

Believe it or not, I have, on more than one occasion, wanted to post a thing and then not posted that thing.

[pacovf]

Well I have no numbers on how whether these board game apps are profitable. It seems reasonable to assume that they are or there wouldn't be so many of them (there are a ton). But maybe they don't break even and are somehow used primarily to drive physical board game sales. That would imply that the board game publisher is paying the software company, which doesn't seem likely.

I remember reading an interview about Days of Wonder game apps (I think it was in the PA report? Shame that thing ended). They mentioned that they don't really make that much money out of the apps, but that it does drive up the sales of the physical copies. Days of Wonder are both editors and publishers of their games, IIRC, so that might change their approach.

Believe it or not, I have, on more than one occasion, wanted to post a thing and then not posted that thing.

but it burrrrrrnnnnnnsssss

[Donald X.]

Well I have no numbers on how whether these board game apps are profitable. It seems reasonable to assume that they are or there wouldn't be so many of them (there are a ton). But maybe they don't break even and are somehow used primarily to drive physical board game sales. That would imply that the board game publisher is paying the software company, which doesn't seem likely.

BSW was paid to program and host Dominion. They were fast too, I mean they had it up in weeks. People always contrast Doug with the Funsockets / Goko / MakingFun, and well I understand that, but make no mistake: BSW, also fast.

If halving the price of a digital thing more than doubles the number of buyers, then the price should be halved.

Yes, ignoring bandwidth costs which we normally can and barring potential negative effects on physical products which I have no data on; and if it won't, then it shouldn't be halved.

However this isn't actually just a digital thing; I don't know if server costs are "essentially nothing" or "man, something, they occupy space in a place with valuable real estate and require a guy to maintain them who rents an expensive apartment and eats out a lot." The formula isn't X times Y, that's the point; if servers are not free then double the buyers at half the price is in fact less money. Well unless they just buy it and never use it.

Believe it or not, I have, on more than one occasion, wanted to post a thing and then not posted that thing.

I've lapped you dude. I have written so many posts I then didn't post, where saying my thing about whatever fun topic didn't sound like fun if I had to then argue about it. I've deleted a paragraph from this very post (it was about economies of scale not being the whole story for board games being expensive but it's just not important).

[Ratsia]

From my perspective, the best value, recognizing that money isn't the only thing worth having, would have been for there never to have been any online versions.

Do you mean literally no online version for the public (that is, excluding playtesting), or no commercial online version?

The comment regarding the interaction with the community sucking can be interpreted in rather different ways depending on the answer. This community (which I hope you see as net positive thing despite some faults) would largely not exist without some online version, whereas I fully understand that the interaction regarding the commercial versions largely evolves around negative things that the small profit indeed could not compensate for.

[Cuzz]

It seems only reasonable that the online expansions should cost <10% of the physical sets. After all, I've only played several hundred times as many games and gotten several hundred times as much enjoyment from playing online as I have with the physical cards.

[GendoIkari]

The key to not being trolled is to make sure your posts are shorter than the other person's. Here my post is quite short; phew, safe. Say whatever you want dude, even crazy stuff; for sure I don't need to argue about it with you.

I am sure you are aware of that fact, but accusing someone of trolling is in itself a form of trolling.

...Does this make me a meta-meta-troll? Now my head is hurting.

At some point though, you can't make your post shorter than theirs, and so you become the trolled. me safe now tho

.

[pacovf]

The key to not being trolled is to make sure your posts are shorter than the other person's. Here my post is quite short; phew, safe. Say whatever you want dude, even crazy stuff; for sure I don't need to argue about it with you.

I am sure you are aware of that fact, but accusing someone of trolling is in itself a form of trolling.

...Does this make me a meta-meta-troll? Now my head is hurting.

At some point though, you can't make your post shorter than theirs, and so you become the trolled. me safe now tho

.

[SCSN]

I kind of like the "Arcade model", where you buy a bunch of credits and pay a (very) small amount per game, with the cost depending on how many/which expansions you want to use and possibly other factors.

It eliminates the fatal flaw of the current model that forces new players who want the full experience into going long on MF's DO lifespan, and it's more welcoming to players who play irregularly than a subscription model.

It also gives MF a clear incentive to improve the experience of existing players (better experience = more plays = more $), and to compensate the people who already paid they could give them more than their money's worth in playing credits, which I think most would accept given that it might well be the difference between a long-term healthy project and something that's going to die within a year or 2-3.

[GendoIkari]

I kind of like the "Arcade model", where you buy a bunch of credits and pay a (very) small amount per game, with the cost depending on how many/which expansions you want to use and possibly other factors.

It eliminates the fatal flaw of the current model that forces new players who want the full experience into going long on MF's DO lifespan, and it's more welcoming to players who play irregularly than a subscription model.

It also gives MF a clear incentive to improve the experience of existing players (better experience = more plays = more $), and to compensate the people who already paid they could give them more than their money's worth in playing credits, which I think most would accept given that it might well be the difference between a long-term healthy project and something that's going to die within a year or 2-3.

That sounds really bad. Some players have well over 12,000 games of online Dominion under their belt. To make this not insanely expensive, you'd have to charge less than $0.01 per game. And if you're charging less than a cent per game, you're not getting anything at all out of players who just want to try it out and only play once. Then in the competitive scene, it becomes almost a "pay to win" like MTG; players who can only afford to play a few games per week will have a huge disadvantage over players who can afford to play hundreds of games per week.

[SCSN]

I kind of like the "Arcade model", where you buy a bunch of credits and pay a (very) small amount per game, with the cost depending on how many/which expansions you want to use and possibly other factors.

It eliminates the fatal flaw of the current model that forces new players who want the full experience into going long on MF's DO lifespan, and it's more welcoming to players who play irregularly than a subscription model.

It also gives MF a clear incentive to improve the experience of existing players (better experience = more plays = more $), and to compensate the people who already paid they could give them more than their money's worth in playing credits, which I think most would accept given that it might well be the difference between a long-term healthy project and something that's going to die within a year or 2-3.

That sounds really bad. Some players have well over 12,000 games of online Dominion under their belt. To make this not insanely expensive, you'd have to charge less than $0.01 per game. And if you're charging less than a cent per game, you're not getting anything at all out of players who just want to try it out and only play once. Then in the competitive scene, it becomes almost a "pay to win" like MTG; players who can only afford to play a few games per week will have a huge disadvantage over players who can afford to play hundreds of games per week.

Why not find some ways to address these issues within the proposed model before outright dismissing it? You're a smart guy, I'm sure you can think something up.

[drsteelhammer]

I'm not sure if an arcade model is the right thing, since it discourages playing in a way. But I fully agree that people should get to experience the game properly before paying 90$.

My proposition would be that you can acitivate all the expansions for a few days to test them out. The only problem with that would be that it might be exploitable by creating new accounts over and over, but I'm sure you could circumvent that.

[LastFootnote]

I'm not sure if an arcade model is the right thing, since it discourages playing in a way. But I fully agree that people should get to experience the game properly before paying 90$.

My proposition would be that you can acitivate all the expansions for a few days to test them out. The only problem with that would be that it might be exploitable by creating new accounts over and over, but I'm sure you could circumvent that.

Another idea that avoids exploitation is just to have a certain number of expansion cards that are "free", and they cycle every day or week. Today Horse Traders, Menagerie, and Jester are publicly available. Tomorrow it's Graverobber, Poor House, and Sage.

[tailred]

I'm not sure if an arcade model is the right thing, since it discourages playing in a way. But I fully agree that people should get to experience the game properly before paying 90$.

My proposition would be that you can acitivate all the expansions for a few days to test them out. The only problem with that would be that it might be exploitable by creating new accounts over and over, but I'm sure you could circumvent that.

Another idea that avoids exploitation is just to have a certain number of expansion cards that are "free", and they cycle every day or week. Today Horse Traders, Menagerie, and Jester are publicly available. Tomorrow it's Graverobber, Poor House, and Sage.

Almost sounds League-of-Legends-ish.

[werothegreat]

I'm not sure if an arcade model is the right thing, since it discourages playing in a way. But I fully agree that people should get to experience the game properly before paying 90$.

My proposition would be that you can acitivate all the expansions for a few days to test them out. The only problem with that would be that it might be exploitable by creating new accounts over and over, but I'm sure you could circumvent that.

Another idea that avoids exploitation is just to have a certain number of expansion cards that are "free", and they cycle every day or week. Today Horse Traders, Menagerie, and Jester are publicly available. Tomorrow it's Graverobber, Poor House, and Sage.

Kind of like what Smite does with Gods.  Maybe MF could have expansions unlockable either through real money or some currency accrued through playing?  So you have the option to either grind however many hours before unlocking Seaside or whatever, or just say "fuck it" and pull out your wallet?