Slitherine: 480% Sales Growth with Premium Pricing

[Grim.Reaper]

Saw this link at QT3 forums, looks like premium pricing at matrix/slitherine is here to stay:)

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-07-26-slitherine-group-the-case-is-now-made-for-premium-pricing

[LongBlade]

Good for them. They'll be fine makers of tablet gaming software. It's a good market to be in.

[Nefaro]

I'm wondering if we'll only be seeing tablet capable wargames from them sometime in the future.  :-\  They're always so limited in depth.  I'm not sure this bodes all that well for us hardcore wargamers' hobby, however.  Their focus has obviously been shifting towards mobile device so my hopes of getting such things as a modern Spartan/Chariots of War sequel continually falls.  Or even if they were created, they would probably be made with the tablet in mind and 'dumbed down' instead of jazzed up.

And what is "premium pricing" for a tablet game?  $10 to $20?  That's still not much.  Twenty bucks and under is small beans for most adults and that's where the easy sales are.  It's the magic pricepoint.

I'd estimate that Slitherine's sales increases came from the expansion of it's customer base to include more casual players garnered via tablet sales.  Perhaps some of them would even attempt to dive into the deeper end of their PC titles, after getting a taste of the lighter stuff?  But that probably wouldn't be as large as we'd hope.

[airboy]

I have had some back & forth PMs with Slitherine marketing people about their price points.  They believe, and the data supports the belief, that wargames can be sold at a price premium compared to lighter game fare with less competition.

I think that if more light wargames are released that the more hard core games will also become more popular.  That is the way pretty much every other niche market works (speaking as someone who studies huge numbers of markets).

There is another big factor on game availability: who is interested in writing the game.  Some people are purely motivated by money and will design what they think they can make the most money.  Other designers build games that they have an intense personal interest in (think Dominions developers and Fury software builders of the Strategic Command series).  Some developers will be a mix of both personal interest and financial interest.

The beauty of the internet is that products with very limited and highly geographically dispersed demand can make a living selling their goods.  The current explosion in wargames is yet another good example of this.

In general, I always want to see companies make money in products I want to buy.  The only downside of that I have seen in recent years has been the current duck hunting frenzy spurred by "Duck Dynasty" which has made it harder to get a spot to go duck hunting.

[agathosdaimon]

i hope that can work - that if more people are exposed to simple, light pfaffy wargames they may want for something deeper and more engaging - the question is though whether consumers will be aware even that this is can exist for them and whether they computers/laptops and not just the tablets.

Hopefully the interest that sustains the release of computer wargames proper is not short circuited by a lack of knowledge among newer consumers as to what a good wargame can actually be like.

I had been playing only really RTS games for a number of years, thinking that Turn Based was just slow and unrealistic but once i developed an interest in more than just wanting to see an animation of units shooting or meleeing, instead to see how critical other things like supply lines and communications are that i found how lacking most RTS games were in the operational art of war and my interest shifted. Much of which was helped by reading some thrilling AAR's such as the one on the web for ADANAC's Campaigns on the Danube and such. Thus what i could enjoy in a wargame in the actual time i might stpend changed, now, if i spend an hour on just one or two turns on Campaign Leipzig, that gives me alot of pleasure and alot to think about and imagine also.

however given how small in size some of the masterpieces that we can still enjoy today on dosbox are, is it possilbe for tablet games to be much bigger in scope and depth? I wish i had an android tablet instead of my ipad so i could use Dosbox Turbo on it, which perhaps makes this a reality.

[SgtRock]

It's good if it helps bring new players into the market but, will the PC just become more of a niche market in the future?  Tables will become more powerful over time but, not sure it will becoming a hard core gaming platform. I think the big danger is developers skipping the PC market to make games for tablets. Less complex games means less development time and lower costs. If a developer can make 2 or 3 tablet games in the same time it takes to make 1 PC game, then PC gaming will shrink. PC gaming started out as a niche hard core game platform, maybe just maybe that's what it'll go back to.

[vyshka]

There is a difference between the premium price points they are setting for tablet games and the premium prices they are setting on pc though. I don't think anyone has been complaining about their pricing on tablets and saying that it is hurting them, it is the premium pricing they use for the pc titles that people take issue with.

[FlickJax]

There is a difference between the premium price points they are setting for tablet games and the premium prices they are setting on pc though. I don't think anyone has been complaining about their pricing on tablets and saying that it is hurting them, it is the premium pricing they use for the pc titles that people take issue with.

+1

[Grim.Reaper]

There is a difference between the premium price points they are setting for tablet games and the premium prices they are setting on pc though. I don't think anyone has been complaining about their pricing on tablets and saying that it is hurting them, it is the premium pricing they use for the pc titles that people take issue with.

Which is kind of funny since they both are roughly the same....a lot of mobile apps/games are free/.99/ or just a couple of dollars, but Matrix charges much more.  Same with their desktop games, on some of their titles, they are much more and they usually keep the same pricing for their products even after been out for years (except for the recent weekly sales).  I don't see it being much different since the gaps are the same in comparison to their specific markets.  Mobile apps just seem like a better deal because their price marks are lower to start with.  Its not really the final price that is the big deal, it is more about how potentially out of line it is with the rest.....but of course they must be doing something right since they seem to be doing well financially.

[JasonPratt]

Thank goodness, I thought this thread was about them deciding to stop their occasional sales and going back to nothing except a 30% Christmas sale. ;)


If premium pricing on tablets works for them, great, more power to them. (It apparently works for Square Enix.  8) ) If they release something nifty for tablets, I have a completely free open-source Android software emulator on my Win8 (which can easily be set up to emulate iOS or various other things), so as long as the game itself isn't buggy (which I've found a lot of Android games to be) and runs on the next-most-recent version of the Android OS (Jelly Bean or whatever it is), I'm good to go.