At 15 bucks USD ($12 on sale on steam right now) I feel like Nidhogg is a really bad value. For a game that seems to be very simplistic by design, I don't see anyone getting 15 bucks worth of depth out of it. The draw seems to be local multiplayer a-la divekick, but beyond that, why would you get this?

Most of the appreciation for this game has been from it being something of an indie darling, i'd like to try it, but not at this price, anyone else agree? Or disagree?

Maybe?

Sure, it probably could've been 5 bucks cheaper.

Hey man over here at full price it's closer to $20, so at least you have it better. But really, doesn't look like something I'd pay this much money for.

Games like Gone Home or Brothers have been pushing the price envelope. It doesn't help that game journalists refuse to acknowledge the importance of price relative to game length. Even Samurai Gun which costs $15 and offers only couch co op was deemed totally fine in terms of pricing.

WHY BUY GAME!?

Hopefully people who are buying it will get their money's worth, however I tend to agree it seems a bit pricey. Its possible that all the hype surrounding this game let them increase the price, but who knows?

Definitely hard to gauge a game without playing it. Either way, it will go on sale eventually so the price doesn't matter all that much in the long run.

But at the same time, games are already kinda under priced for their value. I mean, $15 is a low quality dinner or a 3D film. Those are over a lot faster then almost all video games.

I mean, Blackjack at Vegas can be $25 a hand! Minimum! I dunno. When you are younger and don't have a job I can get where you are coming from, but I just don't worry about price that much anymore. And whenever I do, that's what steam sales are for.

Nah. I think time/price is not a good way to see value for your money and, even then, I can get more good time by a well made competitive local-only than a lot of other games.

Game are super hard to make, most indie games sell for not much I feel compared to the work that went into it.

why do I need to agree?

Simple doesn't mean that it has to be cheap. Another game that has had this debate was Samurai Gunn, which unless you play can seem like a game that is lacking features (after spending too many hours playing Samurai Gunn would never work online). Really I feel that games like this it depends on if you know that you will play it with other people. I got my friends together to play samurai gunn at my house and now they are all hooked and want to play it when ever they come over, haven't play Nidhogg yet, but if it is good then i feel it could also fit that niche of fun games to play with your friends at home.

Single player arcade mode, local and online multi-player, full controller support. Sounds like a shit load more value than some of the other stuff you can get on steam for $14.99

I wish demos were still considered important by game enthusiasts. I sorely want to try it out.

I'm with you. I'm not raking in six digits or anything, but $15 for an experience that I can return to over and over seems like a good deal to me. I understand not having a lot of spending money, but saying a game isn't worth something doesn't seem like the solution. I mean, this isn't Angry Birds Star Wars here. $15 seems totally reasonable to me.

Nidhogg offers both local and online multiplayer and has a single player mode, so I'd say that the pricing is totally fine. 10 bucks is perhaps the ideal - I got Divekick for that price, after all - but it's not a dealbreaker.

It definitely sounds better than Samurai Gunn, also a 15 dollar game that is based solely on couch multiplayer, preferably with 4 people at once.

Also, considering how much my friends play the much more simplistic parody of Nidhogg - Eggnogg - the price seems adequate.

I agree that stuff like Nidhogg and Samurai Gunn should probably be $10 USD. Sure, a finely tuned multiplayer game can take as much dev time and effort as a scripted single player campaign, but especially in Samurai Gunn's case, I'm going to find so few opportunities to play a local-only multiplayer PC game that it's going to be hard to feel like the purchase was worth it.

Also, come on, Gone Home totally should've been $15, or even $10. And Dear Esther is highway robbery at $10, and should be $5. I can at least admit that Gone Home has crazy amounts of detail and polish and voice acting. Dear Esther is just simple Source engine environments and one dude narrating some stuff.

Whatever, devs gotta eat, I guess.

I guess wait for the steam sale, I agree it sounds steep...but at some point it'll be 5 bucks on steam.

What I'm hearing is: Windjammers is not worth $15.

Replace Nidhogg in the first post with Windjammers and it still works

Come on, local multiplayer focused games with simple design and a lot of dept are fine at $15

It looks like a lot of fun:

Looks like a good offer for the money. 15 isn't a lot after all. And if you feel it's expensive, wait for a steam sale. I fail to see the problem.

so I just beat the single player, it took me about 50 minutes but I'm sure I could do it faster with prctice. The game is a lot of fun and has a bunch of interesting modifiers and stuff in the multiplayer. sadly I havent found a match online yet but I guess thats to be expected an hour after release lol.

just played about 40 minutes of it, loved every damn momen. I can easily see myself sinking dozens of hours into the multiplayer. There's a lot more value than apparent at first glance as there's a shocking amount of complexity to what initially appears pretty simple. You can duck, jump, attack as well as change your sword-stance (which includes throwing it). Combining these allow you to disarm your enemy, riposte, attack beneath his guard, sweeping his legs out from under him and possibly breaking his neck, jumping off walls, DIVEKICKs, as well as a myriad of gruesome ways to stab or beat the unlucky sod to death. It's a very intense game, and I found myself constantly watching the position of the enemy's sword, trying to read his attacks to see if I would be able to roll beneath his guard and stab him or perhaps knock his sword away to gain an advantage.

Above all, it just feels terrific, every kill is deeply satisfying, and every death well-earned. With online support, it feels very much worth the asking price. And for anyone who's somewhat intidimated by it, I'd keep it on your wishlist for any upcoming sales. I'm very impressed.

I never understand this thinking. There are certain standards for pricing that we are used to and game companies should adhere to. You can apply this sort of "time x investment" logic inversely as well: I had a lot of fun playing Gears of War during it's 8-10hr campaign, but I also had a ton of fun playing Black Flag for over 40hrs, so maybe Black Flag should cost $80 instead of $60 - I mean, I got a ton more gameplay out of it didn't I?

Now in this games case I'd wager $15 isn't highway robbery but it should probably be $10. On the other hand Gone Home costing $20 was ridiculous and Samurai Gunn should literally be like $5. If your game is an indie pixel art side scroller, that doesn't boast some sort of really MIND blowing pixel art, and is about an hour or two long, it should be priced around $10. There are certain iPhone Appstore games that offer ten times as much value and cost a dollar.

This old chestnut again?

BTW 20% off on steam right now.

@humanity said:

Price should not be highlighted in a game review for no other reason that it changes so quickly. Some people are complaining about the $12-15 price now but it'll be half that during the Summer sale on Steam so what does it matter? Whenever you make a review a cost-benefit analysis it always dates the review. Judge the game on its own merits. If the review is written well enough you should be able to decide if it's worth the $12 to you.

That said, it woulldn't hurt to have a demo of some sort.

I'm with these people. Also factor in that most of these games are made by just a couple of people with bills to pay and i'll happily plunk down $15-20 for a few hours of a quality gaming experience. It costs almost $15 to go to a movie now! Before snacks! 2 beers at a baseball game costs more than that. I have spent double that for me and my girlfriend to eat one meal at some crappy 'fast casual' restaurant. People outraged about things being $15 sound like the most miserable cheap fucks alive, and that's coming from someone who doesn't make all that much money and buys most of his clothes at Target and TJ Maxx.

EDIT: when i was younger i would have probably been mad about this though, too.

The design might seem simplistic, but the execution matters. The game is immensely fun. You can always wait for Steam sales.

It's just not an objective matter. Some people find short experiences still worth their money.

It works this way for food, drink, music, movies, books, all sorts of products and mediums and I don't see why games should be different.

@cybertification: Then maybe you should send them a check for $45 more dollars. I suppose it's highly dependent on our own inherent value system. I loved the hell out of Hotline Miami, but I would never pay $20 for it. That's just me though - to me a game might be fun, but there needs to be a certain depth that some of these "indie" games don't have in my opinion. I don't mean depth of mechanics, I mean the whole package.

Of course price will change. By this way of thinking no game should ever be scored because standards will shift and what was deemed amazing at one point will not be necessarily that great down the road. Metal Gear Rising was a full $65 dollars at time of release and had an extremely short campaign. It is now less than $20 on Steam with all the DLC - but that is irrelevant because the review was informing people of the product they were purchasing at time of release, not a year later.

Now that I've played some online against actual humans, I'll say I think this game is a ton of fun, definitely priced appropriately.

Because $60 for Hollywood-wannabe-padding-fests is good?

It all depends on how much money you have and how much you're willing to spend. Video games are one of my hobbies so I don't mind spending money on them even if a game is short or simplistic. On the other hand, I hate spending a lot of money on clothes because I'm not into fashion and if buy a shirt or a pair of shoes I'll keep them for a long time. For me, Samurai Gunn, Gone Home, Brothers and the other shorter games people have been mentioning are worth the price. And these days the price of games devalues so quickly and sales are so frequent that I don't understand why people are that annoyed with the $15/£12 range because it's really not that much.

I have played 615 hours of dota this last year so I guess I should have paid Valve what, £3000 if we go buy the original logic.

Games are worth different amounts to different people and for people to argue against this is ridiculous.

Exactly. Compared to that, this new hot eSports title is a bargain!

Yep

Who the fuck knows?

At least it's finished.

I HATE "I can afford it, so it's ok" logic.

I could buy this game a hundred times over, but that doesn't mean it's ok to price it as much as it is. A game should be valued at what they're worth, not what they think people can afford. Gone Home, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, and potentially this are all examples of games that cost double what they really should, and they only get away with it because they're liked by critics.

I just really hate this trend of 2-3 hour games with no multi-player or replay-value costing me twenty dollars a pop, it's just not right.

Edit: I should note that I haven't even heard of Nidhogg, and if it happens to have multiplayer and lasts longer than 2-3 hours, then it's ok to be priced at 15 dollars.

Hard to say. Since everything on Steam will inevitably be on sale it's probably smarter for small indies to price their game 50% more than they think the base price should be.

You don't have to play every game released ever friends. If you think $15 is too much, don't buy it.

It's also an indie game and a Steam game. It will be part of a Humble Bundle and will be 75% off sometime this year.

@alexw00d: Yes that is exactly my point.

I don't know why people are fighting this notion of inherent value so much. If you went to McDonalds and they had a burger that cost $30 that would be expensive because it would be a $30 fast food burger, made from fast food components in a fast food setting. You know how much fast food costs, and when things cross that invisible limit that we've all gotten accustomed to we deem that to be expensive. Maybe some people will say this new McDonalds burger is so delicious it is totally worth it! - and I agree you can't argue with someone if that is their personal belief, but objectively from a quality standpoint it is more than you should pay for that product. So it's a very similar situation when Indie games, which have traditionally been priced around a certain margin, begin to cross that line without offering something dramatically different in quality.

Maybe this is something personal for me I don't know. I have a steady income that allows me to not have to worry about how many games I want to purchase any given month - but if you give me a 1hr long game (just an arbitrary example here), and tell me it's $20, then I don't care what you say about the amazing introspective journey you go through during those 60 minutes, I will always deem it overpriced.

Great point

Conversations like these are why I've always thought that demos (in any form, like the timed trials in Onlive) are a great idea and should be utilized more often. Tailored to however long or extensive the game devs want it, the demo would nip the whole "worth it?" question in the bud. So many people are commenting here that the cost/value equation doesn't always apply (DOTA 2, this game). Let people test it out, and a lot of them will gladly pay full price.

Of course, it could work in the opposite direction, but that's when you're happy you didn't waste money.

@humanity: But again, that's you deeming it overpriced. That doesn't fly for everyone. There's a point where something is obviously priced higher then it's worth and that argument no longer holds up (ie. Garnett Lee's insane argument that he would play $200 for Flower) but a person can look at Nidhogg and say the price it's at isn't unreasonable for what you're getting.

If your starved for time short games are what people look for. I personally still enjoy lengthy absorbing experiences like Skyrim, but it has little to do with the pricing. If the game appeals to you then its worth the price, if not don't buy it. Value for money is a personal question as you may enjoy Nidhogg so much that you play it for many hours over and over or just not enjoy it very much and play it for 5 mins. I didn't enjoy episode one of The Wolf Among Us, so buying that season probably not good value for money ;)

I really enjoyed Brothers last year and I waited for the sale because I was unsure if I would. I'd say if you are unsure of whether the game appeals to you then wait for a sale.

It;s no worse than Divekick

I wanna punch you in the dick right now. Next you're going to be saying it's not even a game, and games can't be art and other bullshit.

Amen!

It's the waiting game. Steam has set the pattern of any game that exists being five dollars or less sooner or later. I added Nidhogg to my wishlist today and I'm just waiting on that email that says its on sale. Once they hit a price point I deem acceptable, purchased.

Almost everything that comes out is overpriced by somebody's standard. I wait on most AAA games too nowadays. Paid 12.49 for Tomb Raider, was finally playing that yesterday. Time will murder us all.

i dunno i feel like someone whose gonna buy the game at launch will know what they're getting into and get their money's worth out of it and then everyone else will just wait for a steam sale. dont really personally think this warrants that much discussion, everything like this just works itself out eventually