Notices

Here's an example for you. Think about a game for maemo with quality and polish at the same level as Firemint's real racing on iphone. Now change the genre to anything you like and add the usual bells and whistles you'd find in a wii game, including multiplayer over network or with bluetooth controllers in tv-out mode.

What would be the value of this to you? Or how much would you think a customer outside the open source/Linux world, that just happens to have a maemo device, might value this?

A word of advice as a fellow developer. It's not the price of the game that will make or break your financial calculation. If there were thousands of games competing like in an AppStore, yes, but not on present day Maemo (Fremantle is likely to have that problem, too). So, IMHO, the primary criteria for how well your game will sell is how good it is, and not whether it's 1, 5, or 15$. The watersched is free or not-free (in the actual money sense this time), and the only way to push over is quality, not price. Your other problem is that the customer outside the linux world might not have extras enabled, drastically limiting your default exposure of the (relatively) already small userbase.

That works at the moment but a year from now on when Nokia has several models in stores and "normal" people are buying them then the price is a selling point. Notice the "a", there are other things also like quality.

It might sound weird talking about maemo like a consumer os now but it won't be a small enthusiast market later.

That timeframe is well more than one year. It will be months before the next Maemo device is out, and there has been AFAIK no word on how it will integrate with a store-like distribution model (Ovi?). So, from where I'm standing, I don't see a calculation is possible (you might be right and Maemo might explode for commercial games, but business-wise, that's quite a gamble at this point). IMHO Fremantle (considering all the changes Harmattan will bring) is hardly the final consumer OS that will make it happen (and Harmattan is much, *much* more than a year away). Also, you CAN change the distribution cost of a game post-release to adapt to market changes (unlike game quality which is as is).

There are situations where donations have worked. Maybe not with games though.

Perhaps some kind of system iPhoneOS 3 allows works. You get basic game for free (like demo), and pay very little for a new level/functionality. This way you pay for what you get without buying something you won't use anymore.

Or subscriptions. Look at WoW. If there is some kind of competition like MMOG this means ka-ching.

Sublicensing does work btw. That is what ID software does with their engine. The software just had to be worth licensing. With projectM, that is the case as well.

If there are thousands of games on the platform and your game is good you let a website with a good userbase review your application. Rest assured this media attention means more sales.

Of course, just saying IME pricing has more to do with competition than raw customer appeal (e.g. the competition gives you a bracket of pricing range - a 100$ game for the iPhone is a hard sell, no matter how good it is or how many million hours developers poured into it). Within that range, however, it *is* more about quality (which can be used for marketing purposes as you pointed out) and $1 vs 5$ vs 10$ makes no significant change in appeal. But that's only my limited experience speaking, do with it as you wish

Well, as there are currently no commercial games for Maemo (that I know of), the market is wide open. You have no competition, but it is quite difficult to tell how much "average consumers" would pay for Maemo games since Maemo isn't an "average consumer" OS at the moment.

Asking the current enthusiast community about commercial game pricing is probably just going to get you blank stares. Ask again when Nokia has had Ovi or whatever up and running for Maemo for a while.

It's difficult to write any games for Maemo 5 (except simple ones that run on current hardware) at the moment, because there's still no hardware to test performance on, and there's still some difficulties running 3D accelerated apps inside the composited window manager.

We also have very little idea what the hardware inputs / outputs will be (except that we will have a cam, vibra and accelerometer). The leaked picture of Rover from earlier this year didn't seem to have a D-Pad, which upset a great many community members.

Sadly, your best clue as to what the market will bear in terms of games pricing is to look to Symbian or Apple.

I would love to see some kind of FPS game based on the Quake 3 engine, using OpenGL ES...

i sitll vote for RPGs... like this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d6_a...layer_embedded

And if making descent game from the scratch could take much less effort like using some good engine, say Unity? Would you pay for that engine if the price for basic license was low enough?