Seven dollars is not a lot of money. The developers of Angry Birds can get away with charging a dollar because they sell on volume. They launched their game on an immensely popular platform, then went on to a second. So they have access to a big market where volume is assured. Windows Phone is a completely different animal. It's got a smaller base and a much smaller subset of people who would be interested in buying the game. Keep in mind, that Angry Birds has enjoyed fairly broad appeal and has a very gentle learning curve.
The "volume" issue is not a real argument. You say they sell at lower prices BECAUSE they sell in volume, but it could easily be said that they sell in volume BECAUSE they sell at lower prices. Sales of
Skulls would increase if they sold the game for $1, and sales of
Angry Birds would drop if they sold for $5-7. There's no validity to either claim without having either company do that, though. The one SMALL bit of evidence to my point (volume from price, not price from volume) is that I wasn't going to buy
Skulls at $7, but I DID buy it once it was announced as a $5 game (and once I heard that the lack of bundle pricing was Microsoft's fault--basically, I appreciated their attempt to offer it). The appeal due to the learning curve (and potential sales as a result), I could MAYBE buy into a little.
Also consider that Angry Birds is an easier game to develop. And it's a near certainty that Rovio has developed extensive tools which has massively simplified level and content creation. They've turned the franchise into a commodity. That's not something that's so easy to accomplish with other genres of games. And it's something that requires some level of initial success before it becomes feasible to implement. So Skulls of the Shogun is a bigger gamble.
This is another point I can buy into a bit. The cost of development might be greater for
Skulls, but that is something I would more likely attribute to the costs of cloud saving and multiplayer.
Angry Birds probably DOES have copy-paste level design options, but they also have many more levels, so those might negate themselves a bit. I will also add that where 17-Bit is now, it might be comparable to the infrastructure Rovio had for its first installment. I say that, meaning they might not have had the level-design tools that they have now for their newer iterations of the franchise, so the work Rovio did, as far as tools are concerned, might have been on-par with what 17-Bit has done now, when talking about resources and redundant level development.
There's also the freemium model. However, that doesn't work well with many types of games and is a big risk for developers who aren't established. You launch a game and are without a revenue stream for an unpredictable amount of time. Notice that freemium games tend to be Temple Run clones or full-blown MMOs with loads of micro-transactions. And at the end of the day, people end up spending more on these games than the $7 being asked for Skulls of the Shogun.
I don't see this as relevant to the discussion.
Just think... There was an era when people were paying upwards of $40 for games that were sometimes simpler than what we've got today. A $20 game was considered a bargain.
Yeah, and the costs of developing those games back then were likely higher, as resources were more limited, as were skilled developers. I mean, there were computers that cost $1,000+ that were less than 50% as powerful as the $500 laptops you can buy now, but that is not relevant either, because we're talking in relative to the competition, not the preceding technology. I mean, this is just another ridiculous analogy that has no place in the discussion.
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