OUYA Subscription Model

[Brian Lough]

I'd just like to give my opinion, for whatever its worth

I think this is a good idea by Ouya, people are talking about. I think its a very good deal for Devs. But here are two ways it is bad for me:


Me as a "lightweight" consumer:

Obviously for pass purchasers it is a good deal, but from a consumer point I'm not so sure. I wouldn't be planning on spending €60 on Ouya games in the year so in theory I should not buy a pass.

Let me try explain why I think it will be bad for me. I'm going to use Bombsquad as an example

Video games in general in economic terms are elastic goods. A change in price impacts the demand for the game. We see this every few months with Steam sales, where the price drops and demand shoots up. Bombsquad has gone on sale in the past, I'd imagine demand went up with the decrease in price too. People sitting on the fence at $5 would be tempted at $2.50 (or whatever it was)

Now what would happen if Eric increased the price of Bombsquad to $10? You would imagine demand would go down, as people might consider other ways of spending the $10.

Bombsquad is a pretty fleshed out game, If Eric decided that he wanted to charge $15 who would be able to say it wasnt worth that? But he chose to release it for $5 to keep the demand high. Possible he feels he can sell 3 times or more copies at $5 than he can at $15.

Now what happens if I am a pass user? My demand for goods is completely unaffected by its price (once its below $30). Eric could raise the price to $29.99 or drop it to $0.50 and it would not impact my demand for the game whatsoever.

So what does mean? If there are enough pass users, when it comes time to set the price of Bombsquad 2 why would Eric make it $5 over $15? Demand isn't going to be affected by price so why not go for the upper limit?

So all the pass users don't care as they are still getting the game for their subscription fee. So when it comes to setting the price of games developers are going to go for the upper range of what the game is worth. This will push the average price of games on the Ouya up.

Currently $60 would buy you most games you want to play on the Ouya, but I can see it in the future that it will soon only be able to buy you 6 average games. Which has no impact on pass users, but has a large impact on me (who doesn't plant currently to buy a pass)


As a Hobby Developer:

The more selfish thing that will impact me about the pass is I think free games are going to get a kicking. If you paid to get into a sweet(candy) shop and you could have whatever you wanted from inside, you would try the most expensive stuff first and might start to feel sick before you get to the cheaper ones.

Free games are the cheap sweets, people will straight away will try and "buy" the most expensive games. The "Snob Effect" could come into play with games as people try to get value out of their pass, so games could even see an increase in demand as they raise prices

I released Soc-car for free because i wanted demand to be high. I would much prefer 1000 people to play it that 10 people to buy it. But I feel if the pass takes off demand for Soc-car is going to be massively lowered. And my next game will definitely have paid elements, which funnily enough feeds into my points about being bad for me as a consumers