His detractors on his article ‘skimmed it’, and were ”eager to whine and moan and hurl insults”. Now he clarifies what he meant by how our beloved sales can be a bad thing.
He argues the simple virtues of the free market, i.e. good services and products are rewarded and produced more, while bad market items sink and their creators do too.
Sales however threaten this theoretical ecosystem of pure excellence, and Cliff explains: ”If you pay less than the value of something to you, then this is a market distortion, the developer is not rewarded in proportion to the products quality, and thus the important market-signal is not sent, so less games like that get made.” It was this particular point that people launched a series of tirades against one-man indie ‘Cliffski’, and hence why he’s felt the need to defend his view.
His actual main point was that sales, while quite nice as a consumer, are also short-term. Long-term it can mean the market is flooded with things not particularity ‘fit for service’. All those lovely Steam deals unfortunately let through a number of duds that people don’t even actually play but snap up because of ‘sale hysteria’.
”If you buy something you don’t like at all, and do not even actually EVER play, then a developer is potentially rewarded for making a bad game. A NEGATIVE market signal is sent, encouraging the production of more bad games, and taking resources away from making good games. This is the point I was making. Sales of 90% off where people grab 20 supposedly 20 hour games that they will never play lead to this problem.
It’s this second point that is bad for gamers on the whole, and why the ”mass phenomena of people buying games they never play” can have a big detrimental effect. Check out Cliffski’s blog post for the full write up.
