As a fresh new start for the Kazamatsuri Podcast, we're kicking things off with a discussion over the pricing of CLANNAD on Steam. Joining us for this episode are the regular cast of Aspirety, Bizkitdoh, Pepe, and our guest LinkThinks. Feel free to continue the discussion in the forum below,
Hopefully nobody notices that I lost all my recordings and had to re-insert myself into the episode manually…
My initial response to the pricing was as follows;
“Shut up and take my money”
Thoughts?
“…would not recommend Clannad as their first VN”?
But @Pepe, Clannad WAS my first VN. And now look at where I’m standing today! ^^
whoa get out of my head, I just got done posting on that steam thread… here is what I said, it is rather raw so take the tone with a grain of salt.
So you think you are getting ripped off right? well what the heck are you comparing it to? I don’t think you guys have done your research… do you know that clannad is 100,432 lines long… that is really really long… Grisaia no Kajitsu is $40 it is only 66,715 lines… higurashi 1-8 is only 78,901 lines long, and you know buying 1-8 is going to be waaayy more money, also that game doesn’t even have voice unless you bootleg patch it in.
so I have no idea what you guys are talking about… So if you wanna be dumb and not do your research and buy short vns at 30 go ahead. Cause this game is way long.
The truth is 50 dollars is pretty cheap for how long it is… really name a vn… that is “cheaper” cause really it is just shorter and alot shorter… People are just not grasping how long this game is… think of it as the skyrim of vns cause you are going to get alot of content out of it. You can always wait for a sale if you don’t wanna buy it for this price too…
When I said cheaper I mean vns on steam, also I wrote this before watching this video, so yeah that was my opinion about it… I mean there has been way bigger rip offs as far as how much and how long it is on steam… so I am a bit confused why everyone is getting mad now. Higurashi fits the market better, short cheap segments, but at the end, they will get a lot of money. You are spending more money for higurashi than clannad most likely, but the buyer won’t think like that… they just see the cheap price and buy. I wonder though how many people are going to stick all the way through higurashi though…
I mean when you compare steam vns to clannad it isn’t bad at all. If people wanna make dumb choices they can make dumb choices.
Oh yeah one more thing as regards to bootlegs… I mean it is an old game… if you haven’t bootlegged it yet why would you do it now lol? There was some sort of bootlegged English version floating around for many many years…
In my opinion, 50$ for CLANNAD is completely reasonable for the amount of content it contains. I believe most of the people who have looked down amongst the price tag, don’t understand the length and the novel or even what CLANNAD is. Of course if they are readers whom play Sakura Beach or NekoPara I would understand why they would thing this way. But for someone who knows what CLANNAD is all about, and understands that it is not a game full of fan service, I think that CLANNAD at 50$ is a completely reasonable price.
$50 may be a reasonable price for us who are already key fans but people who only know of vns in general probably won’t be willing. I just don’t think Clannad will be able to break through the western market with this price at all.
I was actually really disappointed by the price mainly because I realised I wouldn’t be able to buy two copies and spread the CLANNAD love with the money I had saved up.
But, I don’t think it’s overpriced. I mean, if you google CLANNAD and look in the shopping section, the PS3/Xbox versions are roughly the same price, and most of the PC ones are like 100 or something because it’s “mint condition” (yay?). And if I’m not mistaken, this release comes with the Dangopedia or whatever plus a HD upgrade. Debatebly we’re getting more stuff for the same price. On top of that (I might be wrong about this one), we’ll probably be getting a 10% release sale because I think Sekai Project has done that (I mean they did it for World’s End Economica, why not this too?).
I dont think it would have “broken through” to non-VN fans if it were $40, or even $30. CLANNAD is amazing, and beautiful, and even breaks some stereotypes, and is something I think any person would be able to relate to. But its freaking long. So long that even some VN fans are wary of it. Even if it isnt “just a book”, thats certainly what is seems like to outsiders. A really expensive, reallllllly long book.
@Aspirety I was surprised when you were gone for like 90% of the podcast until you were suddenly back in at, like, more than 20 minutes in.
Mine too but weeell not everyone has the patience we do ^^ I had two friends reading CLANNAD alongside me and they both quit after 1-2 routes.
I think there’s a pretty widespread agreement that 50 is hard to make people understand for breaking out into the market, but also agree that it’s worth every penny as is lol
Why ? Because of its long scale ? I know for certain that a lot of people played Rewrite, which was their first VN and enjoyed it. Of course, Rewrite had a better common route (majority rules) than previous Key works, and it had a more engaging read-through.
But back to the topic. I think $50 is reasonable. I said this in the other post but I’ll say it in here. Prices are rising up. $40 dollars in 2013 is basically $50 dollars in 2015. And not to mention CLANNAD is well-known, well, at least the anime adaption. And the majority of people who are buying CLANNAD are people who actually backed up the Kickstarter/know about CLANNAD. Also, for the people who are expecting a VN translation that didn’t back it up, they had about a year, to save up the estimated 40 bucks. Another 10 dollars wouldn’t be any different since no one just saves exactly only 40 dollars. Most games today cost 60 dollars, when most of them are utter trash. We should be happy that Visual Arts isn’t going up towards 60 bucks.
Well clannad was definitely the one that got me into VNs in the first place, but I imagine it would be daunting to most people ^^;
Inflation (prices rising) doesn’t happen that quickly buddy. If it did it would be really scary and that would probably mean some kind of huge economic problems.
In 2013, games for the PlayStation, Wii, XBox, etc, were 50 dollars. Now coming forward to 2015, games for those are mainly around 60. I’m just basing that off of games, not anything else.
It’s like, if I saw CLANNAD for $50 in the wild, I’d call that a very good price. But when it’s on Steam, $50 looks huge. As Link said, everyone is a bargain hunter on Steam.
That said, they can’t undersell it when Grisaia is $40.
Aren’t the long VNs also the most popular ones? If you’re going into VNs, a lot of text is to be expected.
I was reading books before I got into VNs, so text wasn’t a problem.
on steam the popular ones would be the short fanservice ones…
(Edit11/23/2015: Paragraphed so people won’t get as lost in the sea of text, whoops.)
Actually just created an account just to get involved in this discussion only, so don’t expect me to be “active” around here since I’m just plain introverted and lazy. I wanna try and enjoy making a point and create more discussion without anyone giving a reply from a “black and white” perspective (I know that’s inevitably impossible knowing that nobody shares the same exact mindset). But I just wanna bring up how well this game’s sales would fare, say for example - to some people who carry different financial situations and schedules.
A game’s price vs content does matter to a lot of people, say for example, a short game may be more appealing towards audiences with less time to put into games and vice versa. Does buying a game mean that every consumer will bide all of their time into looking at ALL the content? I say absolutely not. I have invested a lot of time into games like the Witcher 3, Metal Gear Solid 5 and Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, and eventually I stop at some point to MAYBE pick it up later, but who knows when I actually will?
It’s not fair and accurate to compare games to books, movies, or TV shows because games are an INTERACTIVE MEDIUM (shows why a lot of games getting movies suck in comparison to the original content). Because companies aren’t putting as much effort into producing physical copy after after physical copy, downloading games online serve as an opportunity to have companies not spend as much money and resources to distribute a game to a big audience at a (possibly) cheaper price. It’s like what @Aspirety says, “It’s like, if I saw CLANNAD for $50 in the wild, I’d call that a very good price. But when it’s on Steam, $50 looks huge.” Personally, if I found a physical, boxed copy of CLANNAD sitting on a shelf at $50, I’d buy it!
This entire wall of text here isn’t here just to say “THIS GAME IZ 2 EXPENSIVE 5 ME HURR DURR”, but to bring to light that people are people too, and they come with different circumstances and perspectives on their buying choices when it comes to video games. I’m joining in because I’m someone who watched the anime, loved it, and became interested in exploring the omitted content from the anime. I love CLANNAD, which is why I’m taking the time to bore you with “what I think.” Time is indeed money, and it’s difficult to find a balance between the two. It’s definitely sad that none of my friends will share the same amount of interest in this v/n that I’m looking very foward to playing at some point, since people have different tastes.
Ok so I held back on this before because I wasn’t sure if it would matter or not but now I’m convinced that it would matter at least in this discussion. So I made sure to check it again and you guys did NOT address the fact that in the twitter poll, “Are you excited for CLANNAD?” had 51% say NO. I asked if you guys could address during the podcast when I was in the voice chat but apparently no one saw it? But anyways, what I really want to ask is WHY was it that a MAJORITY was against it? Since this is on Sekai twitter I assume that the people voting should have been familiar with visual novels. Because of that they should know about CLANNAD and how it is one of the highest regarded visual novels of all time. We can safely assume 15% are just trolls who vote no on anything so that leaves us with 35% who did not approve of this. Thats a HUGE number. That’s more than 1/3rd. Remember this is CLANNAD, a game that got almost 4x its goal on kickstarter. So then what’s wrong? The price. Sure $10 may not have helped. But seeing that there’s huge amount of people against it makes me believe that it really changed how people will view it. Since these are probably people who know visual novels (disregarding 15%) they know what to expect. They know to expect tons of content but they still vote no. So in my opinion the price still is not right here.
