I know this thread is old & but I feel like I have my say on this.
Having Clannad priced at $50 would have worked appropriately if there’s was pinned post from developers & publishers themselves explaining why they’ve settled to that price, what you get out of $50 & talking to the consumers instead of censoring them at launch. Degica has done solid job explaining why they’ve come to a conclusion why they decided to priced a shmup, Dariusburst: Chronicle Saviours for $50 on Steam.
However, there’s another problem with Clannad’s pricing on Steam. The game wasn’t fit to be sold. It was unfinished & still needed polishing when it was released.
If I was to spend $50 on a VN that didn’t have any early access tag . I would expect a non-buggy experience the moment I give out my hard earned money like any other VNs that has premium price on Steam.
Unfortunately my experience didn’t go smooth as expected. Clannad received numerous consistent title updates where they would break the game’s read progress & save state. While I was able to avoid those game breaking updates by playing it offline, majority of players were unfortunately had experience this & the damage is irreversible.
While I’m aware a lot of people would criticize me on this part but in my point of view, it’s completely unacceptable to be selling a product at that state especially when the issues could have easily been avoid like optional public beta test at launch. If the programmers who worked on this project, are new to steam platform as developer side, I would cut some slack for that. But that’s not really an excuse to not test your updates before you release them or is it? I was in-fact offering an advice to my friends to avoid buying it until they’ve fully finished with game a few months ago.
I’m just praying Clannad: Side Stories doesn’t receive this awful treatment again & the developers & publishers has learned their lesson from this experience & redeem themselves.
Looking back, we are living in a age where people would complain that a indie game priced at $60 because it’s triple A developers price.
