I think the price is alright. I tend to follow a general $1 = 1 hour of playtime rule so considering that Clannad has far, far more than 50 hours worth of content makes it a pretty good price to me.
This is a really good way to look at it. This is something that carries beyond visual novels and into anime and other hobbies as well.
Iāve never played a VN, so I have no experience with pricing whatsoever. I always assumed Clannad would be āexpensiveā because itās so long and a product of Visual Arts. And itās content is amazing.
$50 seems worth it to me, coming from the perspective of someone who has nothing to compare it to.
I donāt have plans to buy Clannad right now, mainly because Senior year has kept me soooo busy (especially this past month >.<) and I donāt want to tempt myself with such an extensive distraction. I think Iāll buy it next summer.
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Most of the uproar around the price seem to have come from fans outside Japan who knew Clannad as an anime. Many must have felt that the series deserves far more attention in the West only to be stymied in their quest to further mainstream the show.
The price simply reflects the niche status of VN, particularly in the West. That said, conservative pricing might as well be a good thing, as cheapening the price could cheapen the series overall. Think of an island haven becoming popular and then ravaged by hordes of touristsā¦
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 thereās was pinned post from developers & publishers themselves explaining why theyāve 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 theyāve come to a conclusion why they decided to priced a shmup, Dariusburst: Chronicle Saviours for $50 on Steam.
However, thereās another problem with Clannadās pricing on Steam. The game wasnāt fit to be sold. It was unfinished & still needed polishing when it was released.
If I was to spend $50 on a VN that didnāt 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 didnāt go smooth as expected. Clannad received numerous consistent title updates where they would break the gameās 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 Iām aware a lot of people would criticize me on this part but in my point of view, itās 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 thatās 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 theyāve fully finished with game a few months ago.
Iām just praying Clannad: Side Stories doesnāt 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 itās triple A developers price.
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This is definitely an issue that I canāt disagree with. It pissed me off quite a lot, too! However, I know SP isnāt to blame for it, and reallive is just a shitty engine where if you want to change just one line it destroys all save files in that text fileā¦ Though, yes, it could have been mitigated by reducing the buggy text to as minimal as possible.
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On one hand, I can agree that SP should probably have tested the game more before release. On the other, CLANNAD is a massive beast of a game - they no doubt spent hours and hours on testing and proofreading before release, but with a work this size (and SPās limited manpower), I honestly canāt fault them for letting some issues slip through.
But thatās me, someone whoās familiar with the work, the engine, and how development in general works. To someone who doesnāt have this knowledge, it would probably look much worseā¦
One thing a lot of people donāt know though, is how a good part of this whole situation is REALLIVEās fault.
Itās a very old engine, Iād estimate that development began almost 20 years ago, around or before KEY was founded. Back then, the world worked very differently from how it does today. Home computers were slow, the internet was something new and underdeveloped, and nobody had even thought of using it to fix bugs in their games. And because this is Japan, it was also customary for every developer to have their own engine and tools, expanded upon for every release, or in some cases rewritten to some extent between games. There was no sharing knowledge, and every company worked in completely different ways (and made the same mistakes).
This is the world REALLIVE grew up in. For its time, it was a quite good engine - as evident by how games made in it actually still run on modern computers, which is more than can be said for most engines of the time. But its age is definitely starting to show.
One of the biggest differences between the world then and the world now, is how disk space was looked upon. In 1999, even a megabyte was a lot, and disks were very slow. This meant storing assets in compressed archives, to save both storage space and lookup timesā¦ and being very efficient with how you store save files.
Todayās games can have kilobytes, even megabytes of saved data, but back then, that was a noticeable chunk of the userās entire hard drive. So the approach REALLIVE took was to assume that since SEEN (scenario) files were never changed outside of development, you could make very small save files by referencing data in the SEEN youāre saving in. Brilliant!
This, of course, only works until the underlying assumption (SEENs are immutable) changes - with the introduction of easy patching over the internet. To be fair, nobody could have reasonably expected back then for this to become a problem NOW, especially with the lifetime engines of the day had.
But here we are, getting shot in the foot by a decision made over a decade ago.
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Pretty sure the later versions of Reallive had aā¦ uhā¦ āfixā for it. I remember Litbus being a lot easier to work with than Air was in regards to save files. Or maybe I just saved in all the right places, I donāt remember x.x
Luckily we have a new engine now. That isnāt as out of date. That doesnāt have big features that people completely forgot existedā¦ Hopefully.
Yeah, you donāt see many games nowadays outside of beta that break something every update. And when you do cough Pokemon cough people rage. At least we can get quick updates in games now.
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