356 Value Capture In Gaming

Value capture, according the Josh Kaufman’s The Personal MBA, is the difference between how much something is worth to your customer, and how much you charge them for it. He also talks about two strategies a business can take with value capture, either “maximizing” or “minimizing.”

Games are interesting because of how extreme they are in this sense. A game might be “worth” at retail 60 dollars, but worth far more to the player after lovingly pouring 100’s of hours into playing it. It also might be worth far less if the player ends up not enjoying it. Instead, a game may be “worth” 99 cents on the App Store, but much more or less to the player. This extreme delta in value perception makes the gaming medium a unique place to make money. Both are valid methods, too.

If you maximize, you’re essentially trying to guess exactly how much your game will be worth at most to somebody, and then charge just short of that, to secure the deal and capture the most value percentage. If you’re minimizing, you realize the potential perceived value of your game, but choose to charge a significantly reduced amount for it, in hopes of gaining trust and loyalty in your customers in exchange for an alarmingly low value capture percentage.

[ Today I Was Playing: Apotheon and Victor Vran and Professor Layton and the Last Specter ]

#game-opinion