SL Business Marketing

All this work makes a lot of sense - many games never catch on because of playability flaws, and Halo 3 has to be near-perfect if it’s going to vault the Xbox 360 past the Sony PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii. In poorly designed games, players get lost in a maze of corridors and end up wandering randomly looking for an exit, or get killed so quickly at some point that they can’t even determine a strategy to progress. A little challenge is a good thing in playing a game; if a novice player could complete the game in one sitting, it would be far too boring. The trick is to keep the player engaged so that he keeps coming back for more. The best games are truly addictive - hours slip by during gameplay, and if a player is killed he immediately resumes play with renewed energy and improved strategy.

3. Create product bundles. This is closely related to the previous point. One effect of package pricing is to disguise individual pain points, as has been noted by neuroeconomics expert George Loewenstein. One example he cites is the bundling of car accessories, like leather seats, power features, and so on into a single “luxury package.” This avoids the multiple pain points of selecting separately priced items, and also disguises the individual prices. If the packaged items were sold individually, the consumer would have to make a specific decision on whether leather seats were worth an extra $1,000, a power moonroof $900 more, and so on. Even though the package may cost as much as, or even more than, the individual components priced separately, there’s less buying pain involved.