Creexuls, a monster >:3 wrote:

I am sympathetic to the challenges faced by a person trying to price a game. Nobody else here wanted anywhere near this grisly task, and so it was left to me, as are so many grisly tasks. As someone who gives away ninety-nine percent of their work for free, it was new territory. I had to try and generate the most good for the most people. ["good" = money. They see Penny Arcade as more charity and million-dollar business, what will all the giving things away and generating "good". --Fussbett]

...

I wrung four and a half hours out of the finished product [Braid], coming into contact with genuinely huge concepts that hum with stradavarian fullness. You're mad about five dollars? What? Shove your five dollars up your stupid ass.

You read a lot (in incandescent threads devoted to the topic) about how ten dollars is the "sweet spot" for Live Arcade titles, and that may be the case, but we should entertain the idea that its creator wasn't trying to make an "Xbox Live Arcade Game." Perhaps he was trying to make a good game, the best game he could, and Microsoft's Broadening Initiative For Digital Content was the last thing on his mind...

[MUSIC SWELLS --Fussbett]

The reality is that we can create the kind of culture we want. This was always true, but our distributed culture is especially well suited to this ideal. We can be the people who find and nurture truly original ideas when they emerge, or we can lament the sorry state of the medium. [SHARP FADE DOWN ON MUSIC --Fussbett] We can be consumers, or we can be curators. [FULL UP ON MUSIC, MOSTLY TRIUMPHANT HORNS AND CYMBALS --Fussbett]