Stages in Pricing Computer Games (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Stages in Pricing Computer Games (2014)

jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

83 pointsphenylene27 comments

I bought two indie games recently based on word of mouth alone: Undertale and The Beginner's Guide. Both are $10 on Steam (and coincidentally, both are made mostly by solo-developers).

Undertale (http://store.steampowered.com/app/391540/) is one of the best games I've played in years. I wish I could have paid more for it. If you're reading this, buy Undertale now.

The Beginner's Guide (http://store.steampowered.com/app/303210/) is...very indie, to put it mildly. And almost made me feel like I wasted my money.

There's a lot of risk with buying games freely, which is one of the reasons why gamers are unwilling to buy at high prices. However, Steam Refunds may help with this and may make gamers more willing to buy at higher prices.

I was listening the 'matched' podcast where they were talking about The Beginner's Guide. It's meant to play as a an emotional ride to help people understand what the life of an artist can be. Definitely not for everyone, but it is supposed to be on the level of "this 'game', made me feel something about myself... Maybe even empathy for the maker too". Can definitely see how it feels like a waste, but maybe give it another play through and kinda ponder on things. It might make the purchase feel less wasteful :D

It's rare that I purchase games on a whim, but based off your comment, I went ahead and ponied up the ten bucks for Undertale. Looks interesting!

On that same note: I'm not a fan - generally speaking - of survival games or early access, but I purchased The Flame in the Flood, and it's already given me back the entertainment for the cost, and can only get better.

I think the author of the article gets it right on pricing per hour of gameplay for indie games, in a general sense. I'm not sure this works for AAA games, though, where RPGs have - and are expected to have - tens of hours of gameplay if one simply burns through it, and multiplayer games have an almost unknown fun-per-price-hour factor (Rocket League comes to mind), due to the seemingly variable nature of how much time people invest in multiplayer games.

If that makes no sense, I apologize - alcohol and dumbly meatsticks.

The Beginner's Guide is... Uncomfortable. It's an unusual game that kinda needs to be experienced and, well, sat through. But yeah, I felt it was just barely passing muster for ten bucks. It felt incomplete or missing some critical piece of context, and so it seemed to fall short of whatever it was trying to be (unless that's what it wants us to think... But that way Dragons lie).

After playing it, I stumbled across a YouTube comment on Christopher Odd's play-through that linked to a talk the author gave to some college students a year or so ago. It fits so well, I'm calling out spoiler warning. But it's a fine chaser that - at least for me - cleansed the palette and let the game settle. Warning: it's pretty uncomfortable too, but I think it's a damn sight less gnostic.

[0] http://livestream.com/accounts/6845410/gamesnow/videos/83818...

> However, Steam Refunds may help with this and may make gamers more willing to buy at higher prices.

Don't trust that you can get a refund on steam. Their policy is you get one refund, and that's it. I have a steam account with hundreds of titles, bought over many years. The amount of money I've spent with them is in the low thousands of dollars. I've once requested a refund, because I disagreed with particularly onerous terms in the ToS for a game (shown after the purchase, during the install). They refunded me, but made it very clear that this was a one-time thing and I would never again be able to have a product refunded, as per their policy.

It kinda put me off them TBH. I mean, of course you have to protect against people gaming the system, but this was clearly not the case here.

Your experience may be different if you're a famous name on reddit/twitch/whatever.

They completely overhauled their refund policy recently. Now you can get a no-questions-asked refund for any game you've played for less than two hours.

http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/

Interesting, thanks, that's good to know. The game in question had about 8 minutes "played", so this would cover that.

Good on them for improving their service.

I take it you haven't been reading much gaming news in the past few months. Steam now has refunds, like, for real. It used to just be a one time thing and they were real hard asses about it, but now they're very willing to give refunds.

I don't like the idea of basing too much of the price on hours of playtime: if you've got something really inventive and different with a short enough playtime to not overstay its welcome, that's undervalued. Many games with long playtimes are boring and full of grind.

As a player with a dayjob and many interests besides games, I don't value million hour playtimes: I value novelty and innovation. So I'm glad to see and pay for something like The Beginner's Guide for $10.

Although that's probably a minority opinion: look at the Steam discussion forum for any indie game priced at or higher than $10 and you'll see at least one thread complaining that it's too expensive for such a short game(/not being written on a custom engine in C++).

This feels like a weird post to me, because it's got all this discussion about discounts and bundles and so forth but the part that the title indicates is its main thrust -- deciding what price is going to be "full price" for your game -- basically just says "make it $15 or $20, because that's what people charge these days."

Which, OK, but this feels like a subject that could use a lot more investigation. Why is $15-20 what people are charging these days? Does it vary based on genre, platform, theme, depth (hours of expected playtime), art style, phase of the moon? Does a high initial list price that you discount steeply later pay out better than a low initial list price with less dramatic discounting? There's so many angles you could attack this question from beyond just throwing a dart.

It's an especially interesting question given that Spiderweb's games appeal to a relatively small but quite passionate audience, so you wonder if he'd be better off charging higher-than-market prices at launch (when those passionate audience members, who are probably less price-sensitive, will be buying) and then moving quickly to deeper discounts once the hard-core fan base has tapped out.

Agreed, but pricing is a real bear. Doing the analysis, along with all of one's assumptions and guesstimates and strategic choices, is a PITA that is hard to do well and prone to being blown away by Week 1 results anyhow. So I took his advice as "advice to the indie developer who wants to focus on his game and recognizes that he has little business acumen or inclination." Which is sort of a lazy person in theory, but in practice, is sort of like the "self-publishing fantasy fiction writer who wants to focus on his book and recognizes that he has little business acumen or inclination." Etc, etc, etc. The author is basically saying, "Do all the analysis you want; in the end, for you, your most efficient strategy is likely to be pricing at the industry standard."

Pricing well above the going rate can be a signal of quality, prestige, etc., but generally speaking, people have to know you to accept your implicit claims to those things. You have to have an audience. Your game is what economists call an 'experience good,' meaning that people won't be able to judge its quality until they've tried it. A high price is a barrier to trial. (This is why high-priced games often feature free, playable demos or other low-barrier trial mechanisms.)

The other challenge with pricing high at the outset, then discounting later on is that it may breed market resentmemt. Pretty much everyone expects that a game will cost more if purchased in its first week of release than if purchased two years later. But a lot of people might feel burned if your game costs $X in its first week, and .5X a few months later. It might also encourage fans, even the hardcore, to simply wait out the clock until the expected discount period occurs.

On the whole, however, I agree with you. But pricing is hard.

I am one of Jeff's true fans, having played his games since the mid 90s, which makes me think he's understated one important point: you have to have fans. You can't expect to stand out on the strength of your ideas, gameplay or story alone. You have to work to find an audience for them, and then work to get those people to buy your product, at full price. Good games are almost a commodity now. The developer is one of the few points of difference buyers pay attention to.

"You can be 50% off one sale and then 75% the next. Nobody will notice." I disagree with this; once you put it on a temporary sale or in a bundle, many people are content to wait until it goes on sale for lower. I've lost count of the number of Reddit threads where people asked, "Will [game x] go lower than $1.49?"

Indie games have become a race to the bottom, and devs are content on watching them slide. If I had a nickel every time I saw a downward sloping sales graph, with a single spike for that one Front Page day, I would have enough for the latest bundle.

I am always shocked at how marketing-adverse indie game devs are. Developers invest a ton of their base commodity (time) into a game, but refuse to advertise it or fail to save cash to do so. Instead they rely on front pages, bundles, and sales. Then 9 months latter they do post mortems, where they correlated sales graphs to events. I want to see a sale graph for conversions based on Facebook ads. Mobile/FB Game companies pump out mediocre games, but maintain huge user bases just because people find their games.

Everything thinks that they are going to be Notch and their game will spread by word-of-mouth, because they have a unicorn. Turns out your time-bending, retro, 2D, pixel-art shooter/platformer doesnt have the genius of Virtual Legos, and no one cares about it.

In my opinion, if you do CPM/CPC/Facebook marketing for your indie game, you are wasting your money. You are competing with the marketing budgets of industry giants, which are ten to 100 times larger. Your ads won't be seen.

Your effort should be spent convincing influencers to play your game, so that they will convince others. These are not people best reached by advertising.

Have you ever seen anyone try it and report numbers? Ads for Facebook are fairly specific. Its creepy how finely you can segment your audience. Industry giants may have larger budgets, which just means that they can cast a wider net. Well targeted ads may have better returns.

Facebook is not the only platform. Reddit, Polygon, and Twitch all have users that would fit your demographic more. Social media personalities (Twitter, Youtube, Tumblr, etc), all will mention your game for the right price. If you have ever seen 'Featured', 'Promoted', or 'Partner' content, then it was paid for. Communities and forums are overvalued for the time investment, especially because they rely on other people to spread your game.

We live in a consumerist society driven by ads. Refusal to use them is silly.

It isn't a one-size-fits-all market, and lumping together "marketing" with the industrial sales funnel does a disservice to the numerous games that used other marketing techniques, on their own or accompanied by a traditional push.

That doesn't mean that marketing isn't important - if your goal is commercial then it really should be up in that 60% of developer time range - but the way in which you do it requires at least as much design thinking as making the game. The whole premise of the game needs built in sales value or else you're part of the crowd, fighting to break out.

Most of the tricks you can do with advertising and production values only reduce reasons for people to say "no" to a game. They don't make people say "yes", and if nobody says "yes" then all you can do is churn people through the sales funnel, because your game doesn't and never will solve anyone's hair-on-fire problem.

As soon as you make a game that's able to compete for conversions on ads, your game probably won't be considered indie anymore. Ads are extremely competitive and the only way to compete and not get priced out is to "sellout" and make games with mass market appeal, AAA price tags, high monetization funnels to increase LTV, etc. Without that, it's unlikely you'll be able to profitably spend on ads through any of the major channels. You're competing against the Game of Wars and Clash of Clans out there on Mobile and the AAA and IP titles on traditional platforms. So your metrics will need to be on par with the likes of those (it at least needs to be on par in a niche target demographic) in order to have any measure of success.

So the typical indie marketing strategy of using social media, press, and word of mouth, is actually very rational and probably the best way to go about it.

I am always shocked at how marketing-adverse indie game devs are.

Ambient level of marketing competence for indie developers is even below that for e.g. "indie" SaaS companies, which is unfortunate. A lot of them could benefit from simple things like aggressively getting email signups and using them to promote game N+1 to their existing fanbase, as opposed to having to buy their customers back from Valve every single time.

As someone who has a game sitting on my hard-drive for lack of publishing and pricing knowledge, I appreciate this.

For those that are curious (and don't mind a bit of self-promotion) here is my personal side-project game:

playinverse.com

Then there's stuff like this. Where there just aren't that many games like it. Echochrome, Antichamber, Monument Valley, Oquonie, and Fez feel like they're in a similar category, and I would happily throw more money at clever games like that. I'm super stoked about The Museum of Simulation Technology and Miegakure for the same reason.

To go along with another commenter who notes that if you've fans, you're set: if you work in a sufficiently difficult or niche genre with a following, you've got a head start. I'll buy damn near any space-warpy game just on the off-chance I get that fix for a clever and unexpected plot twist; in this case probably a literal shift in perspective.

Edit: spelling and +1 game

Perhaps you'd be interested in this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pF8JRqGEWc

I won't lie. I was hoping for leads on other games. Relativity looks fantastic. It's an odd thing: I have no idea if it looks fun to play or not, but I have no doubt that it will be worth whatever price simply for the atmosphere and style. A spectrum runs where a game can be fun for its mechanics or enjoyable for it aesthetics. For me, I suppose I'm willing to pay $10 for anything that does something well. If Relativity is merely an interactive work of abstract art, I suspect I would be happy with that. And if the game is merely a few shapes and lines with a fun mechanic, I feel the same.

(And thanks also for the lead on Witness - a Myst by The Guy Who Did Braid? I can't see that disappointing (and no idea how I hadn't heard of it yet!).)

You want a list of spatial mind blowers? You should have just asked.

Box game: http://www.sophiehoulden.com/games/boxgame/

The bridge: http://thebridgeisblackandwhite.com/

EOF: http://gamejolt.com/games/end-of-file-prototype/41818

Curved spaces (more of a toy than a game): http://geometrygames.org/CurvedSpaces/index.html.en

colortone(I haven't played it yet): http://gamejolt.com/games/colortone/68905

parallax: http://steamcommunity.com/app/32506

As for relativity, its more than art. The guy showed up on reddit to explain a bit. https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/3amnj0/as_a_fa...

short version: spatial puzzle embedded in a 3-torus.

Looks interesting.

I tried to sign up to your email list and it broke. Not sure why but happy to help troubleshoot if you need me to reproduce.

That's odd. I just tested it and it worked fine.

No worries, I copied your e-mail from your profile and added you manually

"I’ve been thinking about this a lot. The pricing part, as thinking about marketing makes me break out in fear hives."

Fortunately, that part seems to have taken care of itself!

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