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There has to be a better way of pricing games than picking a number out of the air and sticking it on your product. Consider how an IPO used to be priced, they

There has to be a better way of pricing games than picking a number out of the air and sticking it on your product. Consider how an IPO used to be priced, they'd just crunch some numbers in a spreadsheet, add in a heavy helping of fudge factors, and it'd spit out a number that was completely arbitrary. Now it's done by auction so it's much closer to the market's expectation. You'd think Steam's Green Light program would help people feel out a price, it's positioned in the right place. Seeing what people are willing to pay for your game in terms of hard data would help considerably.

setr 10y ago
I think there are a few problems with how the video game market functions; The first is off-pc, theres an explicit monopoly on each platform, and the producers amount to a grand total of 3. Second is the lack of control game producers have on off-pc pricing; every game is $60 (iirc $40 for wii) and thats the end of it. "Arcade" games (small, no hard copy games on consoles) are set at $20, or $15, depending on console. And thats the end of it. There's little flexibility, a right only granted to those who manufacture little xbox indie titles, or maybe for emulated games and such ($0.99 super mario!) A third is that media industry surrounding video games is generally irresponsible; they either refuse to touch a game, or bring it up every other moment if they like it (for indie games, AAA are clearly paying for it) Which in turn leads the consumers to be generally irresponsible; games blow up, and are bought independent of price (ie reddit users often bumrush kickstarters and other video games, and it's not clear to me an educated decision is being made), or a game is ignored. If the price is abnormal for the genre, its often brought up, but I doubt its the _real_ reason the game was dropped (my opinion, lack of a network) Another is the lack of a resale market, and a lack of open source. The xbox one, for example, merely uses the disc as a code to download the game, and afaik, locks the game to your xbox. Gamestop simply doesn't lower prices beyond 10% of its initial sale (except in rare cases), and its common to find wii games still at $40. Ebay and craigslist tend to be the only hope, and there's not much hope. For pc, the indie game community operates as a smaller version of the AAA industry, with an apparent amnesia of its predecessors, and somehow a lack of awareness towards the open source community in software. For reasons I don't comprehend, there is almost no open source standard within indie communities, outside of game engines and a few of the elder genres (ie roguelikes) and thus there are relatively few games of significant complexity actually produced. Any game with significant complexity often raises straight to the top of the market, where it is again often purchased independent of price. In general, the market lacks the competition necessary to make pricing function correctly, and the consumer base is generally uninformed, and those who should be informed, the "journalists" and "critics" are even less informed, if not outright malicious (in terms of promoting a healthy market). Im of the belief that gauging the market price is a mistake; the market will not conform to expectations.
- astrodust 10y ago
  You make a lot of good points about expectations driving prices more than any traditional "value" here. Steam has games ranging from pennies to hundreds of dollars if you buy them fully loaded. Clearly there's varied demand. Maybe the indie developers have an image problem where their titles aren't deemed worthy of a >$10 price-point regardless of the effort involved in producing them. That being said, I know people who've succeeded despite their crazy low prices ($0.99 on sale, $3.99 regular) because they make up for it in volume. Steam isn't their only source of income, either, they have a foothold in the PS4, Vita, iOS and XBox space. As an indie you need to port to as many languages, platforms, and regions as you can afford to cast as big a net as possible. Remember, one of the best-selling games of all time is Minecraft which was, for the longest time, put out at the remarkably cheap (in terms of $/hr. of fun) price of $9 during beta. > For reasons I don't comprehend, there is almost no open source standard within indie communities... Ogre3D and a few sound-libraries notwithstanding, you're right. It's terrible. While there are tools like Blender (and Blender Game Engine) there's relatively slim pickings compared to things like the wealth of resources a typical web developer enjoys. It's not about people giving away their hard work, it's about people sharing and through that making it easier for everyone to produce games. The Pixar initiative to share their OpenSubdiv project is a great example of how that could play out: Now you don't have to waste your life writing a sad, non-performant version of subdivision surfaces. You can do more productive things.

setr 10y ago

I think there are a few problems with how the video game market functions; The first is off-pc, theres an explicit monopoly on each platform, and the producers amount to a grand total of 3. Second is the lack of control game producers have on off-pc pricing; every game is $60 (iirc $40 for wii) and thats the end of it. "Arcade" games (small, no hard copy games on consoles) are set at $20, or $15, depending on console. And thats the end of it. There's little flexibility, a right only granted to those who manufacture little xbox indie titles, or maybe for emulated games and such ($0.99 super mario!) A third is that media industry surrounding video games is generally irresponsible; they either refuse to touch a game, or bring it up every other moment if they like it (for indie games, AAA are clearly paying for it) Which in turn leads the consumers to be generally irresponsible; games blow up, and are bought independent of price (ie reddit users often bumrush kickstarters and other video games, and it's not clear to me an educated decision is being made), or a game is ignored. If the price is abnormal for the genre, its often brought up, but I doubt its the _real_ reason the game was dropped (my opinion, lack of a network) Another is the lack of a resale market, and a lack of open source. The xbox one, for example, merely uses the disc as a code to download the game, and afaik, locks the game to your xbox. Gamestop simply doesn't lower prices beyond 10% of its initial sale (except in rare cases), and its common to find wii games still at $40. Ebay and craigslist tend to be the only hope, and there's not much hope. For pc, the indie game community operates as a smaller version of the AAA industry, with an apparent amnesia of its predecessors, and somehow a lack of awareness towards the open source community in software. For reasons I don't comprehend, there is almost no open source standard within indie communities, outside of game engines and a few of the elder genres (ie roguelikes) and thus there are relatively few games of significant complexity actually produced. Any game with significant complexity often raises straight to the top of the market, where it is again often purchased independent of price. In general, the market lacks the competition necessary to make pricing function correctly, and the consumer base is generally uninformed, and those who should be informed, the "journalists" and "critics" are even less informed, if not outright malicious (in terms of promoting a healthy market). Im of the belief that gauging the market price is a mistake; the market will not conform to expectations.

astrodust 10y ago
You make a lot of good points about expectations driving prices more than any traditional "value" here. Steam has games ranging from pennies to hundreds of dollars if you buy them fully loaded. Clearly there's varied demand. Maybe the indie developers have an image problem where their titles aren't deemed worthy of a >$10 price-point regardless of the effort involved in producing them. That being said, I know people who've succeeded despite their crazy low prices ($0.99 on sale, $3.99 regular) because they make up for it in volume. Steam isn't their only source of income, either, they have a foothold in the PS4, Vita, iOS and XBox space. As an indie you need to port to as many languages, platforms, and regions as you can afford to cast as big a net as possible. Remember, one of the best-selling games of all time is Minecraft which was, for the longest time, put out at the remarkably cheap (in terms of $/hr. of fun) price of $9 during beta. > For reasons I don't comprehend, there is almost no open source standard within indie communities... Ogre3D and a few sound-libraries notwithstanding, you're right. It's terrible. While there are tools like Blender (and Blender Game Engine) there's relatively slim pickings compared to things like the wealth of resources a typical web developer enjoys. It's not about people giving away their hard work, it's about people sharing and through that making it easier for everyone to produce games. The Pixar initiative to share their OpenSubdiv project is a great example of how that could play out: Now you don't have to waste your life writing a sad, non-performant version of subdivision surfaces. You can do more productive things.