GT’s Monthly Round-Up

By: Tim

On: January 21st, 2007

This month’s Round-Up is handing out awards to all except for three games, so I presume they’re all good.

Bookworm Adventures and Blast Miner were recently mentioned on TIGSource.

Posted in Community

gustav

is it just me or does only certain games with a certain look and feel to them get added to that site, while many other quality titles get neglected?
http://www.arsecast.com DrDerekDoctors

Yes, it’s just you. THERE IS NO CONSPIRACY! ;)

Also, nice joke, Tim! :)
Xander

Bookworm Adventures I was very tempted into buying, but with Heavy Weapon releasing on the 360 for about $10 (including 4-player Online Co-op), it seems a little excessive to charge people $30 for something that technically isn’t all that impressive. I’m not saying a game should cost more the more technologically amazing it is, but then I am raising the question; What decides the pricing of a game?

Should a 3rd person Unreal 3 engine game cost half as much as a glorified flash game? Surely it must have required more people and more money to create than Bookworm Adventures. Or maybe not, again I’m just a gamer, I don’t know much about the world of game creators, though I try to keep up. To me $20 the perfect price for any PC Indie/Casual game, it’s something I wouldn’t hesitate much about after enjoying a sample of the game. But $30… that $10 can make all the difference. See how many people refrain from buying XBLA games because of those 400 points between 800 — 1200, I’m sure there’s a line that gamers won’t cross lightly, no matter how casual they are.
Jimmy

“What decides the pricing of a game?”

The publisher decides the pricing of the game. There’s a trade-off to be made: more people may buy it if the price is lower, but you’ll make less money per person. This is further complicated by the fact that money is conflated with value, so if you price the game too low people may think it’s a bad sign and not buy it.

Price-wise, Bookworm Adventures probably benefits from several things: the free advertising P-A gave it, the appeal to the more-wealthy age groups of parents and dorky adults, the relative uniqueness of gameplay.

Still, personally I find $30 to be a bit steep.
http://www.moonpod.com/diary Fost

To be brutally honest what you can get away with defines the pricing of a game. With a large publisher, you might consider that greed (although in reality, they need to offset the bulk of product that doesn’t make much money). For indies though, it’s just another part of survival. We (at Moonpod where I work) sell at $24.95. The only people who have ever criticised us for that has been other indie developers (hohoho!). Even then, we are probably silly to do so, as we’ve also tested at $29.95 – and guess what – sales drop slightly but your revenues increase massively. Even we find it difficult to push up to that mark though for purely psychological reasons.

The ‘opportunistic’ marketing ethos has always been: If you get a lot of feedback about your pricing being too high, then it probably is, however if you get no complaints, then it’s probably too low.

Indie developers have a lot of trouble just keeping going. You could argue that customers shouldn’t have to care about that, and you would be right, however it’s a choice between being here or not. I’ve bought 7 indie games in the past year, and I would have been happy to pay $29.95 for any of them. I’m odd though because I just see fun levels in games, I don’t really look at the number of staff involved in the project and the budget it had to justify my purchase.
Jimmy

I don’t think there’s any reason to feel guilty for charging a higher price. It’s not like people are starving for your game! If you want to support yourself doing this sort of thing, it’s totally reasonable to pick a price which maximizes profit.