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Getting the price right for an indie game on Steam and beyond might seem like a delicate balancing act, but one developer behind three acclaimed hits says that it's as simple as doing a single round of testing.
Tom Francis, developer of Gunpoint, Heat Signature, and Tactical Breach Wizards, all of which boast at least a 94% Positive Steam rating across thousands of reviews, recently published a blog offering four pieces of advice from across his 15 years as an indie dev. The last of those snippets is on price, and suggests that what's often held up as one of the most difficult parts of selling your game is in fact "a solved problem."
While Francis admits that things like bringing players to your Steam page and getting them to want to buy the game are difficult and time-consuming, setting a price is actually very easy. Price, he says, "is just a single number you can change in 30 seconds, and you can find out the correct value for it in one round of testing."
For his games, Francis says that testing involves simply asking people how much they think the game should cost, "and every time we've gone with the price most people chose, and every time they've sold great and reviewed great."
His argument for this apparently simplistic approach - especially for devs who don't want to 'undervalue' the hard work they've put into a game - is that "the audience is effectively infinite, and pricing is elastic within reasonable bounds." Changing price, he says, doesn't really impact revenue very much - charge $20 for a $10 game, and you might make twice as much per copy sold, but you probably won't sell as many copies.
He also suggests that any worries about a "race-to-the-bottom" are unfounded. Over the 22 years he's spent paying attention to indie game pricing (including a stint as a journalist), he says he's never seen that race, and that people have been arguing about whether $15 is too expensive or $10 is too much for a three-hour game for more than a decade. Occasionally, a "janky/silly/ugly game charging $5" might blow up, but that's "not a sign that people will no longer pay $20 for an indie game." Case in point, Peak, whose devs recently justified charging $8 for their game-jam project (which blew up) because $8 is the same as $5, apparently.
Another case in point, from Francis this time, is Hollow Knight: Silksong. Evidence of a race to the bottom, he says, might have been "if people were bitching about Silksong costing as much as Hollow Knight. But Silksong charged $5 more, 9 years later, and people lost their minds that it was gonna be that cheap - even before they saw how huge it is." And when it comes to trying to buck any perceived trend for games to get cheaper and cheaper, Francis asks one important question: "how bad, how real, and how important a cause would this have to be for you to tank your launch for it?"
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