Setting a price for your game can be a difficult question. Development tends to be expensive and time-consuming, but you don't want to price out your audience either. According to an industry expert, studios have been losing out on sales for years due to pricing mandates on certain platforms, leading to certain publishers making practically nothing in some regions.
At a Digital Dragons talk attended by GamesRadar+, Tom Kaczmarczyk, the founder of IndieBI, spoke about how now setting individual prices for particular countries can cost devs significant amounts of sales. "If you don't fix your prices in Poland, which many, many publishers and developers still don't," he says.
"You do see a substantial suppression of sales, and when you fix it, you see a boost in sales," he elaborates. "We've seen some of our clients, when we adjusted the pricing in Poland for them, have their revenues in Poland [undergo] substantial growth, like basically leapfrog many other similar countries."
The issue is common pricing, whereby whatever amount you set for the US or Britain is just converted automatically to every other currency where Steam, the Nintendo eShop or whatever you're using is available. This seems fine and dandy until these currencies fluctuate to a large degree, potentially causing the price of your release to nosedive.
"If you look at some platforms, Xbox in particular has never forced developers to update their regional pricing in countries where they experience currency collapse," he points out. "On other platforms, on Steam and Switch, there have been mechanisms that force the developers to update those regional prices, so that they would actually not be leaking effectively free units."
Fixing this can be quite simple - in some cases, it's simply inputting a number into a box on the backend of your game's listing - and yet major publishers still have this problem. Kaczmarzyk points to EA as an example, because the corporation see minimal returns in pretty large markets because of this.
"For some games, we've seen 40% units being sold in Argentina, which generates no revenue whatsoever. It's just region surfing, and then we sell it over again," he states of the process. Whether you're a developer or a player, this is something to keep in mind the next time you're wondering about the price-tag of a game. You could be getting an amazing deal, and if you're selling it, you could be doing yourself a massive disservice.
