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Nick Kaman of Peak co-developer Aggro Crab made a seemingly silly, very fair point when he reckoned that "eight bucks is still five bucks" when it comes to indie game pricing and player perception. Games director Mat Piscatella of analyst firm Circana says the idea is very real, and reaches way beyond the indie space, especially at a time of enormous price fluctuations in games.
Piscatella got onto the subject of price stability in a recent interview with GamesRadar+. Previously, he's noted a widening range of prices in games, including each year's top-selling games, and we're only seeing that widen with games in the single-digit range moving millions copies while more AAA games push the $70 and $80 ceiling and AA games sit happily at $40 or $50.
"We're seeing more movement on the low end and on the high end, more flexibility," Piscatella says. "People are promoting heavily or less heavily, they're promoting more often or less often, and they're establishing base prices all over the board. Because we don't have as much physical distribution anymore, pricing can be much more fluid and adaptive to the market or what that particular game maker wants to try to achieve.
"You see a lot of consternation on the high end. But you know what, if a game has that kind of price point and it doesn't meet that muster, it's not going to sell, right? We've seen that over and over again, where people have tried to push that price point and the game has not been successful because people didn't find value there. But because of the digital marketplace, those prices can change really quickly, and that stuff tends to even out more quickly over time than it was when it was a more retail-focused environment."
Peak, an $8 game that wanted to present as a $5 game, is an interesting example here. "I don't know how mechanically true that is, but I get what they're going for," Piscatella says of Kaman's comments. "You just try to find the right price point that fits. You can't science it all. Sometimes vibes pricing is OK." (More seriously, it's also an example of how games can, without massive content changes, seek to eke out more revenue at a time where way more games are coming out, but not much more money is being spent on games each year, and it's especially relevant for games that already appear cheap.)
"Vibes pricing" is a very real phenomenon across the games industry, Piscatella reckons, calling Kaman's comments a "little showing behind the curtain" at how prices are chosen, and often un-chosen and chosen again.
"A lot of video game players will think, 'Oh, they have these suits and they're running these hyper sophisticated pricing models on whopper computers,'" Piscatella says. "OK, there's a little bit of that. But a lot of it is also, 'I don't know, is this a $60 game or a $70, $80 game? How much? Is this good? What do you think? I don't know. 70 bucks seems right. All right, we'll try that.' There's a lot of that too. A lot of art with the science when it comes to pricing."
Ask players how games should be priced and you'll likely get a thousand different answers – genre, length, replay value, in-game monetization, graphics, production cost, multiplayer, or even Early Access progress. The only hill I'll die on is that 'hours of fun per dollar' is a silly way to go about it.
