#game pricing

Recap Posts Home Tutorials Demo Reels Animations The Presidential Experience Mad Hen Plays  The Hatchery Explosive News Network City Council Harmony Capes N Cowls Online Games Designs Gallery  Store Submit Your Film Contact #slablounge, #thehatchery, #nintendo, #madhenhouse 🎮 Welcome to the latest episode of the Slab Lounge Podcast! Join us as we dive into the hot topics of the gaming world,…

Get ready, gamers – the wait for Grand Theft Auto VI is about to intensify, and Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick has dropped some significant hints regarding its pricing strategy. Speaking during an interview with Bloomberg Television, Zelnick asserted that GTA VI will be priced in a way that delivers ‘more value than what we charge,’ signaling a departure from previous Rockstar Games…

itch - free, maybe name your own price

game jolt - free, maybe pay what you want

steam - free, but with a large cosmetics dlc available for purchase (since steam requires $100 to publish the game)

as you can probably guess, itch & game jolt are going to be the first on the list for getting released, and steam is a stretch goal.

but uh... pretty much i dont want to make my hobby become a job. i make games for personal self-fulfillment, and if mandatory money is added to the works, it will kill all my interest in the subject.

and, i also dont want to see anyone not be able to afford my game.

also, OST will be free too, available on steam, youtube, & google drive

I saw a headline a little while back "Used-game sales more costly than piracy"  I’ve been saying it for years. Great studios die, and legendary games get canned year after year as national chains like Gamestop resell the same copy of the same game over and over without the producer seeing an additional penny. The problem isn’t just that they buy the game back for store credit usually 10 - 15% and then sell it for 80 - 90% of full retail, but that their pricing aggressively undercuts the original manufacturers', sometimes entirely. I don’t buy used or sell back my games for this reason. 2 years ago my favorite up-and-coming studio went under, yet everyone I knew had played and beat their latest game. Because most of the early adopters purchased the game and beat it in the first week of release then sold it back, the next wave of customers faced the option of buying used at a discount. Their choice was clear, with the used titles being so much cheaper, and backed by a warranty that isn't offered for new games. The studios are not innnocent in this price conflict. Game prices have been climbing for years on end from the $30-$45 titles in the era of the original Playstation to the monstrous $65 titles that plague the PS3 and XBox 360 while PC games max out at $50 (any higher and piracy exceeds sales). The reason game prices have gotten so out of control is because of the ridiculous scale of modern productions. When you have Christopher Walken and Kiefer Sutherland doing voiceovers and full HD graphics for massive 3D environments the stakes get pretty fucking high. Games are costing millions of dollars and half a decade to produce. I promise you that it isn’t helping. Angry birds could have been a student project and it has been hugely successful, not to mention entertaining. Games can impress with their creativity not their scale. The big studios are still making big games, but its the smaller games of our youth that we remember most. There is a reason that Zelda, Sonic, Mario, Mega Man and even Crash Bandicoot hold a special place in our hearts. Even though they lack the high-end graphics, hollywood voiceovers, and elaborate game designs, they worked because they focused on what was needed. Why is tetris still selling titles? Because sometimes two buttons and a d-pad is all you need.

I say to all game studios and aspiring designers, “think small.” It is like William Occam said, “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less” Maybe the next Final Fantasy game doesn’t need 90 hours of gameplay, but a more enjoyable 30 hours with a modest price tag. Perhaps those 90+ playbale characters in Cpacom’s latest fighting game are covering up the fact that the mechanics are exaclty the same as they were almost two decades ago. In an age where mobile games come in at just ONE DOLLAR and are ubiquitously available, bigger game productions are going to feel the squeeze again if they don’t learn to go back to basics. Mobile games are also becoming much more sophisticated with eloquent console emulators, dual core processors, and 3-d games developed on the Unreal platform. This means that everyone with a smartphone has a potential console in their pocket.

We need games that don’t suck, games that don’t piss you off for not living up to their potential, and most of all we need a new set of classics.

According to a news story published at gamesindustry.biz, Epic Games has decided to lower the fees for indy projects made with their free version of the award-winning Unreal 3, UDK. Previously to this measure,  any project that generated revenues above 5 000 $ was to pay to Epic a 25%  of the game revenues. With the new pricing, the threshold is raised to 50 000$, but in turn you have now to pay a 99$ fee to be able to start working in this new mode with Epic.

It is a great step from Epic, in line with the ones that they have been given during the last years, and that has generated a vast community of developers (and wannabe developers) using their powerfull toolset to develop their products. What is the real cause behing these actions? I think that basically assuring a large community of Unreal 3 development, which will make more easy for studios to find Unreal 3 aware professionals and consecuently by the Unreal 3 licenses, which has been drastically reduced over the last years, as they were times were a license for the Unreal engine would cost  above 1 M$ plus a share of the game revenues.

New times forces to new solutions, and Epic has certainly be very aware of what is going around in the 3D technology scene, that there are new competitors in town that could be a future thread like Unity.

:) From time to time I am asked very interesting questions that have the goodness of making me think in things that I thought I already knew. So, when usually asked about it, the first thought is "trivial" but when you start to answer you suddenly realize that you are not actually 100% about the answer, and you stop surprised by the fact that you don´t know immediately the answer.

  So, how do you put a price on your game?

  If you take a look at any marketing manual, you will see that there is three main points that a price should support:

§  achieve the financial objectives set y the company as to be profitable, or in other words, to at least recover the investment made on the product/game.

§  Be aligned with what the market supports, if the games in the channel where you are releasing them are priced at 3$, don’t put yours at 30$, as nobody will be it, even if it wins the Oscars to the best game.

§  Be consistent with the positioning set for the product, if you are making casual games with 2 or 3 hours of gameplay, don´t try to charge as AAA mega-blockbuster.

  As it is possible to understand from the previous points, there are several aspects of your product and your company/work that you need to understand if you want to make a right pricing strategy.

  i)              Any developer should be know full of its cost structure and of the running costs supported by his activities as game developer, not only direct costs like labor, but all other costs as overhead, structure, marketing, equipment. There is also another item that most of the time that people are not including, RISK. You need always to include in your business numbers an estimation for the risk associated with developing your game and that the results to be lower than expected.  No one should start to develop a game without developing a production plan, where even if no one of the team is being paid, to at least include a cost associated the work developed, as to keep track of the investment made.

ii)             Understand who is playing your games, where they are buying them, what they are expecting from the game, and what is there willingness to pay to have access to your content. Putting a price to high may affect the demand for your game, but putting it too low, might have the opposite effect, and may have people thinking that your game is not worth the money to be paid.

iii)            Associated with the two previous points, be consistent with your capacities and your strategy to survive in the industry. Don´t be too ambitious and try to develop a top AAA game, without no resources. I usually tell people that asks me what game they should develop, that before starting developing their game, they should develop a SWOT analysis of the their team, as to have a clear view of their capacities to develop the game correctly and with success, as a correct SWOT will allow to fine tune the way to develop, where to concentrate the resources, etc…

Once you have all this information and facts known, the only thing that you need to do, is how fast you want to have the return of the investment, and to check against the channel if it would support that price, you can iterate until the ratio between price and the number of copies needed to recover the investment are correctly balanced.