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Viewing post in Price

(+3)

The elephant in the room for game pricing is that there's (almost) no marginal cost, which makes normal pricing strategies not work. You can't just slap a 30% margin on the game.

So instead, you have to pick a number where price x units sold is maximized. Which means you have to guess at the habits and psychology of potential customers. This is the big reason why discounts are so popular in game pricing. The idea is that a $20 game reduced by 50% sells more copies than a $10 game. You are signalling that the game is "really" worth $20, but you can save money by getting it for $10 instead.

In an ideal telepathic world, you would extract from each customer the exact maximum amount they're willing to pay for your game. So some rabid fans would pay $100 for it, and a fair number of people would pay $10, and finally a lot of people would pay $1 on the off chance they vaguely like it. Because you can't read people's minds and make them pay this theoretical maximum amount, you create a trade-off, wherein the sooner you want the game, and the fancier the edition, the more expensive it is. Want the Deluxe Edition at launch because you're a fan? Lots of money. Only vaguely interested? Get it in a bundle a year after the release, pay nearly nothing.

Great point. Thanks, Zarkonnen.

I second that, reduced if not non-existent marginal cost is a big factor of why prices feel arbitrarily set in a consumer's eyes, as I was saying in my large post.