Good Question.

that depends on how much information you have. If you actually have an overview of your development cost than you can use it as a baseline. Like how many units would I need to sell at what price to break even.

I think in the beginning lot of people just look at other games of similar scope and style.

You could ask random people how much they would pay for your game... but that will be heartbreaking.

generally i just look at games that are similar in scope and base it off that. i tend to go lower than most games though because i am not yet confident in the quality of my games :P

Tl;Dr: Unfortunately I'm a bit of a goodie two-shoes when it comes down to gulping down a price of a game, so my personal perspective is one that's highly sympathetic to devs, and I do not represent most customers it seems. However, hopefully I can shed some light on consumer behavior, because even I've come under some habits when buying games that do reflect what others think.

I'm no expert on the subject, I'm just someone who wants to be a critic. Development cost of course must be considered, I am only taking the "how does it compare on the market?" Or consumer's perspective.

But I am someone who has a large collection of games, and I have talked to a number of people on the subject of price for games, and I have a few things to say on this.

-Game prices are arbitrary: Before digital downloads became the norm (at least for the indie scene, AAA has to do shipping and retail costs, etc etc. And foreign countries, particularly japan importing to anywhere else have to consider localization, which has been talked about as being more expensive then we think, not to mention that the shipping is overseas in that case as well......I think? ....would they make discs locally I wonder....?)

But for our purposes online stores like steam or our very own itch.io take a fraction of all sales off for thier own owns, paying for the service/server upkeep, and profit.

It's obvious your only selling a piece of code...a program, a complex one yes, but that's only physically some electrons. You'd think it would be obvious, but the abstractness of it is very likely a contributing factor towards customer attitudes on price these days. I would even garner that it would be easier for someone to buy a $60-80 disc then a $6-10 ......file. that disc also features some cool cover art, an instruction manual (ok, so those were made to be fun to read 10 years ago as compared to now.), and the actual, physical thing we can assign value to in our minds, if you break it, all the value is lost and must be bought again if it doesn't fall under warranty. Meanwhile, your steam game could be the most corrupted file with whatever mods or accidentally deleting you did, and you can just restore all local files, easy, bam.

With no consequence for breaking it, as well, it's even harder for our primal minds to assign much value to it, it is easily replaceable......and even easily shareable...... (sure there's anti-authority, anarchist punks out there that crack stuff for the lulz, but there's a lot of regular joes who pirate stuff, that started out because of the idea they could easily share this great thing with a friend at no cost! Wouldn't you share all the bananas if you could make an infinite number of them instantaneously? that or you'd hoard them as a money source, either way, humans can be dicks and greedy, even when they don't feel that's what they are doing, we are all flawed like that. It's just a quirk in our minds no one bothers to address, how dum, sew dum.)

This is a problem that needs to be fixed, but since anti-piracy PSAs aren't working so well, I feel it's more a sign of a fear of not having enough, or greed, whatever you want to call it, imbedded in our brains as a survival instinct, it has reared it's ugly head as something we should all strive to be above, but it's not limited to gaming, it's a general problem of humanity, and it must be tackled by showing everyone how unhappy they continue to be when they pursue wealth first and foremost in and of itself, rather then approaching the issue in the opposite, backwards fashion we have.

sorry....I got carried away there. :P

Piracy is it's own topic entirely, and one I do not feel I have researched sufficiently yet to really talk about in depth, though once I have enough info and data, I do want to address it in some way. For now, we all know the idea, and I don't think we should bring it up too much here.

-Current Market: I only started paying less then full price for games when I noticed how many deals for used games, and steam sales there were, it was just simply a cause of "why am I not getting in on that?" and couldn't find a good reason. (Before I knew anything about how that goes to retailers, and not a dev's pocket.) Unfortunately, current markets have driven prices to a very low baseline, everyone sells rather low, and anyone who tries to move away from it gets kinda shouted down. It's kinda wierd in this way, that the console and pc markets are the exact opposite from each other in this area.

I'd be alright for paying 30-50 bucks on a game if it was worth it, but it's too bad I seem to be a rarity there. And why wouldn't someone buy a game that offers a similar idea, or amount of content for cheaper?

-Unique content hours: Amoungst some of the more reasonable people I know, however, it's starting to become common for us to feel that maybe a good price tag is the one that matches with how many hours we get out of it.

thankfully, as it currently stands, gaming beats movie going by a light year in this catagory. Film tickets can vary wildly by region, and what sort of film is being used. (what I mean is, seeing it in 3D, Imax, 3-D-Imax, or none of the above?), and if you buy thier somewhat over-priced snacks.

The closest gaming gets to movie going in this manner is if you buy into the mountain dew and Doritos XP bonuses stuff, and collectors editions (oh yeah, digital sales don't often come with additional collectors edition feelies, I forgot to note that above.), maybe DLC too and such, depending on who you ask.

But essentially, regardless of how much money you've pumped into extra stuff for a game, your still going to end up with a lower dollar per hour ratio then going to the cinema. because quite simply, a film is usually 2 hours long, and certainly never more then 4, while games with a price-tag on steam are expected to be able to be longer then that due to the refund policy being available for those first 2 hours, and many games often being much much longer. I think most of us knew that too, but it deserves to be repeated, over and over again, to be reminded of it.

The acceptable ratio will differ wildly between people, but I can safety say, even me, who's very accepting of prices as long as the game is good (because I think a game being better and lasting longer then eating a meal out that lasts only an hour actually deserves more then what that meal costs, unlike so many other people, sigh.), but even I feel like, to be responsible with my money, I should ensure a ratio of $1/hour (bear in mind, that's CDN for me.), and no more. this means I have for years have been very happy with bargain bin deals of a $20 AAA game in which I played it for 20 hours or more, or perhaps put down after only that time. However, this ratio should also consider another thing in there, because, you see, a lot of devs can exploit this sort of idea to have you feel like your getting your moneys worth, but for people with large collections like myself, we tend to be too discerning for this practice........

filler content.

-Quality time: This is the most subjective thing ever, I can't even begin to address any sort of quantifiable stuff here.

This depends entirely on the tastes of the person when it comes to what sort of gameplay the game has, the quality of it's writing and/or it's plot, the aesthetic used, etc, etc, etc.

It should be up to anyone wanting to be a games reviewer, in my mind, to figure out if a game does well what it aims for, and it's something I'm very interested in. But we have to go on a case by case basis for that.

But I'll talk about the filler thing.

Even I have a limit, if your game is nothing more then wandering around doing the same mindless thing for hundreds of hours..........I will hate your game more then a game with only 10 hours or less of content that at least tries to have some sort of focus, even if it's linear. And even if that game were a buggy mess. (although it helps I enjoy the glitchiness of sonic 06 and superman 64.)

And if that game has something going for it, even if it's a game everybody hates (Dick Marconko: Rogue Warrior comes to mind), I might enjoy that game, even if I can speed-run it in under an hour, playing it over and over again for how fun it can be.

Which can be what really breaks anything to do with measuring time....because replayablity.....and replayablity, at least to me, doesn't require you to add some kind of new game plus or something like that, or long drawn out unlocks. Replayablity is really just how interesting your game is that a person will want to experience it over, and over again, adding extra content is just an excuse for people like me to keep playing it, really. (Of particular note, the RTS genre is my comfort food of gaming, especially if I can make a neat little base. Stronghold Crusader is one of my favorite games for that. I've never beaten all of it's campaigns, they're a tad difficult for me, I just play random AI skirmishes all the time.)

All I really need, at least, is a game that blows my mind with how fun it is, that I just want to play it...over....and over....and over again. If your game does that, I do not care how small it is, and I do not care what price it is. (within reason, I've never payed more then $100 CDN for a game, I find those MMO fanatics to be...well...fanatics.)

Too bad everyone else is such a dick cheapskate that feels "meh" about most of what they play....huh?

(Ok, to be fair, most games tend to be just ok for me as well, but take a little hope in that some of my favorite games I'll play for hours on end are indie or flash games, at least for me, and a few others, you could make something I'll find amazing, so just give it your best shot, and just ensure it's memorable! good music will help a long way to start, at least for me!)

....yeah, that's all I got for now, I feel sorry for you devs sometimes.

i'll give my impressions as a consumer of games.

my favorite prices that i'll usually buy games at without any problem. 5 usd for a short experience. 10 for a modest one. and 20 for a massive one. and if it's triple A, digitally 40 is okay with me. 60 requires massive hype, and even then it can still be uncomfortable.

notes : i never like it when games go for under 5, always feels like they need more respect for their game. 10 is usually an auto buy if i'm interested enough. 20 requires a bit more research if i really want it.

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.

I think as a developer you have to look away from your own opinion of what your game is worth because it's irrelevant, instead look at what people pay for games like yours as well as how much they sold (using steam spy and similar services). You need to find games similar to yours and ideally with around the same marketing, you'll never be able to predict how your marketing will work out but it will give you a better idea. If you find a few of these games it should give you a rough estimate of the price elasticity of demand for games like yours. This shows you how many people are willing to pay what prices. For small casual games without a big budget you'll probably find the highest players*price at around 2-4usd (at least for the type of game I was looking at at the time). So take that number as highest predicted revenue and then also take into account if you would like to undercut the market to get more players with lower revenue.

If you are releasing a game semi-professionally I would recommend this route. Take it with a grain of salt though because the game I did this for didn't get made in the end because we didn't think we could make back what we would spend developing it and for the game I developed as a hobby I just wanted as many people as possible to play it so I released it for free.

For small hobby games I like the pay what you want model but I don't want to try and make people judge the worth of a game from screenshots before they try it so for my own game I left it free to let as many people as possible play it (I know people could enter 0 as the amount but personally I would rather not play a game than enter 0 in the amount field and download it. Just makes me feel guilty.). If it were possible I think the greatest option for short hobby games would be a message on the download page that says the game can be played for free but it will ask you to pay how much you think it was worth at the end. It might be idealistic but as a developer and a player I would love if the amount paid reflected how much the player enjoyed the game, not how much they expect to.

One of the more common factors I see used is approximate game time for the player. If it's a very short game, and they won't likely get much entertainment time out of it, keep the price lower accordingly. If you've got something in your game that really enhances replay value, and gives them the opportunity for significant time to be spent playing, then it's likely to be able to command a higher price. Overall, your customers are looking for value, they're gonna be thinking "So if I spend this, how much fun am I gonna get for my money?" There's no miracle formula for setting your price, but as others have said you can judge by similar games and what it is about them that players value.