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Advice? Game pricing and free copies

A topic by justinquirit created Mar 18, 2019 Views: 2,606 Replies: 5
Viewing posts 1 to 4
(+4)

I think this is probably the right section to post this under.

After seeing discussion about setting prices for our games to bring up the value of all indie games (thanks RPG Design Friends), I priced my two previously PWYW games to a minimum of $2. I also have a way for folks to email me for a free copy, and the screenshots on the pages of both games have them in their entirety. I thought about making the text versions free and the pdfs priced, removing some of the screenshots, etc. but this is what I settled with.

Does this sound sensible? I want to both value my labor (and the value of other indie creations) and make my art accessible to everyone. How do other folks accomplish this?

(+3)

Those are some pretty hard, though excellent, questions, Justin! I like the way that you've formatted the page for You're Going to Die Kissing Me, in that I can see what the rules of the game look like before I buy it, but I wouldn't want to play off of two image files, That gives me a nice incentive to pay for the PDF rather than just download the images and use them, but for someone who really can't afford the game, they have that option. I think for longer games it could be harder to show the full text in preview images, but in that case specifying that potential players can contact you for a copy would be fine (and seems to be pretty standard across a lot of games). I think your set up is both sensible and clever.

I do think the "you can DM me on twitter or email me for a copy" method is pretty standard across a lot of (especially longer) games. I've seen some games like Erika Shepherd's Exodus have a free plaintext version of the game, without any formatting or art, as a way to demo the game. Nora Blade has a rules lite version of her game Facade that is available for free, whereas the longer version costs $5.

(+1)

Thanks for your input! :)

I like the idea of rules lite versions being free, especially for bigger games.

(+12)

Here is a simple formula to price anything: Overhead + Profit + Salary / Number of Units or Hours you plan to fulfill in a year.

Overhead is anything that was a cost, including other people you may have paid for work.

Profit is a flat % tacked on to Overhead, this is your profit margin and should go back into the business.

Salary is what you want to earn for operating this project. This is what you take home. Anything else goes back into the business.

EXAMPLE

Overhead: $200

Profit 25%: $50

Part time Salary: $2,500

Total: $2750

Units Planned to Sell: 200

$2750 / 200 Units = 

Cost Per Unit: $13.75

Note, if you're planning to try and work with traditional retail/distro you'll need to factor in that the retailer will have a large margin added to the end of this. With a cost already where it is, you can see how being able to produce games at scale is important for traditional retail. 

This isn't just useful for pricing, you can use this formula to determine if a product or service is viable or not. Please note, I mean viable economically. Your game is 100% viable and deserves to be made, it just might not be destined for a life flourishing under Capitalism :-D

(+3)

This is super helpful and not something I've seen before, thanks!

Well, I'm also struggling with the pricing issue and making things viable so the creative work can grow and improve over time... but like most creatives, I also want my stuff to be accessible even when that means losing out on most of the potential sales value. I've made some free stuff and some cheap stuff that's currently on a ridiculous sale, and when I pivot from just 'game assets' to actually releasing game content, I have decided that certain extremely ambitious titles of mine e.g. Miniature Multiverse, which has cost me over $1200 to develop and hundreds of hours' unpaid labor, will not have a free 'lite' version but will be priced very reasonably. And with other smaller game concepts, I intend to have a visually lower res variant that is output for HTML5, in-browser, for free and a standalone Windows/Mac version for $1 or whatever, with higher graphics resolution. It's not even that I'm deresing the free version to incentivize the paid one, it's just... my stuff's very graphics heavy and if it isn't compressed it won't run in a browser! So that kind of makes sense for me BTW.