Looking for advice on pricing

Hi there,

I'm not sure This is the most appropriate sub to post this but I don't really know where to address this so here you go;

I'm soon releasing an asset called Room Architect. I have been working on it for about 6 months full time, it is currently a little over 3000 lines, quite high in complexity, and it has been going through 3 different prototypes over the past 3 years before I settled on a finite strategy on how to implement it. I work alone, and I didn't declare this activity as my job for now so I don't have any debt on the project.

more infos:

- The asset currently offers a little over 30 methods to work with
- The documentation is 20 pages

My question is: Could you help me devise an appropriate price for this submission?

If you need more informations on the project, I will be watching this thread and editing my op so feel free to ask.

Thank you for your feedback

Best regards;
Julien SACREZ

 

I doubt I'll be able to help you with the pricing, but since you're talking about it - what does it actually do? Telling us the "methods" it has (I assume you mean code) doesn't tell us anything about how the user uses it.

Price will probably be based on what it does for the user, not the size of the code/documentation.

 

Unfortunately, the amount of time and effort you put into creating it doesn't mean much to most people who might buy it. I mean, it's not like they know you personally or anything and have any incentive to empathize with you on that level.

In theory, it is worth whatever people are willing to pay for it. You might try setting it at a nominal rate for a number of copies just to get it out there and see what people have to say about it. If people think it has a lot of value, try to gauge the value of your product versus similar products on the asset store already. In general, I think it is smart to stay within the normal price range for similar products, but then people are pretty stupid animals. Sometimes raising the price of a product exorbitantly gives people a false impression that the product is of higher quality than it actually is, but I think that's something that occurs more in the fashion and cosmetic industry. Never ceases to amaze me though.

Vice versa, people tend to view more affordable products of being of a lesser quality. But, speaking for myself, when looking on the asset store, I tend to ignore the price almost entirely and instead focus on the quantity and general consensus of reviews. Only way I will purchase something with few reviews is if it is throwaway cheap. I guess I'm not that bold with my money.

 

I have to echo both @EternalAmbiguity and @BIGTIMEMASTER's thoughts - what problem it solves and for whom are far more important than how much work you've put into it as far as setting a price is concerned. Give us your sales pitch and convince us of the value of your product, and then we might be able to help you set a price.

Just reply to the thread, don't edit old posts. Replies keep the conversation in chronological order so it makes more sense, and by default they also notify us that the thread has been updated next time we're on the forums, so we know to swing by and check it again.

 

Ok, so it's called "Room Architect", but judging by your other linked thread it's a house generator? That thread is pretty light on details, though, so maybe I'm wrong there.

As a house generator the first 4 screenies look like it's off to a nice start. (I don't understand the point of the last two.) I'd definitely be interested in this if I were making games set in urban environments. My question would be, are the houses good enough for production use? What configuration options do I have, how detailed can they be, what types of rooms does it support, can it populate those rooms, and do the houses it generates "make sense" from an architectural point of view?

As you can tell, from what I've seen so far I've got a lot of questions. I'm interested, but there's not enough info for me to know if it's production ready, the start of a cool toy, or somewhere in the middle. Also keep in mind that a critical part of this kind of tool is how much time it saves when getting a production-ready result, so describing the workflow and giving example results is important.

Edit: Ugh, just lost an edit. In short, I suggest comparing your product to other architectural generators on the Asset Store in terms of how it saves time for developers, and pricing accordingly.

 

I don't have time to check everything out, but angrypenguin's description makes me think of another asset called Archimatix. It's honestly quite expensive, but it's extremely powerful - it's a node-based "architectural" designer.

I'll check out the other thread when I get a free moment, but "houses for urban environments" seems interesting to me.

 

Had a chance to take a look, and honestly it seems pretty good. My questions are similar to angrypenguin's, however.

I have a game idea based in the 1800s, which would involve houses--though they're not the main focus at all, so I don't want to spend dozens of hours modeling them myself. In such a use case your program seems valuable.

But yeah, check out Archimatix.