PC Gamer - Are Indie Games Too Cheap?

http://www.pcgamer.com/are-indie-games-too-cheap/

Interesting article about the thread title. I feel the final paragraph is significant:

"In games, perhaps the scarcity is players' time. And if that's right, perhaps an indie dev's real battle is to prove their game is worth time, rather than simply money. Thinking about it this way might help to pull indie games out of a current market price which is unsustainably low for the numbers many sell. And that really does matter to us all. If creative developers can't make a living, that's not only bad for them, it's also bad for us. We lose an important layer of experimentation, and PC gaming as a whole suffers."

I know that for myself as a gamer this is true.

 

I think time is more scarce than money for most players. But the ideal price can be very hard to find. I definitely think we are going to see a lot more indie games priced as impulse buys in the future, because it is very hard for most small indie devs to get noticed.

 

How are indie games not pressed as impulse buys already? The vast majority of them seem to come in at less than $10.

 

Even Xbox has tons of $4.99 games and the like...

 

The issue is the basic law of supply and demand. The number of new games coming out by indie devs is at an all time high and ever increasing, but the market for games isn't growing at the same rate that the number of new games has. This means ever greater competition between games, which puts downward pressure on prices.

In most markets this would eventually result in larger companies buying up the mid tier ones to reduce their overall costs per unit, and the small guys ending up leaving the market when they can't turn a profit (AKA market consolidation). The difference here is a lot of indie devs are doing it just as much because they just like making games, so they will continue making them and putting them out there even at a loss. This means an even greater supply of new games are entering the market, and will continue to, than would if this was something like growing corn (people don't generally grow corn for the fun of it, and would switch to using their farm land for another purpose if the corn market were saturated). Another key difference is distribution costs for games are almost $0, and getting a distribution advantage is one of the bigger reasons larger companies would buy a smaller company. So in general we just aren't seeing consolidation like we would in other markets.

On the plus side this means that the article's last paragraph about unsustainably low prices killing off the indie dev segment is at no risk of actually happening, since many indies will continue making games even at a loss just because they love it. On the negative side though obviously this means many indie devs should actually expect their games to be a net loss in the end.

My personal experience on Steam is it is hard to get sales at all. I've got a game at $4.99 on there, and it rarely gets a purchase at that price. I dropped it to $2.99 for a while and that didn't help. The only way I really get any purchases is putting it on sale for 75% off (I actually raised the price back to $4.99 when I realized this, so that 75% off would at least be something per unit still). It is certainly discouraging. I'm convinced the biggest issue is what was mentioned in the article, proving to the potential buyer that the game is worth their time and money compared to what else it out there. That is hard to do with a few images and a game trailer. Even getting them to watch your trailer is bordering on a miracle in itself.

I'm working on a much bigger game now, and because of my previous experience it is going to be free to play, and I'm banking on people enjoying the game enough that they will eventually go for some in game micro transactions. I figure it is easier to convince someone to try the game for free than try it after paying for it, but I'll see what happens with that.

 

This has literally already happened in the mobile market though.

 

Definitely. You literally can't make a mobile game anymore that is not free, but on the flip side new indie games keep pouring into the mobile stores.

I don't remember where I read it, but I had read not long ago that 50% of all indie games right now do not break $400 in revenue, whether by purchases or ads. That is a bit scary, but there doesn't seem to be any drop in new indie games coming out.

 

Not just a plug, but the fact is there is very little barrier to entry for making games. Unity is free, you can go a long way with free assets on the store. I barely had any experience at all a year ago and I just released my first game today which I think is fun to play and without any major bugs. I spent a few months watching youtube tutorials and the tutorials on the Unity site and that was it. With little experience, using free assets, I was able to launch a fun game in under a year and put it on Itch. I don´t think we are necessary competing for the money, or the time of the actual player, what the biggest hurdle is is actually getting eyeballs to even see your game. I do think there is some merit in the story in that a higher price might lead people to believe your game has higher quality, but you will then get slammed for not meeting that expectation. I mean was No Man´s Sky twice as good as ARK, and 3 times as good a Minecraft?

 

Too high. Most of the cool metroidvania games I see are £15+ instead of nearer £10. So they're not impulse buys, therefore, I don't own any of them.

 

I am not sure how many people think of US$10 as an impulse buy. When I think "impulse buy", I am talking about games that are so cheap that many people will buy games they don't even intend to play. Even at US$10, most people will stop to think about it, especially in developing countries.

 

If I'm very likely to play after I bought them, I would've no problem to buy at full price ($10-$15, maybe $20).
If you put a low price/discount, I might buy them but may not play them (backlog of shame).

Edit: Interesting read. Bit Blaster article on RPS

 

But is your game any good? I don't mean that in a bad way, just in that there are MANY more factors other than just price to take into consideration. If I unsuccessfully tried to sell cups of dirt on the corner for $4.99, then dropped my price to $2.99, should I really expect to sell any more than I was previously? You need to take into account WHAT you're selling, how you're presenting it, how you're spreading the word about it, etc, etc, etc.

In general too, I also don't think there's such a thing as an "average" price for indie games, so discussing whether or not all "indie games are too cheap" is kind of pointless really. I've seen cheap games, mid-expense games, and expensive games. And take into account too that the definition of "cheap" and "expensive" differs greatly from person to person.

Anyway, some games sell, some games don't, but I honestly think price is the least important factor in that.

 

I have seen a very similar trend in my own experience on Steam. I also have a game at US$4.99. I marketed it to the best of my ability, but my marketing skills are meager. I got a little bit of buzz during the initial launch. Then it tapered off a lot. Running a steep Steam sale (like 60% off from normal $4.99) is the only way I have seen the buzz pick back up.

Steam sales seem to work really well. There are two reasons:
1) People love to impulse buy at a low price during limited time sales.
2) Steam does a good job of promoting games that are on sale. Steam automatically sends an email to everybody who has the game in their wishlist, and Steam places the game on the sale pages.

Basically people just toss games into their wishlist and wait for a sale. I don't even feel upset about that, because I do the same thing when I shop for games. I have even received the email from Steam about certain sales and decided to wait for a better sale before buying. Consumers with more games than time to play them all can do this without any problem. That is the current state of the indie game market on Steam.

 

Selling a cup of dirt for $2.99 won't work. You need to sell it for $4.99 and then put it on sale for $2.99. When cups of dirt are on sale, everybody needs a cup of dirt.

 

The issue is ROI, unless you have a trust fund or won the lottery you need to have money from somewhere to put into making your game quality.. Especially on the PC market, I noticed what happened when the makers of Shadow of War decided it was a good idea to add IAP.. There was hardly a positive review to be seen so other methodologies like freemium seems to be a bad idea (in it's specific circumstance of course)..

So you're really left with free / freemium like a lot of MMO's (which is hit and miss at best) and / or the standard pay up front model.

Thing is they have refunds now so I'm not really sure why one shouldn't charge a respectable price if you actually believe your game is worth it. If you're an indie and put a hell of a lot of time and effort to try and match quality of higher end titles (across the board that is, no lazyness) then I can't think of a reason why you shouldn't or wouldn't charge $30.00 or so..

Obviously there are varible factors like type of game, it should be reflective of the amount of time / energy and polish you put into it but even smaller games might be worth more than the bog standard $5.00 amounts.

 

Whether it is or not, does it have to be? "Diminishing returns" is generally accepted by the target audiences of premium-oriented products. Is a pair of Ray Bans really 10x better than a pair of cheaper glasses?

Then there's the fact that the money isn't the only cost. There are more games out there than I have time to look at, let alone play, let alone even think about finishing. And yet there's stuff in my library like The Witcher 3 with ~200 hours played! Honestly, if I'm planning to play something I don't mind how much it costs within reason, because that's not the bottleneck on my playing games. What I really care about is "is this worth my time and effort over the other things I could be playing instead?" And if increasing the price I pay means increasing the quality of the experience then yes, I'll happily do that.

Mind you, I'm not the target audience of most games. Plenty of audiences are indeed extremely price sensitive. So it's about knowing yours and behaving accordingly.

If the only thing you can compete on is price I'm pretty sure you've already fallen short of market expectations.

 

Was actually thinking about posting this article too, before I saw the PC Gamer one and thought it more pertinent.

For anyone who didn't read this one, you should look at it too. Basically some unheard-of game is selling at really strong numbers through the serious hard work of a developer. Some drawbacks to his approach--it appears he's literally making games for profit, not because he wants to introduce a neat idea (this might only be a drawback for hobbyists who're making games they're interested in), for example. But it DOES appear that there's room in the market if you know what you're doing.

 

This. I have several full-price year-old AAA titles still in the plastic-wrap in the closet. One weekend recently I was digging through the indies in the Xbox store and stopped to ask myself, "Why don't I just go unwrap Doom and see what that's all about?"

I also don't think most people draw as much of a distinction attributing relative value between a truly-small indie title and Call of Duty MCXVII (or whatever the franchise is up to these days) as we seem to think. This means, in a way, that AAA pricing is (also) wrecking indie opportunities. If you can buy Destiny 2 for $60 and get a few hundred hours play, that's maybe 25 cents per hour or better. Knowing that $3.99 indie title may only give you an hour or two of entertainment makes it expensive by comparison. I doubt most people think it through in that kind of detail, but I know that type of consideration is somewhere in my mind when I'm browsing titles.

 

I know some people do that, but I also see people make conscious decisions about buying indie games at release price to actively support the devs - something that very rarely will happen with AAA games. Many people seem to begrudge large-scale financial success, and think all those AAA publishers are filthy greedy money-grabbing monsters, that squeeze the soul out of games and replace it with micro-transactions. Steam sales largely have turned games into a bit of a "pay what you want" pricing model, it's just the time axis is a huge factor and patience is financially rewarded to a high degree. This has always been the case in retail too, but to me it seems that steam has accellerated the rate at which prices erode, to the point where you need to wait less than a year to get stuff at half price.

I never quite understand how that happens. I understand it for steam sale games that you can only buy for cheap in a small time window, but buying AAA games at release and then not playing them? That's like burning money if you don't feel any satisfaction from having "donated" to the AAA publishers that sell the games.

You really should. What I've played of it on the free weekend seemed promising. I'll probably buy it in the helloween sale.

 

Very good thanks for sharing. I've posted this game along with others here several times as an example of the kind of games solo devs can be focusing on to make it actually worth their time and effort. Maximize ROI. And it is a great game.

 

Doom was a gift I didn't have time for, but often I just buy them intending to play them, but other stuff comes up. I go months without touching games, then have these periods where I might fit in an hour or two every few days for awhile. Then there are the rare rainy weekend marathons when we have no other plans.

I did, it was fun, I think they did a great job capturing the circular-arena non-stop run/jump flow -- more like the old Quake deathmatch days than original Doom, probably, but once I got into it, the nostalgia factor went to 11. However, if it weren't for nostalgia, my opinion would probably be lower. I'm several levels into it and it's kind of the same old thing, over and over (as Doom was).

Your TV or monitor calibration has to be absolutely spot-on. I went through the first level almost not being able to see anything at all (and assumed they took the too-dark Doom III problem to new extremes), then read about the calibration thing online, recalibrated, and the visuals changed completely.

 

You know, I love to buy games that actually have a price tag. I have a brand new hate for Freemium. Before we left Austin, I downloaded a few games to my ipod thinking I could play them on the plane.

One required wifi, which was free on our plane, but did not work the entire flight home.

The others were fueled by in-app purchases.

What really made me mad was that in order to actually play the game or move forward you had to keep pumping in a few bucks here and there. Of course, no wifi on the plane.

Tried them again and home, one was a visual novel. If I did not buy diamonds, I only had the bad choices available to me. So spent $5 on Diamonds and half the diamonds were gone in 20 minutes. I give up.

Instead, I will only buy games that I can pay up front, like some of the Big Fish Games. It is really difficult to find any anymore than you can pay for. I am happy to pay $5 for a half hour game, or $15 for a full game I can play for a while.

But $5 for 20 minutes? No way.

Games are too cheap but a set price seems to no longer be able to compete with in-app purchases. Ads are fine, but honestly, I end up feeling cheated by the in-app purchases and that makes me take the game off my ipad.

Now, I realize the discussion here is about PC games, or I think it is, but the same goes there. Nice to get a deal but if I really want to play the game, I will pay for it. I was all ready to pay for Guild 3 (I like weird games), only to find out from a friend that it was not ready yet, the early access was bad. I would have paid the $30 or so that it costs without hesitation but will now wait and see if it improves...if I remember to go back and buy it.

I have a few games I bought on sale, but they were pretty so bought them cheap. But a game I really want to play? Indie or not, I would pay. Am I really such an anomaly? Maybe just old school. Wish the App store would let you filter out games with in-app purchases. I guess there would be 20 games left on the store. lol

 

That's so hillarious to me I was laughing out loudly like a mad scientist. The most evil monetiztion scheme I could think of, was getting players really attached to cute ingame companions, and then devising a narrative reason why the player needs to start paying to keep them alive and healthy. You probably could bleed crazy amounts of money from players that way, if you keep sending them heartwrenching pictures of their poor suffering fluffle puffles that need money (for medicine and food) and attention to get well again.
To be absolutely clear though, I despise f2p games and think this is one of the worst kinds of cancer the games industry struggles with.

 

I agree. What is happening is that I have this urge to delete every game I have on my ipod except the ones that allow me to pay full price to pay them as I would a PC game.

Honestly, is there not a market out there for games that do not trick you into spending a bit here and a bit there? It is hard for me to believe I am them the only one out there that avoids mobile games for this reason. Before the plane trip, the only game I had on my Ipad was a solitaire card game that I paid $5 for a while ago and still use occasionally.

I probably should look off the App store next time.

 

Big budget mobile gamedev companies have no incentive to serve niches, they go straight for whatever has the biggest potential to make them money. I know there are plenty of people who think like you, but unless you are the majority you don't matter to the heavy hitters imho. I don't know the mobile market very well, but you'll probably have more luck using other discovery avenues like curated review portals that focus on non-f2p games (or allow appropriate filtering). The appstore is likely biased too much in favor of presenting you everything first that makes the most money, and those will be mostly f2p games.

 

Yep, not that I really need mobile games until my next flight...which could be next year's Unite since we are usually take car trips. And I would rather listen to books on tape in the car.

 

You are not the only one. A person is never the only one thinking & feeling the way they do. I'd say what happens is many devs try the pay model but the market is so flooded and they are not able to market their game well enough to rise above the mass of games so they end up thinking ah if you can't beat em join em and going free with ads and IAP. That's my guess on it.

But yes I am 100% sure there are a lot of people out there sick of ads sick of IAP. People who would much prefer to spend $3 to $5 and just own the game with no bs attached. But then there are also a lot of whiners out there who slam mobile games that are being charged for. Truly from the little I saw on the mobile market there were idiots apparently buying games for a few dollars just to leave a bad review griping about the game should be free all games should be free. lol

 

My wife refuses to play games that have things she needs to "tend" to keep them healthy and happy. She feels bad for them, even though she knows they're not real.

Even Pokemon is really getting to her because of the new mechanic where you play with them and make them happy.

Personally, I only care about them as long as I'm playing the game. When I'm done, they're on their own.

 

On the topic of f2p/etc... I think if people understood that some games are designed to develop addiction and manipulate the player's feelings of success and regret for the purpose of profit - and then accepted and discarded that title then there would be a lot less games doing it.

Unfortunately, the basis of entertainment revolves around stimulating people for profit but content creators aren't always ethically motivated and people aren't always keen to what is happening to them.

The f2p/microtransaction/lootbox stuff is getting heavily explored in recent years and there's a lot of controversy about some things being done. I wouldn't be surprised if soon there were some new standards, ratings or regulations on some of the things we're seeing done in games.

 

Yep, I am a wee bit sad that I cannot finish my visual novels without spending $15 an hour. But...I do not really have an addictive personality, other than for MMOs because I like to socialize...lol. I really did enjoy the choice based visual novels. But not worth it.

So, away the games will go. No more diamonds for me other than the one on my finger.

 

Funny thing though..I would pay $15 for a well done visual novel, even if it took only an hour to read it. But I do not like the having to constantly buy stuff. It breaks immersion and it is so easy to find out you spent more than you intended to spend.

 

I don't want to derail, but just want to point out that Steam has quite a number of VNs at completely different price points. The good ones tend to range from $15 to $40 or so, depending on length (they tend to be around $1 or $2 per hour).

That's obviously a PC thing rather than an iPad thing, but just pointing out in case it's your first foray into the genre.

 

Yeah, but I cannot take my PC to bed with me. lol

 

Not really. Although I'm not an avid consumer of indie games, I would hazard a guess that on average, they are priced at least according to their worth. The really good ones though are almost certainly underpriced.

 

Your trailer says there's "Epic Space Battles", so that might be a better name for the game itself.

 

Jimmy Kimmel´s little joke plug for his youtube channel is ´ and if you don´t subscribe to my channel, I am going to kill this imaginary hamster´ .

 

And here is the million dollar question. In a world with limited platforms to sell games, how would an Indie game developer ever be able to target the few hundred people who share your desires?

As a part-time developer, I would be more than content to spend 3 months ( like I did on Fuel Run) and make a fun, developed, unbroken game that was sold to a few hundred people for $5 who were looking for that type of game.

The reason I think new Indie developer really need to make mass market generic type games is that without spending money on advertising, we are only going to get a few thousand people even seeing our game, and if the game is niche, now you are talking about a dozen people seeing your game who are interested in that niche type of game.

I launched my game last night, been plugging it on all the free resources I can find. So far 57 views of the page, 5 downloads and $0 ( it is on itch for Pay What You Want).. I can´t go back and spam those same free resources for awhile and none of the youtubers I contacted have written back, probably because they are getting dozens of similar emails a day.

This weekend I am going to do another round of research on ´free´ marketing advice.. but so far very little of it is working because everything I can do, there are thousands of other developers doing. The saturation of games doens´t just affect discoverability on the Stores, it also causes saturation of the marketing avenues we have.

 

Did you mean to reply to me instead of Joe-Censored on that one?

 

I was not trying to say my experience would be everyone's experience. Just a one off anecdote.

 

You are absolutely right. The market is so saturated and there really is no easy way for niche games to get noticed. We will have the same problem when we finish our game.

I do not know the answer, sadly. Unfortunately, gamers who prefer anything besides the top selling genres end up losing out too. It is too bad someone has not picked up on that and found a way to market the less popular genres. I hear all the time about how people are tired of the same old games and are looking for something different. But they are hard to find, both the players and the games.

 

It's not completely impossible. I frequently browse different, more unique tags (such as "Visual Novel") on Steam.

But it's definitely not optimal. Requires more from the users, and thus hinders exposure to potential players who have no or little experience with such things.

 

This is a great time to be making indie games for the PC..

The market is only really saturated for very low barrier to entry games. If you remove all of those, the market looks a lot more stable.

As for getting noticed, I think you have to be careful what you ask for Usually when this problem becomes interesting enough to solve, it gets expensive. That's the trade off. So messy and more hard work to get noticed, is probably a much better place to be in then having to pay gatekeepers per eyeball.

Once the gatekeepers start charging, you can't leverage experience or knowledge like before. Not sure if I'm explaining this well. For instance I was working on mobile stuff from the early days to a couple of years after sites like facebook shut down all of the viral channels and replaced them with paid ads. That fundamentally changed how marketing was done, because we couldn't just rely on our own creativity and knowledge to generate viral traffic. The whole equation was simplified to you pay to have your ad shown.

That changed the game from one where small teams with limited capital were doing very well, to one where you needed large amounts of capital to even have a chance.

Indie PC games are probably not under immediate threat of what happened in mobile. The fact that steam is actually fairly stable once you remove all of the low end stuff, means that it's not yet interesting enough for steam to heavily monetize. But you never know what the future holds. You could for example see some segment of what steam does become interesting enough, and see that propel monetization over the entire spectrum. Or you could see a shift in games themselves that drive it. Like my bet is that next generation hybrid PC/Mobile games will start to drive more monetization on steam.

 

Ideally they would start by analyzing the market for the game. Visual novels are extremely popular in some countries with Japan being one of the biggest. According to Wikipedia visual novels made up nearly 70% of PC game titles in Japan for 2006. That's most definitely not a few hundred.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_novel

About the only thing I like about Windows 10 is the fact that it makes for a fantastic tablet experience. Being able to run normal Windows applications and games in addition to apps makes it a huge win for me.

Alternatively you could use some form of remote desktop software but that requires having a PC turned on.

 

I imagine it does. But I already have my Ipad and really only need one.

 

The problem is in the way customers judge what a game is worth. I exchanged some emails with a fellow who complained about my 5$ app being too expensive. He already owned and enjoyed the boardgame the app was based on and knew that he would get tons of hours of gameplay out of it - and the app was priced 10 times cheaper than the boardgame, which he had already purchased. His rationale and reasoning for his attitude came as a bit of a surprise to me.

The coder is going to try to find a good price with respect to the number of hours or work and effort he is putting in. If he tries to put himself in a customer's shoes he might try to use dollars per hours of fun/play to find a fair price.

An app/computer game customer does something completely different though. He'll put together a list of things that look tempting and will then choose the cheapest thing in the list. And these days a lot of those things may well be free or almost free, which you can't compete with if you value your work and time at all. The same customer who spends 500$ for a new iPhone or 20$ for a 2 hour movie, often won't spend 10$ for a game that can provide far more than two hours of entertainment even if he knows the game is good and knows he wants it.

My particular customer didn't use the same logic when thinking about buying my app as he did when buying the boardgame it was based on.

It's pretty frustrating.

 

I try to think of it like this: you'll only make a 10$ (or whatever price) sale if there are people to whom your game seems to be the best thing in the world to spend that money on right that moment. That means they need to value games in general higher than other things in that price range and they need to be less interested in all games of cheaper or equal price.
That's why I think it's so pointless to release low-quality games. If someone just doen't value games and thinks they all should be free, there's nothing you can change about that.

 

Pricing is interesting. I'm on the VR market. VR games are hard, they take time because mechanics are much harder than none VR (With motion controllers etc). People seem to expect mobile app prices.

 

Isn't that because market is saturated with 10 minute "youtuber bait" "meme" "games"?

 

Maybe, but it spills over to indies that actually try to deliver quality content.

edit: Funny thing, they pay 500-1000 USD for the VR tech, than complaints about a game for 24.99

 

Greed consumes all.