PC Gamer - Are Indie Games Too Cheap?

I don't think that's how people think. I wouldn't be surprised if many are like: "I've paid 800$ for the HMD and 1500$ for the PC already, at the very least the VR games could be free now! Those 20+$ VR games are basically extortion, considering how little alternatives are in the VR games market!"

Most people have no concept of running a business or how the financial side of making games looks. They think there were millions of Headsets sold, so every VR games dev studio must be swimming in cash.

 

PUBG have sold 8-9 times more than there are PC headsets, crazy when you think about it. And people wonder why there is no Triple A studio doing proper VR

 

First of all read this "Another key difference is distribution costs for games are almost $0," from a dev selling in Steam.

That is so wrong that needs to be clarified. Online distribution will leave you with 70% of a sale. That is quite far away from 0 costs.

Futher, if you whant quick numbers, from what you sell to what you receive in the end (in Europe) there is like 50% difference. After, returns, Steam part of the cake, VAT, extra taxes) and I've not yet considered production costs.

Now in regards to Price and sales. I sell my game at 14.99€. I've been adding content since last year release, tons of stuff, in order to keep it alive. Last sale, I managed to sell almost as much as on release date by having added a S***load of content in previous update and having the regular35% Price drop. Surprisingly enough, I kept having really good sales after the seaonal sale.

To me, if you've a decent game at the classic indie Price range 10-15 the key is basically Traffic. And Traffic, after doing a 3K YouTube campaign, proved to me that is clearly the key, the problem with traffic is that paid one ends ups being really really expensive cause imagine you raise your sales, 4k after investin 3k in ads, keep in mind that you'll still have to pay 30% of those 4k sales to Valve, and you spent like 3K etc...

 

Interesting, thanks for sharing! In how far would you say you market your game vs. how much do you market yourself? I think that for many indie gamedevs a huge factor in sales actually is how "likable" they seem to be. E.g. given two games being equally appealing I think most people would prefer to support the one from the person they like and respect more, or maybe even just the one whose name they've heard before. Much of traditional marketing isn't about convincing people to buy the product right now, it's about creating a brand-familiarity that ultimately can be the deciding factor in A/B purchase decisions. Like most people will tell you they prefer coke over pepsi, but in blind A/B tests pepsi actually was more popular.

 

I have the opinion that none of this value/perception problem is unique to game sales.

Software development in general suffers from this kind of image problem. I stopped taking sideline freelance work because the payoff (especially after-tax) wasn't worth the time, stress and effort in addition to a day job. Speaking to Martin's point, I probably could have invested some effort into "marketing" myself (although nearly all of my work already came by word-of-mouth referrals), but at the end of the day even people with software experience seemed to significantly underestimate the work involved with a project and (crucially) assign inadequate dollar values to the work. It has also become apparent in the corporate world where programming jobs are aggressively offshored to the lowest bidder, often without regard to experience. (I work for a very large financial company and by this point, billing rate is literally the only consideration -- very frustrating trying to get anything done.)

I half wonder if even well-recognized AAA operations suffer some of this. I think it was a Call of Duty title that holds the record for high dev costs -- but they still spent twice as much on advertising. Sure they got huge ROI, but that's still hundreds of millions spent. I'm sure they'd have preferred to "only" spend tens of millions and pocket the rest if they thought it would work.

Of course, indies have other reputation and recognition challenges, but my point is only that software in general is already not highly valued by most, it seems.

 

I am working at a startup and these guys have the possibility of making 25k+/month more on app I spent 2 weeks working on and these guys are so cheap its ridiculous. If you want to make money work on business apps B2B

 

You have a point. But keep in mind that you're only paying when someone's buying. It's nothing like the old paradigm where you'd have to have a huge system in place to print a certain number of disks (based on your sales estimates) and send them all over the world, eating the cost long before any sales were guaranteed.

Of course pre-orders were a thing, but they were only part of the total units shipped.

 

Yeah, the PUBG numbers are pretty amazing. They have had nearly 17M sales so far and consistently get over 2M simultaneous online players. If PUBG had been VR only, it would have never reached those numbers.

 

It is critical to keep in mind that players don't care what it costs to build a game. They only care about their experience with the game. If they think they might get hundreds of hours of enjoyment out of a game, then they will happily pay US$30-US$60 for that game. If they think they might get a half hour of piddling around time out of a game, then they might only want to pay US$1 for it.

One problem with VR is that most people don't have VR hardware and are unwilling (or unable) to buy the current VR hardware. And then on top of that, a lot of VR gamers can only play VR games for a relatively short period of time. If a VR gamer knows their own threshold is only about 30 minutes at a time, they also realize that drastically limits the total playtime that gamer is going to get out of a VR title. Contrast that with titles like PUBG that many gamers will happily play for a few hours at a time.

The bottom line for many VR gamers is that a US$25 VR-only game is probably a terrible investment regardless of the amount of effort that went into the VR game. One option for developers is to lower the price to get it in line with user expectations. But that is also a problem because the VR market is relatively small. With a non-VR game, a developer can set the price to rock bottom and try to make it up with quantity. With a VR-only game, that might not work.

 

Just to chime in here after admittedly reading only part of the thread...

As far as pricing goes, we have a game on itch that sells for $15. Itch allows people to pay even more if they want to, and people fairly often will do so. It's not uncommon for someone to pay $20 for it, or even more. There's a full free demo of the game, totally usable (without the "Extras"), and if people want to they can get the "Extras" for the pay price. For anyone curious, our demo to sale ratio is currently 1 sale out of every 33 demo downloads.

Anyway, every so often we put the game on sale. The previous sale was for 40% off ($9) and lasted a week. We sold fewer units during the sale than we normally do at full price, plus a few people paid more than the $9 for the game, even during the sale.

Make of that what you will, but it's been my experience in the many years I've been making/selling games that price appears to be something that super important in the sales department, but ultimately it's not really that big of a factor. If you have a game that people want, and it's presented nicely and does what they expect, then you can do well.

Especially in these days when all games are priced at similar levels, you should not expect to win the war with pricing alone. It doesn't work that way, in my humble opinion.

 

That is very interesting, thanks a lot for sharing! Do you have any data on whether having a demo does boost or lower sales? I've heard conflicting anecdotal evidence for both opposing points of view. Some say trailers boost sales, and demos lower sales. But there have also been projects that claim to have gotten successful just because of their demo. I could imagine it to be genre-dependant. Personally I probably have skipped slightly more purchases because of free-weekends on steam, than I have made because of them. But since refunds are a thing now, chances are it wouldn't have made a difference on the bottom line, and e.g. for Dawn of War 3 which just was on free weekend, I would have 100% refunded it if I had purchased it.



Edit: Just saw an imho share-worthy tweet from the steamspy maker:

 

I wrote the "Another key difference..." line in reference to your distribution infrastructure costs, not in reference to all costs from beginning to end of making a sale.

Often in other types of businesses there are distribution centers, storage, packaging, inventory management, etc, that you could cut by buying up local competitors and leveraging their existing infrastructure. That used to be the case even in the video games market, but with digital sales it no longer is the case. There is really no distribution infrastructure costs at all anymore, so no advantage to buying a local competitor in regards to distribution advantage. The only reason now for a larger game company to buy a smaller game company is if they are interested in their specific IP.

 

Haven't read all the post in this thread, but it is interesting discussion.


I'm not an expert in the biz, but I do think there is a misconception about the amount of work involved in making video games. (probably the main reason a lot of wanna-be developers end up quitting -- it's a totally different mindset versus playing games). Look at how much traditional art cost. $500 for some silly thing that looks like a drunk toddler had a hissy fit with a bunch of paint -- versus literally hundreds of hours of complex problem solving, tedious attention to detail, etc involved in making a game... and it's 10-60 bucks?

I mean, as a consumer I'm glad games are cheap, but when I enjoy a game I will get hundreds of hours out of it. A book doesn't cost much less than a game usually, and how much do I get from that? Or movies?

 

I am still battling between weather to publish my game on google store for free to play or pay to play or fully paid. I have put tons of hours into int and spend alot of money on it.

I checked the market, and games similar to my games are sold for at least $7, not less.

Not an easy task to decide how to release it.

 

If they are actually sold at 7$ and not just priced at 7$, then that seems like a no-brainer to me: sell it for 7$.

 

If you get all players that own a RIft and Vive to buy one game all of them play at once, they you can get 2M simultaneous players

If you target PSVR you get a few more million players at your feet. But we all know the joys of targeting PS. Plus if I know Sony correct they will not let the PS players play with Vive/Rift people becasue the inferior tracking will shine through

 

I agree, but in a market with basically zero quality games, gamers need to be a bit more involved with the industry. Keep in mind VR industry is 30-40 years younger than flat gaming industry.

Thats a myth, most players can play hours, and hours of VR just after a few days

 

With VR I think people associate most of the value with the hardware. It is what enables the core experience. It's not really that different then any other new hardware that has caused extra time for developers. It's just a cost you have to absorb.

There are very few situations where it actually makes business sense to make VR games right now IMO. If VR becomes big it will also become much cheaper to develop for as tools mature along with it. I guess you could make the case that becoming familiar with the medium and learning how to make games that really leverage VR is worth starting now. But I think that's really only the case if you are working on next gen type stuff. Otherwise if you are just following everyone else, it will be easier to just catch up once it's more mature.

 

Good VR interaction mechanics is several magnitudes harder than normal gaming mechanics. Its not something you cock together from scratch in months. I hope we did the right business decision to get on early, time will tell

 

I don't think it makes good biz sense to do VR game dev right now. It might even be a loss unless you do it hyper cheap.

It makes fantastic biz sense for engines to support VR though, if that makes sense. You'll get constant enthusiastic feedback from engine developers like Unity because that's a hot topic for hiring and for engine sales.

 

By the way, is there any ETA for your VR game?

 

Or their talent, though I can't recall an example of that off of the top of my head.

 

I've heard/read the same. I think it might depend on the demo type. Over the years with various games we've tried having no demo at all, having a full "pay if you want" demos, "nag" demos, "free to play" type demos, etc. I can't honestly say that I've noticed much of a major difference that couldn't otherwise be attributed to more simply the game itself. I could have kept better records, I suppose, hah!

Regarding the game I mentioned above, the "demo" is more like a fairly full game experience, with no time limit. The "pay" comes when someone wants the "extras", like a character editor, etc. So it's sort of a hybrid of various demo types. I just went in and did checked the stats, and as of this post, our gross sales average is $2.60 for every download of that "free demo version". Bear in mind that's just from one sales site. We've had it for sale at various other places as well. Patreon, for instance, but that has been going down as we stopped updating so much.

Anyway, I'm not sure what would happen if we simply lowered the price to the full game to $2.60 and got rid of the demo. The game is almost three years old now so it might be interesting to try something like that sometime.

 

We had dev kits for PSVR before it was available and took some industry advice and shelved the game. Likely we'll dig something back out when it makes more sense to do than what we are doing currently.

 

One inherent disadvantage VR games currently have is game videos and streaming. Popular YouTubers and Twitchers are one of the main driving forces for determining which games become popular. When a game streams very well, that game will get played by those trend setters. You cannot really stream the VR experience. There are aspects of a VR game that can be streamed, but not the real core experience of 3D vision with head tracking and motion controllers.

One of the reasons PUBG has been so successful is that PUBG is very streamable. The graphics are detailed enough to be interesting, but still simple enough to stream. For example, games with more foliage tend stream worse. Games with a lot more moving objects tend to stream worse. Even games with more red objects tend to stream poorly. The PUBG videos tend to look nearly as good as the actual game.

Beyond that, PUB has a lot of gameplay complexity while lacking a spectator option for the solo mode. So gamers end up wanting to watch PUBG videos, and they have to go to YouTube and Twitch for that. That leads to more views for the YouTubers/Twitchers for their PUBG videos, so then they decide to make even more PUBG content. It is a synergistic relationship between PUBG devs and YouTubers/Twitchers. As more and more videos are made about PUBG, more gamers buy PUBG and then search for more videos to learn about PUBG.

A typical VR game does not get to be part of that YouTube/Twitch excitement. And the problem is not restricted to VR games, either. Any game that does not stream well is at a disadvantage. For example, my current game (Disputed Space) looks a hundred times better in person than it does through YouTube or Twitch. The massive number of moving objects (thousands of laser blasts) in my game cause problems for the video compression used by YouTube and Twitch. That issue puts me at a similar disadvantage, because games that do not stream well will not get covered by YouTubers and Twitchers.

 

My best guess would be sales drop at the much lower price point because "the price is part of the message". A 15$ game with a free demo seems much more valuable than a 2.60$ game. Just like a 15$ game in a 82% off sale seems like a great bargain. Higher prices also often lead to higher consumer satisfaction, because they want to be happy with their purchase when they pay more.

That makes me sad, but I'm sure you did the right thing and didn't make that choice lightly . Will you ever show us what you had been working on? I've been curious for a long time about your game and now I fear we might never get a glimpse at it.

 

I've had a completely different experience with Itch. I have my game on both Steam and Itch. I match the price and sales between the two, so if I have a Steam sale then I have an equal Itch sale at the same time. I have sold very few copies through Itch, and the copies I did sell through Itch were during a sale. I have never sold a single copy at full price through Itch. Steam accounts for nearly all of the sale of my game, and Steam sales consistently bring large sales increases.

I am curious why Itch has worked completely differently for you. Do you sell on both Steam and Itch?

 

Afaik you can't sell uncensored adult xxx games on steam, so by default the audience for those won't look for those on steam. They are likely to know they need to go to itch and similar sites for that genre. Your game is a typical steam game imho.

This reminds me... I mentioned somewhere that I think indies are marketing themselves at least as much as their games, and you're relatively public with being on patreon for example. Do you have any data points from a time where you two as a dev team where more anonymous? Can you roughly quantify the effect it has that you now are relatively visible in the public? I'm certain it helps, but I have no data to base that on.

 

As Martin points out, almost all of our games for about 17 years now have been "adult" games. Although these days there are (censored) adult games showing up on Steam, traditionally that wasn't allowed. We're not making adult games anymore (aside from finishing up the one I've been talking about in this thread) so I won't ever have the chance to test actual Steam vs. Itch results.

Agreed. Good points.

Yeah, after all of those years, we finally came out and went public with who we are. On some counts that was a plus, I think, mainly on a personal level where we didn't have to feel so hidden anymore. It's nice to just be able to say "hey, we make adult games" and be done with it, instead of making stuff up, haha. On the other hand I think it became somewhat of a negative. Since the anonymity was gone and people could put a face to the company, it took away some of the "mystique" in a way. I know for myself once we started being open about who we were, I got a lot more, uhm, uncomfortable messages from various people. My partner (wife), not so much, because she has never been so much a public person as I tend to be.

 

I think that people dissociate their hardware from the games they play. For one, they spend big on the hardware, but that just leaves some of them more budget-constrained. Second, everything is compared against AAA games. That said, if you create a game that really scatches the itch of some niche, I think you should charge for it, regardless of what the players say. If you talk to the critics and personalities in the space, and tell them what the risk is, and what the costs to create these smaller scale games are, I'm sure most of them would agree that they are often underpriced.

 

I've found that customers are definitely sympathetic after you get the opportunity to talk/interact with them. Gets them out of the "mob mentality" mode. Most of them don't realize that the typical game would cost over 100k if you were paying programmers market rate for their time.

There's a little thing that I like to do to point out the impact of low prices. I have an app on the market right now based on a popular boardgame. It's pretty fun but it's incomplete - no on-line multiplayer, about 50% of the expansions aren't in there. Whenever someone writes me about adding those missing items, I let them know that I need to continually move to writing new games in order to continue making a living off it and that if acceptable prices were only about 50% higher I would have been able to stick with it and finish those parts off.