Is there a steam price yet?

[TLHeart]

When discussing steam pricing, one has to keep in mind that steam sets the price by region also. Many of the comments about the price are comming from regions where Steam discounts the price.

[RickyMartini]

Without having read trough the comments, if we compare Rimworld (a 2d base building game with an extreme amount of content detail) to other games, I'd say that 30 dollars is really the upper limit.

No offense, Rimworld has a ton of content for it's seemingly "low end" 2d graphics, but then again there are some other incredibly well managed early access games like Prison Architect for example.

And the developers of Prison Architect are selling their game for 30 dollars atm but when it came out it was on sale. So if Tynan keeps his price at 30 I'm already seeing some negative reviews of people complaining it is too much.

I'm not making anecdotal references, if you're curious how people are going to react to the price, go to the Steam page of Prison Architect and you'll see that out of thousands of reviews there are still a couple of hundreds complaining about the 30 dollar price and that it is too much for such a game. Those reviews, although not popular, contributed to Prison Architect not having an almost "perfect" positive score.

[Tamedsquall]

With the amount of content, lack of bugs, and until recently, the amount of updates. Not to mention mod support already. There is no other game in my life that I have came back to play as much as this one. I only wish I had a record of the hundreds of ours I've already gotten from this. And I have been gaming a long time. This game is easily worth 30 bucks. You're kind of doing it a disservice saying it's only worth 5-10. But you are entitled to your opinion.

[Maligner]

Interesting conversation.

I already bought the game so there's that.

I bought Minecraft early on for $10 US. That is by far the best purchase I've made at "full price". I've gotten some games on sale in packages that were great prices, like getting Fallout New Vegas with all the DLC for something like $12 US or so.

I think there's something to be said for keeping the price lower for a game in development as it fuels word of mouth; many more people will buy a cheaper incomplete game than people will buy a full price incomplete game.

On the other hand, some developers don't necessarily want the sales. I know for a fact the developer of Crea (avaialable on Steam), Jasson, specifically says the price is high and he wants people to buy it only if they want to either support development through sales and through helping to bug check and play test. So he is actively discouraging sales through "high price". Which actually implies the game isn't at the right price point since it's in Early Access.

So the real issue is not what we as individuals feel is fair. We live in a world where people are buying virtual spaceships for a game that wasn't playable at the time of sale for hundreds and thousands of dollars (Star Citizen). Just because one person is happy to spend a certain amount of money isn't indicative of a price point. The real question is, where will mass sales be generated? Where is the sweet spot against the main competition versus the quality of your product?

If Tynan Sylvester wants to limit participation through a high price point, there's nothing wrong with $30 buy in.  $30 buy in at release is probably worth it, but Mr. Sylvester should consider a little lower price as the extra sales would probably be worth it. It's really simple math. I don't know the amount Valve gets or other costs of distribution, but let's assume 50% recovery. So a $30 price point would net $15. If you sold it for $20, you'd get $10. So if you sold only 50,000 copies at $30 you'd gross $750,000. If you sold 100,000 copies at $20 price tag you'd gross $1 million. At some point, you have to look at your sales and see if you are losing sales and thus revenue. Also, there's something to be said about the more you sell, the more people are exposed to your game which generates more sales.

Like I said before, I already bought it. I have to admit though, as is it's a steep price. At release, I should think a little discounting would be wise.

[TLHeart]

Interesting conversation.

<snip>

If Tynan Sylvester wants to limit participation through a high price point, there's nothing wrong with $30 buy in.  $30 buy in at release is probably worth it, but Mr. Sylvester should consider a little lower price as the extra sales would probably be worth it. It's really simple math. I don't know the amount Valve gets or other costs of distribution, but let's assume 50% recovery. So a $30 price point would net $15. If you sold it for $20, you'd get $10. So if you sold only 50,000 copies at $30 you'd gross $750,000. If you sold 100,000 copies at $20 price tag you'd gross $1 million. At some point, you have to look at your sales and see if you are losing sales and thus revenue. Also, there's something to be said about the more you sell, the more people are exposed to your game which generates more sales.

Like I said before, I already bought it. I have to admit though, as is it's a steep price. At release, I should think a little discounting would be wise.

Depends on what mass market is.

Tynan has already generated $3 million is sales, he has no incentive to reduce the price. He used to post units sold, and stopped doing that at 90,000, over 6 months ago. That is why he can afford to take this 6 month vacation.

[Maligner]

Depends on what mass market is.

Tynan has already generated $3 million is sales, he has no incentive to reduce the price. He used to post units sold, and stopped doing that at 90,000, over 6 months ago. That is why he can afford to take this 6 month vacation.

I absolutely agree that if you wanted to sell RimWorld for $100 and people flocked to it, by all means take advantage! However, $3.5 million is still better than $3 million. The business side of it still demands flexibility in the thought process of what the "correct" price for your product is based on your customer base and your competition.

Notch walked away from Minecraft having made multi-millions in sales ostensibly because he didn't want the pressure of being a serious game developer, but it couldn't have hurt that Microsoft dropped a few billion $ in his lap!

I guess what I was saying is that Mr. Sylvester knows what his daily motivation is, and I'm sure it's not all about money, but at the end of the day the money helps a lot. He's no fool and I'm sure he knows that maximizing his income is a smart thing to do. The question is, does having a higher price make you  more money than having a lower price? Typically, you can make more with some discounting, provided you have a market. People usually only gladly pay high prices for things that are highly anticipated must-haves. A game like RimWorld, as good as it is, hasn't achieved it's potential ($3 million in sales notwithstanding) because so many people don't know about it. Selling more units early at a lower price point helps fix that. Getting on Steam is going to make a big difference too, but having a good entry price on Steam, in my opinion, would be smart in the long run. Mr. Sylvester probably knows this so it's fun to watch what will happen.

As I said before, it's an interesting conversation.