Blog post: Early access price and final price

Started by Tynan, September 02, 2018, 12:02:08 AM

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homemdosgalos

Completely agree with what the first member wrote. I bought the gama already knowing that i would gladly pay 60 bucks for it, but i agree it may be too much for some players.

In terms of knowing in advance how much invested a person will be... well, there are Steam reviews, and dozens of gameplays on YT that will give anyone an idea on what they are getting, so i doubt many will get shocked about the visuals and such.

The mod and community also provides a TON of replayability for this game, too. If i was Tynan, i would release it at 39.99. Cheaper than a AAA while still at a decent price, and with a price increase that will make any early access user happy they purchased and supported this game in advance. Though personally i would still be fine if the price tag was the same, because other players didn't had the experience of playing the game "as it grew". Some might not agree with my view, so that price tag would likely be fine.

And of course, wonderful piece of work, all of Ludeon Staff ;)

Ramsis

Personally I feel 35-40 dollars USD is the safest bet.

The game offers content, options, a large scale modding community, and an incredibly active developer/team. Go too much higher and we do risk the piracy side of things increasing; not that pirates won't pirate if they want to but more one less reason to pirate if they don't have to.
Ugh... I have SO MANY MESSES TO CLEAN UP. Oh also I slap people around who work on mods <3

"Back off man, I'm a scientist."
- Egon Stetmann


Awoo~

Panzer

What Ramsis said. I feel like a price increase of 50% of the original price or more is going to hurt sales rather than increase them, thats going to make potential buyers think twice.

Ade_the_Rare

I'd say aim for £25-30, or $30-35. Why not higher?

1. You have made a truly amazing game which has inspired *so* many people to then produce a rediculous number of mods as well, which are all free, providing a near-infinity of options and preferences, and thus a large spread of appeal.

2. The spec requirements are so low that there isn't a machine on the planet that couldn't run it.

3. I routinely browse the mods workshop on Steam, and there is a massive variety of first-languages amongst the mod developers, which means that Rimworld already has a market base in many, many countries.

As first sales go ahead, the overwhelmingly positive reviews will keep rolling in, and to be honest this game is by far and away going to be a classic; one of those ones that will be referenced to in decades to come as a benchmark of what games *can* be, and future games will be compared against it to judge how good they are on the "Rimworld scale". It wouldn't surprise me if this game's popularity (and sales) will be measured in years; most games peak after a few weeks and then fizzle out.

Jibbles

When I paid 30, I knew I wanted this kind of game. I simply wanted to support development in hopes it wouldn't get abandoned too early. Glad to see it come this far!

If features/content keeps getting added over time then the price is understandable, but if this is pretty much all there's gonna be (mainly bug fixing here on out) with price jacked up past 30, then it's hard to refrain from thumbing it down.

I know I will fight myself on this. (I won't thumb it down on steam, but I won't recommend it either) Not because it's a bad game but because I can't recommend it for the price.  When a game gets in that price range then it raises my expectations. I do have fun in Rimworld, but it doesn't reach my expectations. The feeling of an incomplete game was always there in just about every game I boot up in Rimworld.  I have this feeling with several other indie games but I didn't pay 30+ for them. It's great to see players completely satisfied with it and would gladly pay more.. But TBH I've gotten at least six people to buy this game and sort of regret it based on most of their reactions, so I'll be very hesitant to even bring it up with friends/random encounters with price increased. I know this post is sort of on the negative side, sorry.  I will say that you guys have done some great work so far! So thanks for the experience.

BlackSmokeDMax

Quote from: vzoxz0 on September 04, 2018, 04:20:25 PM

Steam Spy indicates this game has ~500 000 owners. It would be interesting to see other popular early access games (with similar stats) and what happened when they released, and whether they changed their numbers.


Tynan announced a while back that the game had officially hit 1 million sales.

https://ludeon.com/blog/2018/01/one-million-copies-sold/


blooshoo

I just made it into the kickstarter at $15, and for a game I've been coming back to since the early versions I've more then gotten my money's worth. And as many have reflected, knowing what I know of the game now, how deep and wide it is, how vibrant, diverse and active the mod community is and how on top of the community you are, I'd gladly pay $60 for it. You've made a great game tynan, and I really can't wait to see what you do next, especially excited to see what your next project may be :-)

As for what the final price should be it's really hard to say. Thinking of how I approach buying a game on steam (which I do way more then I should)I know that $30 is right at the top of my 'impulse buy if it's in a genre I really like' range, and 40+ would push it into a 'lets wait and see' for a new release, and a 'let's see how patching has looked over the last few months and what the glowing reviews and the scathing reviews say'. Additionally I'll ask any friends who also own it for their feedback.  I also am seeing a lot of developer responses to negative feedback lately, and when it's a well thought out response to a well thought out bad review that is a tremendous boost to my outlook on the developer.

Given the "overwhelmingly positive" reviews on steam and with several of my friends having have played and loved it I think if I were approaching it new you could get $40 out of me. Anyway, this post really got away from me. I hope it was helpful.
How ever you fall on the pricing I'm sure it will continue to be a success, because at the end of the day it's a great product with a great community around it that loves it.

PaszaVonPomiot

I'm willing to pay 0,25$ per hour of good game. I have 165h in Rimworld so it is worth ~40$ at the moment for me. I reckon that after 1.0 I'll have 300h or more. So if you ask me about value of Rimworld I would say it's about 70$. However I would strongly discourage rising price to anything above 35$ because this would discourage many potential players. Larger player base is important because it means more word of mouth, more modders, more fame for devs and better sales for next product. I personally would prefer to sell 1M cheaper copies than 100K more expensive copies of the game. Especially if you don't plan any price drops for long time there's no need to ramp up the price. Just keep it reasonable and steady and cash will flow.
Oh and I'm also willing to pay 2$ subscription a month for continued development ;)

Ruisuki

its gonna cost more? damn. Hope 1.0 doesnt come until after christmas then

Sunago

Personally I would agree with some of the others. A price range between 35 and 45 would probably work best. Not because of how much the game is worth, though. If it's just for myself then yeah, this is a game I would have happily paid 60 dollars for it. I've gotten hours upon hours of enjoyment out of it and will probably get hundreds of hours more enjoyment still in the future.

My reasoning is purely consumer based. One of the trends I've noticed on steam is that you can easily see which are the indie games and which are the AAA titles purely based on price most of the time. Till 10 dollars you have the easy platformers, puzzle games and visual novels. From 10 to 30 you have the indie titles. 60 dollars....almost all of them are AAA titles.

And with those, come certain expectations and limits. So if you price it at 60 then people will probably expect an AAA production...and DLC...and let's not forget the whining that a lot of those titles bring forth if the smallest thing doesn't work.

35 to 45 is probably a price that shows "hey, complete game but not completely indie but not an AAA either." if that makes sense.

sunscreen777

#40
Before I share my thoughts I just want to put out there that this is my 3rd most played game with ~300 hours. I even purchased a backstory to help support as much as I could :P. I would only want the best for this game and the developer for all his hard work!

That being said, I would actually advise going the other direction in terms of pricing.  If you look at all the top steam games rated 10/10: https://steamdb.info/stats/gameratings/ You will notice that about a good amount of the top games can have graphics that can be deemed similar to Rimworld.  This includes things like Factorio and Don't Starve.  However, what you notice with those games is that they already cost at or below what Rimworld does: $30 and $15 respectively.  So if you were to increase the price of the game, from a behavioral standpoint, If i only have $30 dollars to spend, Factorio seems to be fun according to the reviews, so eh lemme buy that instead of saving $x amount to get to the new rimworld price.  What would be interesting to learn is how many people have both rimworld and factorio, or just one of the two but wanted both. (you would never be able to get this info but interesting none the less)

Additionally, looking through the above posts, many of the people claim that they would not have bought the game unless X happened, i.e. watching a streamer. Not only would they have not bought the game, but many couldn't simply afford it. By increasing the price, you may scare people away, where now if the price is $50, Why should I get this game, when I can get The Witcher 3.  Not saying this game is inferior to the Witcher 3, but if people had doubts of buying it at $30, i don't know if they would want to buy it at $50.  This can be also related to the idea of price discrimination, where at movie theaters, they give discounts to college kids not to be nice, but because they know college kids can't afford the regular price ticket.  So essentially ( in theory) everyone who would buy the game, would have already bought it by now.  While I know this can't be true because you get new sales everyday, there is a ton of kids who would buy "the movie ticket" if it were only cheaper.  What you could do in that instance is just put the game on sale. 

As to the point of "we have never gone on sale and we will never go on sale" This may work for an individual standing item but when you are listed with other items it is much harder to pull off.  For instance, I have 22 some odd things on my wishlist.  Do I remember when the last time "northgard" went on sale? HAS it ever gone on sale? beats me!  But I guess I will just wait until it does because I like the idea of saving money and something seems to go on sale on my wishlist every week anyway! Additionally, if I still only had $30 bucks and Factorio goes on sale, now I could afford Factorio AND Don't Starve.  One of the key components of the above is everybody had to "discover" how good this game was.  While there is nothing wrong with that only a slight proportion of people would bother reading the fourms of a game they are considering.  Which leads to people probably choosing to buy multiple games that are on sale instead of just one at the full price. 

Moreover, connecting this with the above, if Northgard all of a sudden increased by $15 bucks, my inclination is to stay even farther away from it.  Sure it may have come out with more content, and sure it may be out of early access, but if DayZ suddenly came out of early access 5 years in development, I don't know if 1 dev cycle would justify a huge increase in price to a bystander who was already on the fence of getting it. 

The other problem that you run into is that if you were to follow the recommendation above and lowered the price, you might alienate the community that already bought your game as they may feel ripped off.  Additionally, it already seems like you are convinced in setting it to some price above the current $30, so my suggestion is to input it so that it is lets say $45, but then instantly have a 33% sale for the first month or so in "celebrating" the release.  This way you target those "sale seekers" and hopefully you will receive good press from the big gamer sites/magazines creating even more of an incentive to buy your game.  This would also seemingly be a "method" to satisfy all the arguments above.

Again, I don't even know if the above makes sense. Please don't take this post the wrong way.  I know you worked for years on this game and I get that you think your work should be worth more, but I would honestly think you would be compensated more in the above fashion.  I would be happy to explain it in more detail if you would like.  Just my 2 cents.


A_Chinchilla

Hmm, to be honest I'm not sure how I feel about that. Don't get me wrong, the game is absolutely worth 30 dollars. If I had been trialing it until now I would likely be willing to spend more than 30, however, I am not so sure I would have bought the game if it had been at a higher price point than it is currently. Especially with the lack of sales. I get Tynan may not like sales, but that is simply how I feel. In my opinion, due to the nature of the story telling aspect of the game, it does not translate very well into other media aside from text based stories. Based off of the steam page it appears to not have much depth. Based off of youtube and twitch it appeared very boring to me due to the downtime. I very rarely pay more than 30, and almost never pay above 40 for a game. The combination of reading the steam review and steam's refund allowed me to push through and take the chance.

I don't think this is just me either. 2-maybe 3 people in my very close circle have been put off due to this as well. I'm not saying that the game should be less than 30, but before playing it, a combination of the graphics/viewing the gameplay was not too interesting. That's just my two cents worth though.

Bit more on why I do not find it interesting to watch gameplay. I find it hard to both acquire and maintain an interest in the pawns and their stories outside of my own game. In a "make your own story" game like rimworld I believe this to majorly detract for the enjoyment.

korppi

I am convinced that anything more than currently will only lower sales. As others have stated the game is expensive for a indie right now.

Roolo

#43
Quote from: korppi on September 06, 2018, 02:28:06 AM
I am convinced that anything more than currently will only lower sales. As others have stated the game is expensive for a indie right now.

I agree. When I bought the game I was already very hesitant, the 30$ tag already seemed like a lot, but the positive feedback the game received as well as the concept I really like finally convinced me. If you look at other indie games with overwhelmingly positive reviews, they're all priced slightly lower than Rimworld. If you have to choose between those games and Rimworld, a 5$ price difference isn't likely to matter much, but if the price of Rimworld increases it'll more likely be a 10-15$ difference. I think that would put a lot of people off, at least it might have putten me off.

So I think the 30$ is spot on. The game is worth more to me, but that doesn't mean asking more is wise.

Blato

Even at the 30$ price tag, I spent an amount of time watching people playing on YouTube and skimming through the reviews before buying.
If there were any price increases, I believe that ~40$ would be the top for me. I veeery rarely buy a game above that price range, only if I've been eyeing something for a long time, and after the initial reviews of course.