Blog post: Early access price and final price

[Nafensoriel]

setting price to 40 just to make sale (that will return price to original value) is shady marketing technique that likely to angry customers with IQ over 59.99.
39.99 is additional instance of that shady marketing, i feel treated like some kind idiot when see such price tags.
40 is 40, not 39.99 or 39.68.

if something works in local "walmart", does not means, that it will work everywhere just fine.

I hate to devils advocate this but it works pretty much everywhere. The psychological effects of a .95 to a .99 at the end of a price point are well known and actually, disturbingly, work on the majority of the population. It's the same vein of behaviour that prompts the "ideal" sales height to be slightly under 5 feet. Most people are legitimately that lazy to let social instincts override common sense.

All that said though rimworld doesn't appeal to that market audience. It's a game that really requires you to think. Not thinking results in really damned short games.

[RawCode]

there are no creditable research results about price tags.

and "ideal" sales revolve around setting and keeping price, increasing profits by decreasing quality or volume\weight of product over time.

unlike production of physical goods, that consumed on use, such techinque can't be used on software fully.

ofc you can "upgrade" base software and release paid fix, but customers are highly likely to notice this, and they won't be happy.
also customers may reject to update or downgrade.

[Bozobub]

there are no creditable research results about price tags.

Um....  Yeah, no:
https://www.google.com/search?q=why+do+price+tags+end+in+.99

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

Whether or not you agree with the underlying reasoning, the fact remains that pricing ANY good in this manner results in a small but significant boost in sales.  Your quibbles fall to empirical results *shrug*.

[Nafensoriel]

there are no creditable research results about price tags.

and "ideal" sales revolve around setting and keeping price, increasing profits by decreasing quality or volume\weight of product over time.

unlike production of physical goods, that consumed on use, such techinque can't be used on software fully.

ofc you can "upgrade" base software and release paid fix, but customers are highly likely to notice this, and they won't be happy.
also customers may reject to update or downgrade.

You neglected an entire portion of engineering called workflow. Process efficiencies and raw good costs are where you gain the most margin period dot end. Reducing product weight is not even fractional %s and done normally as a stopgap to price increases. The pricing metrics are measured, known, and widely used. In the 90s billions were spent studying this. To make matters worse the major spenders have not published their research. Walmart has never published its internal testing results in its "prop store" or its video evaluations at live stores. Yet we still have plenty of research backing up the data.

Is it crappy? Yes. Doesn't mean it's not happening or valid however.

[magicbush]

Going over $40 would be dumb honestly. And really much more than $30 is asking a lot. Granted it does have many hours of play available, but the average gamer does not care if the graphics look like they do in this game and thus will just pass it up for another colony/survival game with 3d graphics.

I think people are misunderstanding something about playtime. Playtime is NOT a good indicator of a quality of a game. I'd rather play 8 hours of amazing gameplay than 30 hours of average gameplay.

That being said, the fact that people have spent so much time on Rimworld can be a good indicator of quality.

Not everyone agree's with that statement. I don't really since I play WoW , and just because a few people say "playtime does not equal price" repeatedly does not mean most people don't think that way as it's quite the opposite regardless of your personal opinion. Most gamers do actually think that way when making a purchase just from what I have read on forums(which is alot) and reviews.

always considered outright hostility towards DLC to be strange. Don't get me wrong, I'm not approving of Day 0 DLC. But no one's proposing Rimworld to include any. DLC utilized properly is today's equivalent of expansion packs, and people fucking loved expansion packs back in the day.

That is because "back in the day" expansions were actual expansions. They included an entire new campaign, and new units, new graphics/sounds, and hours of new content for usually about half the price of the game. DLC on the other hand nickle and dimes customers for new skins, new weapons, a new mode, and new maps, etc. I don't buy DLC unless it feels worth it, and is not something I use to get for free(IE new maps like CoD,  BF, etc does with dlc). It causes a lot of people in my generation to hate dlc that grew up with expansions and mods that know what is possible which is what you sort of go into following what I quoted. Most games any more do not sell expansions, but small dlc that adds up to cost more than an expansion would have for less content overall.

Two Point Hospital costs $35, seems to have done okay.
Crusader Kings 2 costs $40 (but they regularly put it deep on sale).

Both of those games are very niche, and cater to a certain audience. Arty basically said the same. This game does as well, but i'd think by now most people that want this game already own it. Also as Arty pointed out there are quite a few other similar games on the market already. So you are going to be competing for the crowd that didn't necessarily want this game to begin with.

I still think your best bet is to increase it to $35, and release an actual expansion down the line for around $15-20. Or just move on to your next project, but who are we to decide that lol? We are after all random people on the internet.

[Call me Arty]

I still think your best bet is to increase it to $35, and release an actual expansion down the line for around $15-20. Or just move on to your next project, but who are we to decide that lol? We are after all random people on the internet.

I think MysticalShrubbery summed it up pretty well here, and the bullet points of this thread seem to be:

• Rimworld is niche, and fits very comfortably into that niche.
• Veterans can agree that $40-$60 is a fair price for the content you get.
• Increasing the price beyond $30 could potentially alienate new buyers (most of the people who will buy the game likely already have).
• Those who already own the game would be willing to buy DLC for as much as it's worth (skins/pay2win bad, expansions good).

Back to my personal beliefs: $30 is a good deal, $40 is too much, and $35 might as well be base price (of $30) + "The change-some-aspect-of-the-game-in-a-meaningful-way expansion". This could be anything from boats, to a couple more non-baseline human pawns to control, to some way to sway a colony towards an acceptance of human flesh: a lot of things that have been long-requested, shown in-demand by the presence of mods to supply it, or a combination of the two. Hey, so many things have been added to Rimworld over the years for free, I'm sure the fanbase would've started paying for it a few updates ago.

[Wanderer_joins]

I still think your best bet is to increase it to $35, and release an actual expansion down the line for around $15-20. Or just move on to your next project, but who are we to decide that lol? We are after all random people on the internet.

^ This. $35 is what you can reasonably ask for getting out of early access, $40 would be strechting it, more would be deemed greedy. That's from a player viewpoint, i get you may be considering minmaxing the return on personal investment to finance future projects.

[Jibbles]

You can put games like factorio and prison architect in the same field as Rimworld. 
Personally find those games more polished. 

Both are $30, tho PA has been on sale.  Big features are still being added to those games and don't have DLC.  Even PA seems to be experimenting with multiplayer now.  So I do question the price increase, especially if I want to take the comment to heart about no more major features being added to rimworld.

Too early to talk about dlc IMO but here we are.  I don't think it would be wise to expand on existing mechanics or include the many features that players suggest into a dlc. If I'm going to pay for it without rubbing me the wrong way it would most likely need to change the game/experience entirely, something similar to marsX mod.

[gendalf]

5thHorseman, real goods and virtual goods aren't the same, there's an implied production cost per each sold good with real goods so the real goods demand should always increase the price, when the supply isn't sufficient, for example how it was with the gpu market half a year ago - due to the hype around the bitcoin/crypto mining the demand went up, but the gpu-producers were smart enough to know that it was a temporary hype, that wasn't worth investing more into production for, so the've just waited it out, which had lead to a physical lack of goods = increase in prices. None of this is possible with virtual goods, unless it's artificially orchestrated for profit.

[Limdood]

I think that an increased price is fair. 

That being said, 30$ is the most i've paid for a game in a LONG LONG time.  I tend to get really early access games cheap, or pick up games after they've been out for a while on sale. 

If Rimworld cost 40-50$....I don't think I'd have bought it.  If it cost that much at 1.0, I don't think i WOULD buy it.  BUT! - and this is important - If i did buy it for that amount, I think it is worth it. 

Generally you can't play games before you buy them.  You can watch videos, read material...there might even be a demo, but it's still hard to tell if you'd like a game ahead of sitting down to actually play it yourself (not to mention the people who won't put in the research effort anyways...not everyone wants to work hard for their fun).  That being said, LOOKING at rimworld and the videos/reading material that exists, without having played the game, it was agonizingly hard to spend 30$ on it.  I'm pretty sure I wouldn't spend 40-50.  Luckily for me, I DID buy it, and it is WELL worth that money.  I'm just trying to say that Rimworld being worth 50$ doesn't mean someone is willing to drop 50$ and hope that the game will be worth it. 

It's a tough position without an easy answer.  The simplistic and cute graphics and controls that make rimworld work so well, pack so much content in, and enable such a complicated management/survival game to exist and be worth the money, are also the main things that would hinder impulse buys and first-impression purchases at a higher price-point.

***EDIT***
After reading some responses.  DLC seems a bad fit for this game.  Mods already cover such a huge HUGE variety of what you COULD do.  most every other possible suggestion tends to get bogged down with roughly equal good/bad feedback (see thirst needs, z-levels, etc) OR wouldn't really fit too well in the established lore of the game (no sequel with "colony on a spaceship" because everyone in interstellar travel is in a coffin because there is no FTL travel).  I'd much rather see a rimworld-inspired game using some of the same mechanics or assets, that is completely stand-alone, than a DLC that tries to squish a round-shaped new story/game experience into a square-shaped existing game.

[5thHorseman]

5thHorseman, real goods and virtual goods aren't the same

I don't know what I said that made it sound like I thought they did, but I am aware of that, yes.

The important point I was making was there exists a price where Ludeon will make the most money and that is the price they should try for unless some other factor comes into play. That number is impossible to know but many companies have spent lots of money determining it for both real and virtual goods. Of course, most of that information is secret and doesn't apply generally anyway, but there ARE generalities and it DOES boil down to graphing out (profit per sale from a price)*(sales from a price)=(total profit) and picking the price where (total profit) is highest.

"Profit per sale" accounts for manufacturing costs of physical goods and paying the Steam Price for video games, however it's only one factor and sometimes not even a very important one. For all things sold to the public, the much more important factor is determining how high you can price the item before people (in general) stop buying it.

[Senio]

This thread is for discussing this blog post.

Please add an multiplayer co-p mod, I believe a lot of people are willing to pay extra for it, like Stonehearth and Craft The World

[sadpickle]

setting price to 40 just to make sale (that will return price to original value) is shady marketing technique that likely to angry customers with IQ over 59.99.
39.99 is additional instance of that shady marketing, i feel treated like some kind idiot when see such price tags.
40 is 40, not 39.99 or 39.68.

if something works in local "walmart", does not means, that it will work everywhere just fine.

"I'll tell you what brilliance in advertising is: 99 cents. Somebody thought of that." -Roger Sterling

[middlemonster]

The only reason I've played more than 20 hours on this game is because of mods. I don't really enjoy it anymore without them. If it wasn't for the modding community, I think this game would have died a long time ago.

I think this game is worth $30 and that is based purely on production value and amount of solid content.

If you play the game on full speed, you can experience the majority that this game has to offer in a single play through in about 10-15 hours. Its a different story if you make the game intentionally more challenging and add mods. But playing vanilla Rimworld the first and 15th time is not really that much different.

I get tons more content from mods then the original game. I think its the only reason I occasionally go back to it.

[ShadowTani]

I'm not going to speculate about the product value and make any analysis about the sweet spot for the price. But as an economist by trade I do have to commend you for not underselling your game Tynan. Too many ambitious early access games kill themselves simply by putting the price point too low during the alpha and beta period. Though I recognize Rimworld started as a kickstarter game where early access is considered a premium, not something inferior (as is often the case on steam EA).

And quite frankly, full release is likely not going to affect sales significantly, even if you were to maintain the same price; despite it being a growing group of people who refuse to buy a game in early access, they are still a minority. A game with an early access period will see most of its sales happen during that early access period, so there will be no big payday waiting for it in the future upon a full release. Take note that this is based on impressions and individual reports and not so much on hard sales data, as proper sales data on this is lacking (I would love to hear your experience with this after release though, considering Rimworld having a full release should not come off as controversial as it sometimes do for other early access games).

The best part of releasing a game however is that DLC will no longer be seen as controversial. *nudge nudge* Vehicles and religion are potential big themes that people might pay extra for. ;3