Blog post: Early access price and final price

[Call me Arty]

How about DLC?

Two games that Rimworld has drawn a lot from have sold a fair bit over one million and two million respectively - at $30. If we assume that people look at Rimworld and have a similar level of interest, a price increase may hold it back from similiar levels of success. Say what you will about DLC, but I think that may be the way to go. The game's sold a significant amount of copies, and (no disrespect) it's hard to picture it going too much further at an increased price, as similar games would be available for less and those who thought a not-amazing-looking complicated and harsh colony management sim for $30 (bit of a gamble) already have, it's not a huge demographic. Meanwhile: look at Civilization V. Not only was it already twice the price of Rimworld, but it's best-rated DLC pack added half the price back on in addition to it selling very well in it's vanilla state. Yes, it's apples to oranges, but there's something there. They sell Civ and Scenario packs for around $4.99. The price would have to be adjusted, but the content would translate perfectly. There are plenty of mods that add new factions and respective technology (Rimsenal, Apini, The German Imperial Army), a decent price tag could add new content for existing players, and make what's there look all the more appealing than a price increase alongside "I don't feel like adding more content" (respect the choice, just sayin').

For example: the Cryptosleep Revival Briefing has plenty of more content I'd love to see, without having to "steal" from other games or mods. More additions to the technology we already have (Proof of Concept: Medival Times and Glittertech, averaging 87k subscribers), the addition of robotics and artificial intelligence (Proof of Concept: Androids and Misc Robots++ having 24k and 75k subscribers respectively), xenohumans (Proof of Concept: Beastmen at 14k and Dwarves at 23k, plus, an incredibly handsome man typed this excellent argument), terraforming (MarsX, in addition to getting Tynan's approval, could be seen as a proof of concept for Dead and Toxic worlds), and crimes against nature (Proof of Concept: GeneticRim and Dinosauria averaging 35k subscribers). All of these mods have either personally given me hours of additional content, or might have well because a similiar mod did it instead. All have significant effect on gameplay (as opposed to additional particle effects or bling in a singleplayer game) be it opening a sort of prehistoric park or dwelling longer in a tech level which has no impact beyond it's research speed for one scenario. I'd hardly expect any reviews or articles criticizing the addition of hours more content while keeping the game at $30. That way, the game could technically get a technical price increase, while keeping the momentum of its current price, and giving those who already own the game more ways to support the continued development.
It doesn't even need to have been shown in abstract in a mod, a cactus that whips people and animals with human-level intelligence are objectively interesting.

Or, y'know, just increase the price anyways and add a bit more code that doesn't do anything to the vanilla game so that modders have more things to play around with (like, idunno, enough to manipulate into a scent system, don't think you can do that with what we have now). I have nothing against "just let the modders do it", but the game's developers are at least restricted, in a good way. "I want a big faction" will net you Starwars or Space furries. oh god so many space furries. †

† Not shitting on any of these mods by the way, I've used most of them. I'm just sayin', maybe the occasional cactus, gemstone, insect, or abomination would spice things up a bit.

[corestandeven]

As with others I took a long while to decide whether to buy Rimworld, and a big factor that prevented me buying so long was the current price. I bet many have been stung by other cheaper indie games that were awful or abandoned by the devs, so i would say Rimworld is 'seen' as a big gamble. £23 for a indie game that is early access seems steep.

My gamble paid off as i love the game, and I recommend friends who are interested in indie games that this is worthwhile, but they see the graphics and early access label and they are turned away, especially when you can get games made by well known established companies on sale for under £10.

My advice is that the game go no higher than £25 when on full release (v1.0). I'd then advise future development be funded by DLC. However, please do not follow the Paradox model. I'd rather pay for one good DLC release that adds lots of content, than small crappy DLC releases that are clearly money making gimics.   

[Numar]

After some more consideration and reading the comments here, I would argue for leaving the current price as it is, 30 USD.

- Is there a need to increase the price besides your promise?
- 30 USD are imho the maximum price for such a game, no matter the game time.
- Are sales still going up? Is there still a big enough market for increasing the price or did most of the people already bought their copy?
- Will customers who already bought their copy care about what others will pay in the future? Personally, I don't.

I would rather argue for some ingame gimmick to all pre-release customers instead of a price increase.

[poika22]

I made an account just to say what a terrible idea I think this is. Simply because I love the game and feel like I owe you this little courtesy of warning you of a grave mistake.

I have hundreds of hours in the game, so I know it's worth 60€. People who don't own the game don't know that. I put off purchasing it myself, because I thought 27.99€ was steep for an indie game, even if it has endless replayability. I play a lot of indie games, and here's what I've paid for them, all at release or in early access.

Into the Breach 12€
Stardew Valley 14€
Factorio 20€
Hotline Miami 10€
Banished 10€
Cities Skylines 25€
Darkest Dungeon $25
FTL $10
Don't Starve $15
Prison Architech $15

The list goes on, but I think you get the point. 29.99€ is the maximum I'd ask for an indie game with a simple presentation like this one. Even if you desperately need money, I'm willing to bet a price of 40€ will scare away so many customers you'll end up making less than you would've with 30€ or even 20€ price tag.

The 1.0 release will likely be your last big spike in media coverage. Don't waste that opportunity by alienating customers right when you have the most traffic on your Steam page.

If you look at AAA games, their prices go from 60€ to 30€ in a matter of 6 months. Just yesterday I saw Ni No Kuni 2 for 25€, a game that released in March 2018 to critical acclaim. Consumers expect video game prices to go down after release anyway, so increasing the price at 1.0 would end up being this weird little spike after years and years of 27€ just to go down a few months later. Why? Right when you have the opportunity to present yourself for the largest simultaneous audience you choose to drive customers away.

[poika22]

Two games that Rimworld has drawn a lot from have sold a fair bit over one million and two million respectively - at $30.

I bought both of those games during early access, and like I said I paid $15 and 20€ for them. I have the receipts right here.

Prison Architect  November 12, 2013  $14.99

Receipt for Your Payment to Wube Software Ltd. ([email protected])
Payment   €20.00 EUR
Apr 1, 2016

So Rimworld is already 33-50% more expensive than those two, and they're also the type of games that theoretically can provide you with endless game time.

[saulysw]

I've been a gamer all my life, well, for the last 35 years anyway. When I think of VALUE of games, I think of how many hours of enjoyment/playtime did I get for the purchase price. A cheap game is not good value if you decide in 15 minutes it is not for you. Anyway, in my experience there have been a few games with absolutely stellar value, and perhaps top of the list is Minecraft. So cheap, and so many, many hundreds of hours. The next two behind that are probably Rimworld and 7D2D, very different games. Stupendous value, for me, even at double or triple what I paid for them. The thing is, you just don't know which games are going to turn into this kind of value when you are paying for them, and most people have been burnt a few times by really disappointing games.
I will recommend Rimworld to anyone who listens, but for those fresh off the street, probably $30 seems like about right for this. If you do go up from there, I don't think it could be much, and it will eat into sales. There is diminishing returns of price rises, and the perfect price is of course a guess. I would suggest, like Minecraft, the best strat is to err on the side of low price / high volume. This can snowball into a very huge income, as it pretty much has already. I would not rush out and buy that gold Lambo yet, but I can see the sales more than double on v1.0, and continue to grow over the years if it is fairly maintained. Clearly there is a lot of scope for DLC as is evident in the large mod community, this game could be milked for years and years if so desired.
So, what is my point? Like Grandpa Simpson, I'm not really sure. I guess I'm just saying not to be greedy, and the success will come.

[Valkjosandi]

After reading many replies after mine, I think that I have to change my stance a little bit.

I actually think that $30 is a good price point for what we have, as others have said, if it were $40 I probably wouldn't have gone for it, at least not for a longer period of time. Ultimately I probably would have waited for a sale or a price drop, lest some sizable stipend fell out of the sky.

Something that was on my mind, that I left out of my previous post, was that I think, perhaps, an option to donate to your future endeavors would be a nice way to go.

DLC, as mentioned eariler by someone else, would be a cool way to sell nice bits of dev time in chunks and give more support to a game that we came to realize, over time, was a good decision to purchase. However, I think that modders are capable of delivering DLC-scale content.

So here on some thoughts on that:
*

• I'd imagine that some of the more capable modders would be able to make quite nice DLC if they could take some percentage of sales, given that they could devote more time to their dev-process. With that said, I don't know much about the level of fees incurred by DLC sales, nor the legal stuff that would undoubtedly eat time. And the ethics are rather dubious, it seems, because "what level of free content might we have missed out on?"
  

*

• I DO think that, perhaps rather than adding more features directly to RW, maybe one more update before you take a break that gives these volunteer developers some more tools to work with.
  //I don't actually know much about coding beyond some basic Java and data structures and whatever can be inferred from that level of expertise.
  
  

• Finally, I think that a donation link or button on your storefront, as opposed to anywhere in-game, placed there to "support your future endeavors and projects" would be a good thing. As several of the people who cared enough to comment on this have stated, they would have been willing to pay a higher price, especially after they found out just how much value that they got from this game, and would like to support you more. But, as others have pointed out raising the price now, save more than perhaps $5 if you added the extra mod-tools (!!Free DLC & Devs!!), would likely scare off many potential customers.
  
  

I played the game for about 8 hours before I knew that it was something that I wanted to support when I could in the future. $30 was really pushing the threshold on my willingness to do that in a timely manner, however.

P.S. I don't really care what others in the future have to pay for the game. I think that the money that I spent was worth what I got. That said, some part of me would probably be the slightest bit miffed if the price dropped immediately upon release, but I would get over it in a day or two, as, ultimately, it doesn't really matter. lol

EDIT: Post Post Script: I'm not actually sure what YOU could add to the game with regards to DLC that modders couldn't do for free other than devote more time, something you don't seem very keen on doing, because you'd be compensated for your development time. As I doubt there will be any major game mechanic changes out side of, perhaps, some debugging and balance changes ( which I believe amount to chaning numerical values in code, more or less).

[poika22]

I've been a gamer all my life, well, for the last 35 years anyway. When I think of VALUE of games, I think of how many hours of enjoyment/playtime did I get for the purchase price.

I'm not calling you wrong because people have different priorities, but personally I hate this argument and how common it is.

You wouldn't go see a 3 hour movie instead of a 2 hour one because "you get more value". You wouldn't read a 1000-page book over a 300-page one simply because there's more of it. Bold and the beautiful isn't a better TV show than Sopranos simply because they've made 7000 episodes.

As a kid with very limited income and before Steam/GoG/Humble etc. sales this logic had some reasoning to it, I wouldn't blow my savings in a game I couldn't play for months. These days with limited free time I view it the other way around. Time is an investment just like money. I want a return for my investment. A 5-hour game that's extremely polished and doesn't drag or dip in quality is a better value for time than a 10-hour game with the same amount of work put into it but spaced out.

A game like INSIDE only takes 3 hours to complete, but every second of it is hand-crafted with love and the experience is well worth 20€ without hesitation. Meanwhile Steam is full of free2play games with content for thoudands of hours I wouldn't touch with a long stick.

RimWorld is an not an amazing game because you get so many hours from it. It's an amazing game because those hours are fun and barring extremes that's all that really matters. The average amount of "enjoyment per hour" you experience while playing the game.

[5thHorseman]

I've been a gamer all my life, well, for the last 35 years anyway. When I think of VALUE of games, I think of how many hours of enjoyment/playtime did I get for the purchase price.

I'm not calling you wrong because people have different priorities, but personally I hate this argument and how common it is.

You wouldn't go see a 3 hour movie instead of a 2 hour one because "you get more value". You wouldn't read a 1000-page book over a 300-page one simply because there's more of it. Bold and the beautiful isn't a better TV show than Sopranos simply because they've made 7000 episodes.

I similarly hate this refutation of the idea and how common and - in my opinion - wrong it is.

Of course I wouldn't prefer a 7000-episode soap opera to a 13-episode series like Firefly. But if Firefly and Stargate are both $100 for the full series, you bet your ass I'm going to forget all about how cute Kaylee is and nab me up 200+ episodes of cheesy scifi goodness.

Also, it's not that there are 7000 episodes of the soap opera. It's that the person making the purchase *will enjoy watching them*. If someone would actually enjoy watching 7000 episodes of a soap opera as much per episode as they would enjoy watching the Sopranos - and trust me these people exist - then yes. The soap opera is a much better purchase for them.

If you play 1000 hours of a video game then you either really like that video game or you're a masochist. Either way, you're getting more fun than someone who spent the same money and finished a similarly enjoyable game in 3 hours.

[poika22]

I've been a gamer all my life, well, for the last 35 years anyway. When I think of VALUE of games, I think of how many hours of enjoyment/playtime did I get for the purchase price.

I'm not calling you wrong because people have different priorities, but personally I hate this argument and how common it is.

You wouldn't go see a 3 hour movie instead of a 2 hour one because "you get more value". You wouldn't read a 1000-page book over a 300-page one simply because there's more of it. Bold and the beautiful isn't a better TV show than Sopranos simply because they've made 7000 episodes.

I similarly hate this refutation of the idea and how common and - in my opinion - wrong it is.

Of course I wouldn't prefer a 7000-episode soap opera to a 13-episode series like Firefly. But if Firefly and Stargate are both $100 for the full series, you bet your ass I'm going to forget all about how cute Kaylee is and nab me up 200+ episodes of cheesy scifi goodness.

Also, it's not that there are 7000 episodes of the soap opera. It's that the person making the purchase *will enjoy watching them*. If someone would actually enjoy watching 7000 episodes of a soap opera as much per episode as they would enjoy watching the Sopranos - and trust me these people exist - then yes. The soap opera is a much better purchase for them.

If you play 1000 hours of a video game then you either really like that video game or you're a masochist. Either way, you're getting more fun than someone who spent the same money and finished a similarly enjoyable game in 3 hours.

"If someone would actually enjoy watching 7000 episodes of a soap opera as much per episode"

But that's the crucial "if" which isn't present in the original argument that simply values hours of gaming as equal.

"If you play 1000 hours of a video game then you either really like that video game or you're a masochist."

True, but I've put a thousand hours into very few games. On the other hand there are plenty of games I've invested 20, 50 or even a 100 hours into before realizing I wasn't having any fun. A personal example for myself would be Warframe.

It's very hard to judge a game by the first hours unless it's technically broken. Many games seem like they "will" be fun, as soon as you get past the initial learning curve. Warframe seemed like a game that would be awesome once you grind enough to get good gear, but once I reached that stage I realized the end game content was very weak and that for the past dozens of hours I had simply been playing at the hopes of delayed gratitude which never came. I didn't feel glad that I at least got 50+ hours from it, I felt angry that I had wasted so many hours of my life into this game in the hopes that I'll start having fun at some point. I have to congratulate the devs for making the grind-cycle seem seem so promising and addictive at first glance though, that's a huge part of making a f2p game. Another example for me would be Planetside 2 for the same reasons.

"Either way, you're getting more fun than someone who spent the same money and finished a similarly enjoyable game in 3 hours."

But if I finish that enjoyable game in 3 hours I can go on to do other enjoyable things. "Fun" is hard to quantify, but if we pretend for a moment it could be done, a 5 hour game with 100 units of fun per hour would allow for more enjoyment per hour in my life overall than a 20 hour game with 50 units of fun per hour, even if the total fun to be gained from completing the game is lower.

I consider a 5-8 hour game with constant edge of the seat action like Furi for example a better return for investment overall (when money AND time are combined) than a similiarly priced longer game that has ups and downs. Not a bad game, but a stellar mediocre one. It's reflected in development as well, many of these "short but sweet" (again, INSIDE) took as long to develop as games with 100+ hours of "content". It's like drinking sweet syrupy juice concentrate as opposed to a drink someone dilluted with a gallon of water.

[gendalf]

Ser Kitteh, 100 people had been working on fallout 4, the witcher 3 had 150 and up to 1500 people involved with 81m$ budget and in general 50-60$ games are having teams like that. I'm not sure why would something like rimworld, which didn't have that high cost of development have the same price, it's unjustified, even if the game is good, the witcher 3 is good and it costs 30$, cities skylines is good and it is 30$. The price should go down over time to keep up with the reduction in popularity and competition, not up.
Since the game didn't cost as much to develop the only thing the higher price means is more profit per sale, it's not a necessity, but pure greed.
Entertainment value argument doesn't really work either - you can spend your entire life playing chess, it doesn't mean that you have to pay 1000$ for the set. That's just backwards thinking; by that logic if you don't enjoy your car it should cost 1$ to drive.

[RawCode]

as soon as developer try to milk customers with DLC and payed mods, and especially horse armor DLCs ever most loyal customers may suddenly change mind and run away (also they likely to review bomb game on steam)

also for me, dayzero DLC is solid no buy ever if game is perfectly fine and i really like it, more over, i won't buy anything from that developer ever.

also payed DLC will fragment community, especially if developer made DLC wrong, like destiny, that instead of adding new content for people who bought DLC, removed content from people who dont. (absolutely genious buisness plan btw)

[poika22]

as soon as developer try to milk customers with DLC and payed mods, and especially horse armor DLCs ever most loyal customers may suddenly change mind and run away (also they likely to review bomb game on steam)

also for me, dayzero DLC is solid no buy ever if game is perfectly fine and i really like it, more over, i won't buy anything from that developer ever.

also payed DLC will fragment community, especially if developer made DLC wrong, like destiny, that instead of adding new content for people who bought DLC, removed content from people who dont. (absolutely genious buisness plan btw)

While I don't disagree with the general principles you laid out, DLC fragmenting the player base isn't really a thing in a single player only game.

I 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.

Diablo 2 Lord of Destruction is the D2 everyone remembers. Warcraft 3 the Frozen Throne was not only a solid second single player campaign and overhauled multiplayer, but it spawned Dota, something the original WC3 couldn't have supported. Witcher 3's DLC's would've been packaged as a separate disc a decade ago, and customer's would've been more than happy with their purchase. Company of Heroes' expansion packs equaled more content than the original campaign. The base game was solid, so it would've been a shame to only have one campaign for it. The list goes on.

Despite certain companies abusing the DLC system, delivering additional content for a well-crafted base game is a consumer-friendly concept. Rimworld's core principles are so good I would love to see an extensive expansion pack (=DLC) for it. Not horse armors and save slots for sale, but an extension that utilizes the same core mechanics established in the release game while expanding the experience without the need for a full sequel. Speaking of that, a lot of sequels these days could've just been expansion packs.

Darkest Dungeon is a great modern example. A single player indie game that felt like a complete package without compromises at release. A year later they released DLC content and no one thought they had been "holding back" content at release. The game was ready to release, but the devs knew it had even more potential yet to be utilized. That's where I see Rimworld.

[vzoxz0]

"While I don't disagree with the general principles you laid out, DLC fragmenting the player base isn't really a thing in a single player only game."

... horse DLC.

[poika22]

"While I don't disagree with the general principles you laid out, DLC fragmenting the player base isn't really a thing in a single player only game."

... horse DLC.

I feel like you don't understand what the phrase "fragmenting the player base" refers to.

A prime example of it would be Call of Duty map packs, which separate the online que to a plethora of queues based on their DLC availability thus making everyone wait longer. Whether your neighbour has the horse DLC or not doesn't impact your gaming experience.