Want to know why indie games are priced at $10 to $15? Becaue AAA has been putting everything they’ve made in the last decade on Steam and it’s all going for $20 - $25.
Indies can’t launch at that price point anymore because they’re competing with AAA games from 10 years ago that have been discounted to death.
The Steam winter sale is the best example of this, where most people will buy RDR2 for $19 instead of the new mega hit indie that’s $20. So indies have been lowering their price to actually get sales. That’s why team cherry priced Silk Song at $20.
Basically, AAA is now just competing with the bottom part of the market they spent that last decade flooding.
They’re complaining about people actually choosing where to spend their money wisely because that means they might actually have to make a good product if they want to sell a game for $70.
Thanks! 🙂 Appreciate you confirming that. We actually changed the price of our latest game to $10 (from $20) because we launched last December and got buried by AAA selling for $15.
Almost every dev team we talked to this year felt the same about the $20 price. That is, it’s much better to go out at $15 or $10 as a LOT of people see indie games at that price as better than modern AAA. (All while still holding out for classic AAA that go on sale for $20.)
And that being said, I’m totally cool with losing a sale to MGSV or Witcher 3 😁 Just wish the $20 space wasn’t getting so crowded. It’s making it rough for the smaller teams to compete at that price too now.
Honestly, if an indie game is promising, I’ll gladly pay full price. Pacific Drive, The Forest, and Inscryption (small sale) were all games that I picked up because of interesting trailers, premises, and very positive reviews :)
Terraria has always been $10. Stardew Valley: $15. Undertale: $10. Braid was $15 when it launched, and even then, people were bitching about the price. So, the price tag has always been in that range since the first indie game launched.
I think you’re ignoring the incredible amount of oversaturation in the industry. Games are everywhere. I could throw a thousand sticks into the wilderness and it would smack into a thousand different game studios, all working for years on their big hit that (in their eyes) would make them millions of dollars.
But, people don’t have time to even play their own Steam backlog. On average, people buy more games than they even have time to play, and that’s not even counting the sheer amount of movies, music, TV shows, YouTube videos, whatever that is competing for people’s time. If they are playing video games, then they are not watching or listening to other media.
It’s not just the gaming industry. The entire creative industry is propped up on the backing of a 98% failure rate, or sometimes even a 99.99% failure rate. The lucky few get to spout off their survivorship biases, under the bones of former companies and individuals, crunched under the weight of oversaturation.
My dude, I’m very familiar with the 14% of videogame players new game devs are vying for. And every one of the games you mentioned launched at that price because they were developed by a single dev (two at most) who could profit off of the $10 - $15 dollar space that was below the smaller studios putting out games like Shadow Complex, or Mercenary Kings, or Shank 1+2 for $20.
Now all of those spaces are being crushed together. Mostly due to economic factors. Thats where the biggest problem really lies, in the fact that people just have less money to spend on all that entertainment. Just pointing out that it’s competitive at all is obvious my dude, but the direction its going in is one in where there’s less anything being made (including games) because not as many people have money to spend on anything but necessities.
That’s why AAA is now scavenging at the bottom of the totem pole, and pricing their older games at $10 or less on sale, it’s because the few people that have money find that price point appealing. So it’s now one that not just the people who made Terraria, Braid, etc compete in. The money those devs made previously in that space is now up for grabs to AAA companies that never had anything to sell at that price before.
Theres a very tried and true formula for any business, including making games, and in the last 2 years it has completely broken apart. Mostly due to the Embracer group merger failing, combined with AI, combined with economic uncertainty, combined with AAA companies stabbing indie creators in the back (Subnautica, Disco Elysium). Your game doesn’t have to be a massive hit to be successful, it just needs to have a big enough audience to be profitable. But that audience has shrunk over the years as economies have tightened, and the companies getting squeezed have been invading markets they never had a presence in before.
So it’s just desperate times more than anything. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make a living off of making games. I know dozens of small teams funded by government grants making small games you’ve never heard of to help kids in hospitals learn about their cancer. Or teach kids in underprivileged schools about resource scarcity. Making games as a business goes far beyond entertainment and the hopes of narcissists. It’s an artistic medium like any other, and as such benefits society by making the toughest parts of it more accessible.
There’s plenty of ways to run a company doing just that - and just because the world economy is in free fall doesn’t mean the entire business of making games is something for the lucky few. It’s just for anyone that wants to learn how to run a game company. Which isn’t easy, but extends far beyond the simplistic view you are portraying.
I don’t know about the main point that you are making, meaning that it’s the economy’s fault.
I only have a few data points to compare, but anecdotally me and my friends have plenty of budget to buy games, but not enough time to play them as the poster above says. I have such a huge backlog of nice games that I don’t care to buy a game at release time, I can wait for a discount. If it is something exceptionally good that I want to play now, i will do it, but mostly on the ~20 euro range
So I will agree with the poster above. Make something exceptionally good, otherwise it compares with my backlog.
At any given time, there’s about 400 million people playing game on the planet. Of those people, only 14% play NEW games released within 12 months.
It used to be 30% 10 years ago. Now it’s less for a variety of factors, but one of them is less people have the income and budget they used to.
You are in that 14%.
Which is great - but the games you buy as part of that 14% are based on your taste. Not if they are exceptionally good, only if they are exceptionally good to you.
So making games that are “exceptionally good” for an audience isn’t easy because your audience doesn’t even know what they want beyond a genre. I’m sure you could tell me about the games you like and prefer to play, possibly even a genre of games you love.
But if I asked you to tell me what game COULD be exceptionally good in that genre, you might not have an answer. Just other games to compare it to. And if you do have an answer, there’s no telling if it would actually be popular with a bigger audience that genre enjoys.
Making “exceptional games” isn’t a bar to be crossed that makes a game money. Rather a game is “exceptional” once it finds an audience that feels that way about it. Games that have broad appeal have broad audiences like Call of Duty who all feel that game is exceptional too. Many who play it would argue which one in the series was the most “exceptional” and wouldn’t have a great answer for what to make as a better version of that game.
People like what they play, and exceptional games are only exceptional to the audience that plays them. So it’s not so much about making something exceptional, but making something that has an audience that thinks it’s exceptional.
And finding that audience is the hard part. Especially when only 14% of people who plays games are even looking at what you’ve made.
But it’s not impossible. Just difficult these days.
As much as it’s great to shit on triple A games, this is quite bad for the industry as a whole. Devs cannot price their game above $15 without being held to an absurdly high standard, which makes budgeting for game development extremely difficult for smaller studios. If we want the AA scene to expand and give us more great games as we’ve seen in the past few years, that’ll need to change.
Arc Raiders launched as a feature complete game, mostly bug free, well optimized, with a sufficient amount of functioning servers, and with genuinely innovative game design.
It sold incredibly well at 40 dollars. I’ve bought it 4 times myself.
Expecting every game to meet those criteria is not “absurd”. It used to be par for the industry and it still should be.
AAA games from publicly traded corporations are just absurdly underwhelming. They want us to think these standards are absurd so they can keep their minimal effort bullshit gravy train running. It’s not going to work anymore. That’s the free market. Adapt or die.
Aka the market has rejected your overpriced bullshit. Adapt or die. Welcome to the free market.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a mega corporation and previously had the winning formula. You adapt to meet evolving market demand or you die.
These c suites got too comfy doing everything to only please their shareholders. They forgot that pleasing their consumers wasn’t optional. We are your money supply. If you lose us, it all comes crashing down.
I don’t have the time anymore, the price isn’t really the factor. Anything new has to compete with my existing library and backlog, and other things on my wishlist. It’s a problem that’s only going to get worse, games aren’t really aging out of relevance at the rate they used to.
Not only that, but charging full price for a game and then charging $15-20 for cosmetic DLC is fucking wild. If I’ve paid you $60+ for a title, I expect the full experience. If you want to add some shit a year down the line to lengthen the life, I’m on board, but day one DLC that costs more than the base game was played out the moment Bethesda graced us with horse armor. I’ve gotten more joy out of Vampire Survivors than I have out of any Ubisoft and EA games in the last 20 years combined.
For what it’s worth, only one player needs the DLC for everybody in the session to use it, which is pretty cool of the devs to allow that in this day and age.
Unless something changed, players who don’t own DLC can’t play as the DLC characters. I believe they can interact with all the rest of the content normally, just locked to the vanilla character selection (which is still broad and fun enough, and further expandable with mods).
As the other commenter said, only one person needs the dlc to play the (non-character) DLC content. It also frequently goes on pretty big sales, though right now it’s probably full price since the newest (and imo, best) DLC just dropped. Each DLC is a significant content expansion to the game, and is absolutely worth the asking price (except maybe seekers, which fell a bit flat for me on release. It’s since been rebalanced).
If you wanted to weigh which DLC to consider getting, I would recommend Void if you like the idea of modified items that do cool shit, an alternate ending to the game, and some cool new mechanics. It comes with a dope sniper survivor and a void survivor that trades health for damage or vice versa.
Seekers comes with an alternate path of stages leading to an alternate (very challenging) boss. I find that the seekers boss is a severe difficulty check compared to the ease of reaching the boss, compared to the void boss which you only fight late in a run or after a different boss. Two of the survivors feel lackluster to me, but False Son is an absolute beast and the only melee character capable of truly tanking rather than using i-frames or mobility.
Alloyed Collective is the newest, and comes tons of new mechanics (free for everyone but expanded on in the DLC), a new path to follow, SEVERAL new super interesting boss fights, tons of new stages, and tons of new enemies. Overall, super worth it. The characters it adds are a drone controller (a previously unviable play style) and a loot gremlin that gets tons of really awesome interactions and A Cube.
My list would be Alloyed, Void, then Seekers. Alloyed and Void add the most to the base game, Seekers is mostly alternate stuff that won’t touch your runs, though the new shrines are pretty useful early game.
Would be interesting to see the stats for revenue by game, price by volume. If someone charges 300 for a game that no one bought. Then it shouldn’t count, hypothetically.
I work in market research. Data at this level of granularity (price band view) is extremely expensive.
Around 300K per year and that would also likely only include a few retailers GameStop, BestBuy, Walmart. I don't remember off the top of my head, but I believe Steam data wouldn't be included.
It's very likely Valve doesn't share the full dataset with anyone. Maybe partial data with some of their biggest partners.
Because youre overinflated executive and managerial budgets dont justify the fucking price when games like Hollow Knight, Jump Ship, and Stardew Valley are 10x better.
Piracy is free. If you’re charging 70usd for a game, then I’d rather just spend the time and pirate it. If it’s 10 bucks, Im just lazy to do a Google search and pay you for it.
Oh fuuuuuck the DRM. I purchased CIV5 for my phone and it requires an active internet connection or it boots you out. I only play on an airplane. So I ended up downloading the pirated version so I can play the game I purchased.
This, I think, is the big open secret about the push for consoles to move towards pure digital distribution.
It’s easier to not have to compete against your back catalog for gamer attention, if you cut off end-users ability to access it!
Rockstar already tried something like this, when they released the Definitive Defective Edition.
It failed successfully, in no small part to the remaster being absolute garbage, but for the AAA publishers, it’s merely a small setback that they will try again in the near future.
The difference is back then, I didn’t have to wait 2 years (give or take) for games to go on a proper sale to enjoy it. I’d just wait until a month or two has passed and ask around, go into Gamestop/EB Games, rent it at Blockbuster, find used games at yard sales, etc. and buy them for cheap (or potentially barter for them or be lent the copy).
We pay $70 to not play at release due to server issues and critical bugs. We do QA for most major gaming companies - while paying for the privilege to do so. We pay full-price for incomplete experiences that we are misled into believing are complete experiences, as well.
Most games I purchase at release (or pre-order) are just in limbo on my account while I wait for a playable product. By the time it’s playable, there is usually $70 worth of DLCs for me to buy.
I am anxious about nothing and feel the whole range of human emotions, hope for the future, enjoyment of other things. I feel quite happy most of the time actually.
i’v heard some people say this sort of thing is likely that your subconscious or whatever just isnt being “fulfilled” by that level of activity, that you got to try something a little “higher” like creating your own game/telling your own story
Yeah, especially since I know I likely wouldn’t play it much.
On the other hand, if it was free (also as in money) and open-source, and I liked it, I could donate. Although I don’t have much money, so probably just smaller amounts, better than the 0 I do right now by not gaming instead.
For example, I absolutely wouldn’t pay $9.60 for Binary Eye (barcode/2D code scanner app) if it cost that much, but as a donation that was fine.
Well, I could make an exception for games on physical media. I like it, and it has resale value.
Yeah I’m a very patient gamer, I’m perfectly happy to just play games on my Steam Deck years after they come out. If there’s something I want, I’ll usually just wishlist it and let it sit there until it goes down to a price that seems reasonable. Much better to get it for $15-20 with all the DLC and bug fixes than paying $80+ for an unfinished buggy mess IMO.
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