How much should I charge?

[Jake]

Ok right now my game Escape has 30 levels (5 tutorial) and I am going to raise that number up to 40. Someone told me that the demo levels are too challenging and that people will have enough fun with the demo alone, and not register the game. Do you guys recomend that I turn the demo down from 5 hard levels to 4 easy/medium levels?

Heres my other question, right now I allow people to pay whatever they want for the game, and I don't know if I should keep doing that or fix the registeration price. Here is a list of my current registeration ammounts...

5
10
5
5
6
10
3
5
1
1
10
8
10
20
5
10
6
10
5
5

Mean = 7 dollars
Standard Deviation = 4.13 dollars

It seams that most people eather pay 5 or 10, with some oddballs in there. I am thinking I could leave it as it is, charge a fixed 5, fixed 10, or fixed 15. Whats your opinion?

[Jake]

Oh and for those of you who haven't played my game here is the download link

http://nuclearnova.com/download/games/escape1.4.4.sit

[macboy]

I say a minimum of 5 dollars and of course if they want to pay more they can. :cool:

[skyhawk]

As ADVANCED as Escape is, I don't see its value over $5 If it had some key improvements (in my mine) it MIGHT go for $10. But you have to play the mind game. Can you get at least 2 people for every 1 that would pay 10? would those that easily pay 5 also esaily pay 10? it's a war out there to get their money. but as I said, no more than $5

[Jake]

Originally posted by skyhawk
As ADVANCED as Escape is, I don't see its value over $5 If it had some key improvements (in my mine) it MIGHT go for $10. But you have to play the mind game. Can you get at least 2 people for every 1 that would pay 10? would those that easily pay 5 also esaily pay 10? it's a war out there to get their money. but as I said, no more than $5

Hum... I think i may just leave it. It seams a lot of people want to pay 10 bucks and alot of people want to pay 5 bucks, so i will just satisfy both of them.

[macboy]

Originally posted by Jake
Hum... I think i may just leave it. It seams a lot of people want to pay 10 bucks and alot of people want to pay 5 bucks, so i will just satisfy both of them. But if you make the minimum 5 dollars people will have to pay at least that much so they can pay either amount.

[jamie]

If its working as it is now, I say don't mess with it. You don't want to excluded those who have and will pay $1-4 and if your getting people kind enough to pay up to $20 then your lucky!

Don't try to fix something that isn't broken! :)

[DaFalcon]

There are terms and theories about this that I only kind-of remember from my various Economics courses, but the gist of it is: Leave It The Way It Is! :-) This is why some movie theatres offer discounts for students and seniors, so that they can get those people with less money to still give what they have, while getting as much as possible from those who can afford it. I doubt that many of those who paid $5 would have paid $10, and I doubt that those who paid $10 would have done so if you told them the cost was $5. You have given people the option to pay you what they feel it is worth, and I like that. As for those who paid $1 ... well, it is only a couple of people, and they probably wouldn't have paid the $5, so you're still making $2 more than you would have otherwise made. :-)

Those are my thoughts.

[Najdorf]

I think that your idea to make the user choose is Terribly good. Whenever I make a new shareware, I' ll do it that way: absolute genius. And to Falcon: I think it as you do.

[Carlos Camacho]

What are YOUR costs? For example, if someone pays you $5, how much is going into your pocket, and how much is going into some KAGI/PayPal/middle-man? I once got a donation to iDevGames for $1. I know it is the "thought" that counts, but $1 via PayPal means $0 for us. So was it a donation? :wacko: Or a joke?

Perhaps you should do some market research of your customers. Ask them some questions to get a sense of why they paid, why they paid $NN and so on. In other words, learn a bit about consumer behavior (search the net).

I think I said this before. I see a game like Airburst for $5 (is it still $5) and think, "Very Polished and worth much more." Ditto for SlopeRider. Then I see another game for $10 or $20 (not talking about your game) and see it is worth about Freeware to $3. Yet, somehow I'm sure the dev got a few people to send him money. Perhaps some people see some potential in said game and want to encourage the developer. (Or some people are completely honest.)

If I am going to price a game, I will take in the following into account:
1 my support and various costs
2 the quality of the game and its polish
3 the price of similiar games
4 what the market will bare
5 how long until my next title

point 4. Seems that shareware on average ranges from $5 to $20. Above $20 you encounter larger projects like Realmz or E.V. or Pangea stuff. Also consider a new game is around $40~50 and older titles go for $20 or so.

point 5. Some games will a quick peak in donations and then drop off fast. Some will be cash-cows, and some won't be cash cows but provide a nice little sum each month. Check out the article on our site about this issue. In a nutshell, when a game is starting to lose interest in the marketplace, you can squeeze extra money out of it by add-on pacs, sales, promotions, various PR, etc.

BTW... We posted KGA Golf's postmortem recently. Karl sent me a note to say he saw a large increase in traffic to his site after we posted the postmortem. This is what I mean about PR as well as reaching people who missed your game during the first "wave."

Good luck,

[Jake]

My costs are cheep. I use paypal and they take 50 to 75 cents for each registeration (i don't know how your 1 dollar turned into 0?!?). I pay 10 bucks a year for my domain name, and 60 a year for the server. I pay 0 dollars for dev tools (Metal :D) and 0 dollars to employees (I plan on donating money to Marin as soon as my Paypal ballance increases a little).

I really like my method, because if it was at a fixed 5 dollar or 10 dollar fee I would have probably made half of what I did.

[griffin239]

There are options to these.
You can go the commerical game route and charge $50 for a game..and noone buys it.
You can choose a time like a holiday to drop the price, using this as advertising...say $50 game is released with 4 level Demo, release a 6 level demo and bug fixes for the $40 sale.
Some time goes buy, you drop the price again, and so on and son.

When your next game is ready you use its demo as advertising space for the last game at a great discount....and then follow the same trend all over again.

Game three is out, you advertise "buy this new one at full cost get the way old one for Free" (value added)...as the months go buy you say Buy this new game and get these two older games for only X dollars....

Keep track of the people who pay you the most, and give them the special offers first, then leak the word out to the other folks in the world.

Definately thank the people who send you nice sums of money, throw them extra levels as soon as you have them...keep them interested. Invite the ones who praise your work, or mention you on their sites to beta test a level or two of your new project...thereby gaining some insite that you are or are not on the right path to customer happiness.

I've played Escape, so I say your business model for that game is perfect.
Glad to hear you're making some bucks.

Don't forget to send a few dollars to idevgames.com jake, now that you're big shot dev like Bill, Steve and Larry.


:D