Hey Godot fam! I've been working on a project on and off for the last few months which I'm hoping to share for some testing soon friends and on the forum here. I can see some opportunities for expanding on my game and if I did, I think it might be fair to have a price on it. Plus it would be nice to get a bit of a return on the time spent on the project.
I’m curious of when you all think it’s appropriate to put a price tag on your projects? What are certain criteria you try to hit before commercializing. I’ve been through the struggle as a photographer/videographer and know it can be hard for me to put a price on services in the past.
A price tag is one of the last things to worry about when selling your game imo.
First you need to know the scope, how much gameplay you can get out of your idea, how polished do you think the game is etc.
Setting and adequate price requires knowing what kind of game you have, and if it’s not a final product or close to it then you might overvalue or undervalue it, so I would make it one of the last things you do when releasing.
Yeah I’m definitely not planning on releasing a game close to $50 anytime soon
I feel it’s more realistic for the $2-$10 range. But again, I’m not looking to put the cart before the horse, I’m more so curious of what boxes people try and check before putting a price tag on a project not how to appraise the value of a project.
I like what marcy said about identifying scope and how well you can scale mechanics. Polish of course is a good one too.
I was thinking having aiming for a meaningful amount of playtime/replayability would be an important metric too. I would think that’s different for specific genres ie rouge like vs story driven games would have different targets.
Price theory is such an esoteric thing. A simple and practical approach I like is: Look at what you have built and compare it with titles similar to it. Especially check against quality (performance, controls, art) and content (as in: how many hours might a player enjoy it) and put your price at the same or less as matching.
Of course you could look at it more economically and set the price tag by looking at your investment (of time & money), assume a number of units you are able to sell, subtract the middlemen costs and land at your price point there.
And don’t forget that 30% of revenue go to the platform (Steam, Apple, Google) and around 30% of what is left (and depending on your government and location) goes to taxes.
Games are cheap. To make a real profit you will need to sell a lot to people. It’s a gamble.
It’s really odd for the platforms to take 30% of a game! like devs work hard,learn for years and they only get around 58-60% of a game!?(including taxes,engine loyalty fee)
Devs are like write 1000s of lines,model 100s of things and they got 60% and the platforms are like We got our server,we got our page ready BOOM ! now give me 30% of your whole game! also don’t forget to give the 100 bucks because we don’t believe your game would even earn a cent!
well,Godot,Blender,Gimp,itch(for simple small games) the GOATS are free to use soo we can keep around 80%!
I know that feels alot. And yes platforms can be greedy and start adding fees left right and centre until they kill their own platform. (Take Fiverr or AirBnB).
But, they not only provide the platform, the payment systems and the convenience, they also provide the market, the audience themselves. This takes a lot of effort and work and is not easy nor cheap to do. Imagine trying to sell your game without any platforms.
You are of course free to sell from your own website, and advertise that yourself on search engines and social media. You will soon discover that it is not easy either.
I think 30% of sales is fine. I would prefer 25%. I don’t like upfront listing fees though. This seems to transfer all the risk to the developer. The platform costs are covered from the outset and a popular game is just profit for them. I would not mind if instead of a listing fee the first few sales were 50% dropping to 30% for 50+ sales (or a financial minimum) and then to 15% for bigger sales volumes.
But, unfortunately, platforms are greedy. We should start our own platform!
I agree with the argument, but would like to add three thoughts:
30% is just way too much. 15% would be a lot but fine.
The whole point of taking a cut to do the financial and fiscal work is understandable, as the cost for this is the offload of an often unwanted task. So charging extra on that is understandable, I think.
Your argument about the market is true and also quite faulty in itself. Steam got the market, because they were so early and lucky with their initial success. Steam was Valve’s “Launcher” for Orange Box, right? Good timing, good intro. There is a reason why monopolies are considered bad and infrastructure usually is broken apart and regulated heavily. And looking at Valve’s revenue and per capita profit, I would also argue that running that market is cheap.
Well it is one of those things that getting the momentum is the hard part. Like starting a social media site. Once the ball is rolling it starts to gain its own momentum. It doesn’t really matter how they got their balls rolling in the first place, and taking advantage of some existing audience building doorway is not a bad thing. And yes, first mover advantage is always a good thing.
I agree, that they don’t seem to help as much as they could for their 30%.
I am thinking about it though!
It may never get past that point but it’s interesting to think about.
Any thoughts on what they could actually do? Because I struggle to find good ideas here. The obvious stuff: automating page authoring and publishing. It seems absurd how much work it is to provide all the assets for Steam and their product pages. All the resizing could be done on their part.
In terms of helping you getting your game seen by people: not sure, if Valve should be involved more than they already are. There are certainly cons about gate-keeping - but in terms of entertainment, they certainly are needed.
Imagine if you could just submit your game and they actually took care of all the marketing! Games could be rated on Bronze, Silver, Gold. Gold games get the full work over - video, reviews, gameplay footage etc. Bronze gets a listing with a more plain description. Pricing is automatic. (Of course with the game dev’s final approval, and the game dev can still add their own stuff, with the platforms approval.)
PS What about the platform arranged some user testing for you!
