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Stages in Pricing Computer Games (2014)

83 点作者 phenylene超过 9 年前

7 条评论

minimaxir超过 9 年前
I bought two indie games recently based on word of mouth alone: Undertale and The Beginner&#x27;s Guide. Both are $10 on Steam (and coincidentally, both are made mostly by solo-developers).<p>Undertale (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;391540&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;391540&#x2F;</a>) is one of the best games I&#x27;ve played in years. I wish I could have paid more for it. If you&#x27;re reading this, <i>buy Undertale now</i>.<p>The Beginner&#x27;s Guide (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;303210&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;303210&#x2F;</a>) is...very indie, to put it mildly. And almost made me feel like I wasted my money.<p>There&#x27;s a lot of risk with buying games freely, which is one of the reasons why gamers are unwilling to buy at high prices. However, Steam Refunds may help with this and may make gamers more willing to buy at higher prices.
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dyates超过 9 年前
I don&#x27;t like the idea of basing too much of the price on hours of playtime: if you&#x27;ve got something really inventive and different with a short enough playtime to not overstay its welcome, that&#x27;s undervalued. Many games with long playtimes are boring and full of grind.<p>As a player with a dayjob and many interests besides games, I don&#x27;t value million hour playtimes: I value novelty and innovation. So I&#x27;m glad to see and pay for something like The Beginner&#x27;s Guide for $10.<p>Although that&#x27;s probably a minority opinion: look at the Steam discussion forum for any indie game priced at or higher than $10 and you&#x27;ll see at least one thread complaining that it&#x27;s too expensive for such a short game(&#x2F;not being written on a custom engine in C++).
smacktoward超过 9 年前
This feels like a weird post to me, because it&#x27;s got all this discussion about discounts and bundles and so forth but the part that the title indicates is its main thrust -- deciding what price is going to be &quot;full price&quot; for your game -- basically just says &quot;make it $15 or $20, because that&#x27;s what people charge these days.&quot;<p>Which, OK, but this feels like a subject that could use a lot more investigation. <i>Why</i> is $15-20 what people are charging these days? Does it vary based on genre, platform, theme, depth (hours of expected playtime), art style, phase of the moon? Does a high initial list price that you discount steeply later pay out better than a low initial list price with less dramatic discounting? There&#x27;s so many angles you could attack this question from beyond just throwing a dart.<p>It&#x27;s an especially interesting question given that Spiderweb&#x27;s games appeal to a relatively small but quite passionate audience, so you wonder if he&#x27;d be better off charging higher-than-market prices at launch (when those passionate audience members, who are probably less price-sensitive, will be buying) and then moving quickly to deeper discounts once the hard-core fan base has tapped out.
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flashman超过 9 年前
I am one of Jeff&#x27;s true fans, having played his games since the mid 90s, which makes me think he&#x27;s understated one important point: you have to have fans. You can&#x27;t expect to stand out on the strength of your ideas, gameplay or story alone. You have to work to find an audience for them, and then work to get those people to buy your product, at full price. Good games are <i>almost</i> a commodity now. The developer is one of the few points of difference buyers pay attention to.<p>&quot;You can be 50% off one sale and then 75% the next. Nobody will notice.&quot; I disagree with this; once you put it on a temporary sale or in a bundle, many people are content to wait until it goes on sale for lower. I&#x27;ve lost count of the number of Reddit threads where people asked, &quot;Will [game x] go lower than $1.49?&quot;
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dexiwz超过 9 年前
I am always shocked at how marketing-adverse indie game devs are. Developers invest a ton of their base commodity (time) into a game, but refuse to advertise it or fail to save cash to do so. Instead they rely on front pages, bundles, and sales. Then 9 months latter they do post mortems, where they correlated sales graphs to events. I want to see a sale graph for conversions based on Facebook ads. Mobile&#x2F;FB Game companies pump out mediocre games, but maintain huge user bases just because people find their games.<p>Everything thinks that they are going to be Notch and their game will spread by word-of-mouth, because they have a unicorn. Turns out your time-bending, retro, 2D, pixel-art shooter&#x2F;platformer doesnt have the genius of Virtual Legos, and no one cares about it.
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IIAOPSW超过 9 年前
As someone who has a game sitting on my hard-drive for lack of publishing and pricing knowledge, I appreciate this.<p>For those that are curious (and don&#x27;t mind a bit of self-promotion) here is my personal side-project game:<p>playinverse.com
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tempestn超过 9 年前
&quot;I’ve been thinking about this a lot. The pricing part, as thinking about marketing makes me break out in fear hives.&quot;<p>Fortunately, that part seems to have taken care of itself!