the general mindset around game pricing has become so unreasonably bad, I don't even know what to say anymore.
i know it's not a vast majority of people but the fact that there well and truly is a subsect of players who won't even spend a measly DOLLAR on a game should just remind you that if the culture does not value you, then you should value yourself. the people who truly want to support your work will do so in kind.
think about how many copies you need to sell of a $1 game, just to be able to say you made a profit. you lose so much money between payment processors, distributor cuts, tax between countries, etc. that you would need to sell like 30 copies of a game to make maybe $10.
you sell one copy at $20 and you make more money, and to be honest, much more genuine support and positive treatment for even bothering to make the game in the first place.
a person who is spending $1 on your game, more often than not barely values the purchase that they have made, and the kind of entitlement that i see from people complaining about the games they spent ONE DOLLAR on would honestly... well... actually, it probably wouldn't shock most of you if you've ever released a game publicly at all.
so, please, charge what you're worth. if you think your game is worth $5, charge $5. maybe even charge $7. charge $30 if you want! a bunch of games have done that and sold just fine. just please don't feed this ridiculous devaluing of creative work.
As someone who released a game in a company we founded out of uni, we worried about the price so we went low (£5)
We thought it'd make people more likely to buy, instead people didn't bother looking at it and just assumed it was a bad mobile port of something before even looking at it really.
Company ended up closing because we didn't get sales on the game, we didn't manage to get funding from elsewhere & overall it just didn't work out. Charge more.
