as you price lower, payment processors wind up eating a larger percentage of your profit. at one dollar, you will barely see any of it. even the cheap games on steam now, the ones that are playing the algorithm lottery trying to go viral through impulse purchases, are like $3-6. if you are anywhere but steam, you are never going to make it up in volume. i am begging you to charge more.
even ten years ago, the $1 iphone app store price point was ridiculous. inflation means charging a buck today would have been like charging 75 cents back then. if you made a thing you think is worth some money, you are not begging for nickels!!!! if someone is seriously like "I could afford one dollar, but THREE???? highway robbery!!" they live in clowntown and can go fuck themselves or get it in a sale or pirate it, who gives a shit, selling anything for a dollar these days is worse than giving it away for free.
according to itch:
For most PayPal transactions, a fee of $0.30 + 2.9% is applied per transaction.
I believe this is out of date! Paypal currently lists their fee as $0.49 + 2.99%.
So for a $1 game, Paypal takes 52 cents. That's over 50%! For a $3 game, they take about 58 cents, or about 20%. On a $5 game, they take 64 cents, 13%. DO YOU SEE??? If every transaction costs you a base amount, there is a floor to how much you need to charge to even make a transaction worthwhile.
Even if you sold ONE MILLION copies of your game at $1 a pop, you are handing paypal HALF A MILLION DOLLARS.
And please remember, after those fees you are going to pay platform fees and taxes.
The margin on a $3 game is not three times more than a $1 game. It's like 10 or 20 times more. You'd have to sell at least 10x more copies for $1 to be a better price point than $3.
And the reality is that you will not, basically ever. People have a fairly inelastic psychological barrier to spending money, and you have to overcome that whether your game costs $1 or $3. Beyond that point, the marginal difference in sales between that $1 price point and the $3 price point is just not that big.
You will make more money setting your game on Itch to PWYW with a $0 minimum than by selling it for $1.
This is just looking at launching com__et on Steam at $4/€4 (and Steam's suggestion for how to translate that to other currencies). I also sold the soundtrack for $2, and a bundle of the two together was for $5. I had a launch 25% sale for the first couple weeks, so the price was technically lower than that still.
In my first month, I sold 127 copies of the game and 15 soundtracks (which to be honest just feels like a slight extra tip jar in how I read the sales). With discounts and regional differences, their gross average prices were $2.81 for the game, $0.99 for the soundtrack. But with an actual total figure of $391.11 on the game itself and $16.51 on the soundtrack.
$407.62 total gross earnings.
We'll come back to that number, because next we shave some bits off. I thankfully didn't get any returns this month, but if I did those would get taken right back out first. $36.36 sales tax does get eaten out at this stage. Next Valve takes their 30% cut, which is $111.39. I'm then 'lucky' that Ireland as a tax agreement with the US because if we didn't then there's up to $150 that could be withheld to cover US taxes. It's not clear to me how much of this could get eaten here.
At that point it's just money that gets transferred to my account. I only get transfers if there's $100 or more in revenue that month. Which for a small game like this, does matter. (the money doesn't disappear it just gets held onto until there's sufficient earnings). There's transaction fees and currency conversion, so when steam sent me $259.87 it arrived as €227.38, which if I convert today is $243.88.
$243.88 is left of the original $407.62.
That's just shy of 60% of the actual gross earnings. Meaning 30% Steam's cut and then a further 10% lost other ways, at least for this price point.
The one last takeaway I'll say is, you can always discount your game or drop the price if you need to. But the one you set at the start is the max it can be.
