Zutaca

@Zutaca

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I do art, sometimes

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Zutaca
@Zutaca
Crabbit-Slater
@Crabbit-Slater
Crabbit-Slater
@Crabbit-Slater

"Don't price a game less than $5 for margins reasons!"

This makes sense and is solid advice BUT

What if your game is only gonna be about 1-2 hrs long?

Is this gonna bankrupt me with refunds?

  • "just make the game longer"

no thanks, I've already been on this for a 18mo and hacking away at it for another 18 mo will burn me out and kill the game

  • "Just release the game for free"

I'd rather not devalue myself if that's alright. I could really do with the money for a laptop that can actually be used for gamedev purposes, but that's secondary.

  • if you're not going to listen to the two most obvious suggestions why even bother asking?
    Well one is asking one person to do the work of a team of multiple people, while holding a full time job, and the other is asking this person to work for free, so I'm not sure these are really solutions imo!

anyway fr I'd love to hear experiences or suggestions from other devs particular with releasing 'short' games on steam. Is it worthwhile, do you get stung by refunds, etc.

please and thankyew

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in reply to @Crabbit-Slater's post:

kylelabriola
@kylelabriola

I think 4 or 5 USD for a 1-2 hour game is fair if youre comfortable with that!

You can reduce Steam refunds and negative reviews by estimating the completion time in the description, like how Frog Detective did: https://store.steampowered.com/app/963000/Frog_Detective_1_The_Haunted_Island/

When we first released A Dance of Fire and Ice it only had about an hour of content. But it's a rhythm game (thus replayable) and people were stumped on the hardest levels so that extended their playtime a bit. I don't think the refund rate ever exceeded 10%.

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Crabbit-Slater
@Crabbit-Slater

Thanks for the feedback! It's it's good to hear that this is a reasonable price point for that amount of content- it's easy to get intimidated when you see the deep, deep price cuts for ""AAA"" games on steam. Being upfront about the length of the experience is good advice- if nothing else it'll assuage the voice in my head that'll be trying to convince me I'm conning people.

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danbo
@danbo

if someone was gonna refund a 5 dollar 2 hour game that they enjoyed, they would do it at 3 dollars, 2 dollars, 50 cents. don't base your pricing strategy on that type of guy

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MOKKA
@MOKKA

I just so happen to have done some math yesterday with Virtue's Heaven's price and though I can't completely retrace my steps, basically I came to the conclusion that from a purely commercial perspective, there's almost no situation where giving your game a lower pricepoint, leads to you earning an equal amount, or even more money. Obviously, that's for me and my game and I have some idea of what I might be able to expect in sales (which is no guarantee, but at least I have my own frame of reference to go off of), but generally speaking, I would advice for you to not go below $5.

Even with a slightly higher than normal amount of refunds, you'll probably end up with more money in your pocket, if you price your game above what you think it's worth.

In general, the problem with releasing your game on Steam isn't as much about people potentially being jerks (though that does also happen). Your game actually getting seen by people, is the much bigger challenge.
If your expected audience is only a few hundred people, even under the best circumstances, try to get as much out of that audience as you can. Be it money, or feedback, or just experience.

Also maybe as a reference:

GB Rober costs $6.99, has a playtime between one and two hours and since it came out (October 2021), I had 21 refunds. A lot of those came, because people didn't understand the intro sequence, none (at least from the listed reasons) came, because they thought the game was too short.

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Crabbit-Slater
@Crabbit-Slater

Thanks for the feedback! it's really useful to hear from people who have actually released.

I get the feeling as well that visibility on steam is gonna be the biggest issue, (which is why I keep seeing loads of people theorycrafting how to 'game' the algorithm, to varying amounts of success).

I'm kinda playing with the idea of a 'supporter's pack' DLC or whatever it's called that'll have the OST and concept art/ dev logs etc, the idea being that people who really like the game have. an option to buy in more.

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MOKKA
@MOKKA

If you have the time to dedicate towards this, this sounds like a nice idea.

I have to restrain myself a bit from going too far off the road here, since I just did a lot thinking about this for my own stuff, and therefore am deeply money-brained.

In general I'd say, try and figure what exactly it is you want to get out of releasing a game Steam, and then figure out steps on how to get there.

A lot of advice you see on the internet is supposed to be build around ways to increase all the numbers that your game could make on Steam, but most of them also don't really work, if you're making a game with a lower budget and without much of an organic following outside of Steam.

So once you're outside of that framing, understanding your own goals and finding your own paths towards it is much more important.
It also lifts off some of the pressure, because all of these "you need at least X thousand wishlists or else your game is doomed" blogposts don't apply to you anyway. At least it did for me.

At the end of the day, you know your game the best, so just trust your own judgement and do what makes you comfortable with the entire process.

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