geometric
@geometric

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.


geometric
@geometric

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I believe this is out of date!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.


bruno
@bruno

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.


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in reply to @geometric's post:

Totally serious: I was honestly going to price a side project game I'm working on at $1 but this made me reconsider. For my own work, I'm not sure how to price a kinda scrubby game, having made free prototypes and demos, as well as a free fully-finished game, until now. Buuuuuuut girl kinda needs pocket money :|

Believe it or not I have met with investors/publishers who were livid when I suggested that a starting price for a VN project I was a part of should be $15 and was incredulous that I considered that an undervalue. They thought even $5 was a little too high and would not listen to me when I said that it had a wordcount similar to fantasy meganovels like Sanderson's and that it should be priced more similarly. I still think the fact that the going market price for VNs of any quality is free to $15 is a travesty.

imo a $1 game also signals to players that the dev thinks that what they're putting out is... pretty much worthless (and won't be receiving future support). I could believe a free or $3-5 game is a prototype, a prologue, an experiment, or a working demo, but $1? nahhh

i have yet to see any indies who put their game on steam—the largest gaming storefront and basically the deciding factor between success and failure—use the "pay what you want" system that valve has made available to them. i wonder if there is a reason for that??

in reply to @geometric's post:

Back before the pandemic, someone worked out that the absolute minimum you should sell something for on Steam is 3 dollars. I'm assuming that was in USD, and it's been a while, so I'm gonna suggest keeping to 5 USD as a minimum. Anything less is just ripping yourself off and enriching the platforms and processors.

I know I'm a smidge bit late, but I decided to do a little bit of napkin math.

With your $0.49 + 2.99% number and Steam's 30% cut (excluding tax (because it's different everywhere (and I'm lazy)));

At $20 per sale, you'd need to sell ~756 copies to make $10,000

At $5 per sale, you'd need to sell ~3,279 copies to make $10,000

At $1 per sale, you'd need to sell ~29,412 copies to make $10,000

If you multiply the amount of sales required at $20 by 4, it's close to the amount needed at $5 (a quarter of the price), off by only a few hundred, so you wouldn't be losing much at $5 a pop, but of course, you don't need to sell nearly as many copies at $20, so that's nice.

Of course, doing the same trick between $5 and $1 reveals that it's so much worse, requiring about 1.8x the amount of sales at $1 than you'd need at $5.

These numbers are a bit off because I excluded tax, but it should still be similar in principle.

So yeah, don't price your game at $1 unless you hate money.

in reply to @bruno's post: