And someone brought up N++? A game with literally thousands of levels, multiple modes, over 30 hours of gameplay just in single-player mode, not worth $20??? Are you on drugs?
It's not about what a game is worth, but what people are willing to pay. A minimalistic vector graphic game is going to be a hard sale at $20, regardless of quality or length, especially when the previous game was half that price. At that price, it's definitely a game that could benefit from a well done demo to convince people.
I recall the OP talking about how crazy the huge gap in time it took to create sprites when working on their latest game (which is somewhere in between SNES and Playstation) and their previous games (which were around Sega Master System to SNES in graphics).
Our first game (8-bit style RPG) took us about 3 months. I remember thinking that we'd be able to do the next game (early 16-bit style RPG) in about 2-4 months since we already had an RPG engine from the previous game and was surprised when it ended up taking us about 8 months. And yeah, going from standard SNES RPG style (our last game) to CT-style (our upcoming game) has been way more work than I expected. As you increase 2D complexity, the work and difficulty increases exponentially.
That is a poor example. Indie gaming really started ramping up after 2011. Just look at this Gamesutra list of the top 10 indie games of 2010. Nothing but very low budget games.
That Gamasutra list is a bit odd and includes a number of cheap freeware games in it. 2010 also saw the release of Amnesia, Recettear, Octodad, Zeno Clash, and Gratuitous Space Battles, all of which have good solid production values.
There's only a certain amount of people that are interested in these types of games and a lot of them would be willing to pay a little more for a more expansive product that hits all the right notes.
This is the core of my argument. People often underestimate how many people could be interested in playing a game. For example, when we were getting started, the commonly held belief was that indie JRPGs were an extremely niche market, that nobody on PC wanted to play them, and that you needed to charge $20-$30 since you were going to be lucky to sell more than a few hundred copies. We said forget that, charged $3 for our debut Steam release, and ended up selling 50,000-100,000 copies in the first month (and over 500k+ lifetime).
Now I'm not saying everyone should price their game so low (and in fact, we were going to do $5 but Valve didn't want the Steam version to be more expensive than the XBLIG version), but price is a valuable tool in an indie developer's arsenal. Pricing should be very carefully considered and rejecting the idea of pricing your game at a lower price because of pride hurts your chances of success.
Zeboyd, I think Cosmic Star Heroine looks fantastic, depending on the scope and how long the game is, for example 10-20 hours. I'll gladly pay $15-25. but, since I really like the premise, I actually hope the scope is even bigger, make it 40-60 hour rpg like many snes rpg such as chrono trigger, final fantasy 6 etc and I'd gladly pay $40-$50 for it.
When you use retro styles of art, you're limited in how much a mainstream audience is willing to pay. It may not be "fair," but that's how it is. And besides, people are constantly telling us how they appreciate that they can actually finish our games in a reasonable amount of time - there are plenty of 40-100 hour RPGs out there but hardly any good RPGs in the 5-20 hour range. CSH is our longest game yet, but we're still estimating that it'll be doable in 20 hours or less.
Indie devs can charge $20 for all I care, but when I get excellent games like Gunman Clive for like $3 and Child of Light for $15 they better be damn good to ask that price.
That's how I see it as well. Child of Light may not be an indie title (made by Ubisoft, albeit with a smaller team than most of their games) and it has its share of flaws, but it's still a rather good game with fantastic art & music and it was only $15. If your game isn't at least as good as Child of Light, you probably shouldn't even be considering a $20 price tag.
I think a lot of people are ignoring the phenomenon Robert keeps bringing up, being sort of "wishlist and forget".
You charged $20 for your game as a possibly new indie developer with no impressive history or exceptional buzz, that's possibly just over many people's impulse purchase threshold. So they wishlist, and once you do have a sale at $10 or $15, the big splash your game made or could have made at launch is already over, the people aren't necessarily buying the game at this point because they're already more interested in something else that's new, or higher up on the wishlist.
Exactly. Games are constantly coming out and the quantity is increasing every year. The vast majority of games make a large percentage of their lifetime sales at launch. You should do everything in your power to make your launch as successful as possible. Saying "I'll release at a high price since it's easy to lower the price" doesn't work very well in practice. If you release at too high of a price & lower the price later, chances are nobody is going to care when you lower the price because attention spans are brief in this industry and by the time you've lowered your price, everyone has already moved on to the new hotness.
Oh and I'd like to thank everybody for being so civil in this discussion. I was a little worried at how this thread would go over when I started it, but I've been impressed with how polite everyone is being, despite disagreements.
