Theo, PC PowerPlay intern

This morning I submitted my first column for PC PowerPlay, an Australian games mag I’ve read on and off since 1997. In this month’s piece I wobble around near the issue of indie game pricing, inspired by the question marks hovering over VVVVVV‘s $15 price tag. VVVVVV is easily worth $15 by the way. In researching the article I emailed a bunch of people and received waaaaay too much in reply, so I’m posting the raw interview data here in the extended.

AdamAtomic / Adam Saltsman

How did you decide on your price?

We really genuinely thought that the game was worth $3.  Enough people were playing it and loving it in the browser, and we’d had so much press coverage, that it seemed like if we could charge a reasonably fair price for anything, we could charge it for Canabalt.  Plus we had the iPhone version playable from the website, so people really couldn’t claim that we were telling them it was going to be this huge full experience when it was “just” a simple arcade game.  We felt like we were just being as honest as possible: here’s the game, here’s how much its worth.  Help us survive!

Were you confident with your decision?

…fairly.  It felt a little bit like a science experiment, and some great friends and mentors really encouraged us strongly to sell for a dollar, and they may have been right.  But the more I think about it, the more I think we didn’t really have a choice.  It was either price it for a dollar and try to be the number one game on the entire platform (extremely competitive) or price it for three dollars and just sell very well instead.  The latter is oddly the more conservative and less risky move, despite the relative uproar over the price.

How did people react to your price?

99.96% of people responded with something along the lines of “Man, this game is fun, and it’s only $3!!”  A very few (maybe 20 or 30, out of well over 100,000 customers) believe that its price is an outrage and have accused us of paying for all our good reviews, because who on earth would buy THAT game for THAT outrageous price?  Listening to those 20 or 30 people would be a monumental mistake in so many ways…

Are you still happy with the price you decided on?

Yeap!  We both wonder if we had gone for a dollar if we could have run the gauntlet and made it into the top 10, but we’ve had so much success with this little project that it’s hard to feel any regret or guilt about the decision.

How do you think players decide whether or not to buy a game?

I genuinely have no idea.  What we were banking on with Canabalt was people liking the PC or browser version enough to want to take it with them, and/or to enjoy the game enough to help support us so we can make another game in the future.  I really have no idea if either of those things are why people bought it though.  Maybe they just bought it because Apple told them to?  We used twitter quite a bit for our launch, which I think is a nice way of spreading news about a game.  It’s not always fast, but it’s a kind of maven network; people follow other people because they like what they have to say or recommend, it’s really purposeful for this sort of thing.  My gut feeling is a lot of people buy games because their friends say “this game is rad.”  TLDR version: word of mouth I guess?

How do you feel about the effect a game’s platform has on the perception of its price?

Flash and iPhone both have annoying amounts of semi-justified stigma regarding pricing.  The vast, vast majority of iPhone and Flash games are not worth buying, not even for a dollar.  But the idea that somehow that applies some amount of risk or danger to a really good title on those platforms still strikes me as a little bit crazy.  Most movies aren’t worth $8 but people still pay it, right?

How do you think promotions like the recent Steam sales affect the indie gaming market?

The Steam sales are great, anything to get more small games in front of more people and get them acclimated!  Since the big studios have by and large abdicated the innovation throne (I’m looking at you, Nintendo!) we definitely have a responsibility to pick it up and Steam is helping get our meager efforts out in front of an actual audience.  This is good!  I only wish they had a broader non-gamer audience.

increpare / Stephen Lavelle

Ooh this is a delicate subject for me – you’ll have to excuse my answers if they’re a bit brief.
 

Why don’t you charge for your games?

Because I don’t like paying for them.

How would you describe your experiences with donations?

I’ve never asked for any, and have never gotten any.  Overall the experience has been pretty good!  (I can imagine various once-off situations in which I might, though*.  Thankfully, such occasions have never come up).

*I remember a story once about Edmund McM relying on donations to get some rather urgent medical procedure or other.  I can imagine myself doing this (though I wouldn’t voluntarily move anywhere with shitty healthcare, natch : P ).

Anything else? Go nuts.

I sometimes wonder where my anti-commercialism comes from, and think it might be an indicator that I have latent sympathies for more archaic (though no less problematic) economic models.  There are a great number of artists I have a great deal of respect for, and I don’t particularly begrudge them for charging for access to their works, whether games, or recordings, art, or performances.  I think that it’s better for cultural works to be freely accessible.  I know a lot of commercial developers who would sympathise with this view, though I don’t know if it affects their works, or even how it might.

cactus / Jonatan Söderström

Why don’t you charge for your games?

Charging for a game means you have to make a game that people will want to pay for, and that limits the developer’s freedom and will probably force him to make design choices for reasons other than to make the game he wants to make himself.
 

How do you think your games would be affected if you charged for them?

If I charged for my games it feels like less people would play them, and I wouldn’t have as much room to experiment with whatever I feel like doing.

How would you describe your experiences with donations?

My experiences has been positive, but it seems I always have to have a reason for people to donate. Just putting a donation button on your site doesn’t seem to be enough incentive for most people to send you beer money.
 

How do you think players decide whether or not to buy a game?

I think most players are concerned with how long, how polished and how fun a game seems to be, especially in relation to its price.
 

How do you feel about the effect a game’s platform has on the perception of its price?

I guess there’s some kind of standard on most platforms, but it usually seems that an indie game can cost anything from one to twenty dollars regardless of platform (aside from retail because of manufacturing costs.)

How do you think promotions like the recent Steam sales affect the indie gaming market?

I don’t know, but one might assume that being able to buy a highly successful and critically acclaimed game for cheap would make it less likely that people will pay the same amount for a lesser known title with worse production values.

Ron Carmel – 2D Boy

What motivated you to run the pay-what-you-want sale?

The idea came out of a conversation I had with my friend Ajit.  We were contemplating starting a website that offers absolution to pirates if they make a donation of any amount to the developer whose game they
downloaded illegally.  The pay-what-you-want sale was supposed to be a way to test the water and see if something like this might work.  It was Kyle’s idea to make it part of the World of Goo birthday celebration.  
Ajit and I never made that website even though the sale was a huge success.

Do you think the current model of buying a game for a fixed price (with occasional promotions) will continue to be profitable for indie developers?

My instincts say that there’s a flexible pricing model that would work better than the fixed price model, but it’s going to take a lot of experimentation to figure out the details of how to make it work.  As you said, even the currently dominant fixed price model isn’t really a fixed price model because we have sales.

How do you think promotions like the recent Steam sales affect the indie gaming market?

Steam sales are great, they generate a ton of money for the developer.  They also encourage people to try new kinds of games they wouldn’t otherwise play by making them an irresistible offer and sticking right
in their face with a popup as soon as they launch the Steam client.  The more people we have playing indie games, the more indie developers the market will be able to support, and that would result in more creativity
and more fun for everyone.

Next month’s submission deadline lands right in the middle of GDC, so I’ll probably write something about the Indie Games Summit and Independent Games Festival. Any suggestions on where to go from there? What would you like to know about the indie scene?

<3 Farbs

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