just read this interesting article regarding retail game pricing trends:
http://www.avault.com/articles/getarticle.asp?name=pricingmystery&page=1

you think indies should follow suit and lower price to compete if retail companies are release games at almost the same price?

I know many people that earn more if they keep the price up, like 19.95$ or 24.95$.
On the other hand lowering price MAY (no necessarily) get you more sales (but not more money) so a bigger customer base...

Price only becomes a critical factor in game pricing above and below certain thresholds. The rest of the time I believe that price has very little influence on sales, and definitely, very few people actually compare game prices before making a decision relative to the majority.

In other words I'll be sticking with $20 :D

Cas :)

I always find it surprising that people are willing to pay $25 for these games... :) Maybe I'm just too used to being flat broke, but $20 is definitely my upper limit for impulsive purchasing. If I'm going to pay more than that for a downloadable, it better have rocked my world up, down, sideways, and made me breakfast in the morning.

$20 is such a pathetically small amount of money for a few evening's entertainment it's amazing that $25 seems so much steeper. As I like to point out, you can just about get a pizza and a six pack for $20. Well, here in the UK, anyway.

Cas :)

Ordering a pizza.... I haven't done that in years....

I *really* am broke. ;)

I thought Bob's article was interesting, but I don't really agree with his data as far as shareware is concerned. He states that Shareware prices are bucking the trend by going up. That might be locally true (e.g. the recent trend to move from $19.95 to $24.95 as the 'standard' shareware price. See Popcap, etc). However over the same time-span that he uses to compare retail game prices (early 90s to now) he seems to have forgotten that the standard shareware price back then (for any Id, Apogee, MVP, etc game) was $29.95. If anything, prices took a nosedive with the growth of the internet, and are only now coming back toward those levels.

And comparing shareware prices to to bargain bin retail prices is really beside the point. It is not the perceived cost of production or even the quality of the game that drives shareware game sales, but the availability. I've payed my $20 for Mutant Storm or Alien Flux happily because I know I can't find these types of games in retail.

What I find interesting: even at $1.99 or $9.99 or whatever, very few retail games grab my interest. I think for more mature gamers (i.e. those who are no longer starving students) the question of "can I afford this" is replaced by "do I want to waste my time with this". I'd still rather pay $30-$50 to play a great game like Tron 2.0, than $3-$5 to play a mediocre game like... well, fill in the blank here.

I'm sticking with 19-25 dollars. Make your games of good quality and most people are happy to pay that price.
I have found that changing my prices has no real effect on sales.

From a computer developer standpoint, this is a bleak reality, but there’s at least one contravening trend. The programming tools available to develop computer games have improved in quality, increased in number and lowered in price to the point that, if one has the proper design ideas in place, one can pump out the code to run a title a lot faster than in the past. As a result, even though the technological demands are a lot higher than before, the advances in development tools have tried to keep pace. The net result has been to shift the majority of costs from coding implementation to basic design.
Sorry, but that speculation doesn't match with reality as I understand it. YET.

The tools have tried to keep pace with demand. They haven't caught up yet. So the cost of developing the software have continued to go up. That MAY change in the future (I think & hope so), but it ain't quite there yet. What you need is for technological demands to flatten out - which they may be doing soon, most people seem to acknowledge - so that the tools can truly catch up rather than just losing ground more slowly. But if that was all there was to developing a game, design and programming, I'd be inclined to agree.

What this article doesn't acknowledge is that modern AAA game development is about 5% design, 20% coding, and 75% content creation. The tools have become MUCH more powerful recently, but they still can't keep pace. For a simple 2D puzzle game, sure - content creation may be a single artist working one week, and an off-the-shelf sound library. But if you are creating a game with multiple 3D levels and objects, motion-captured (or hand-animated) characters, etc... Woah, look out! Particularly if your team is using an engine they've already used before, coding will be a pretty small chunk of your development time. It's all in the content creation, baby! That's where a lot of the costs of game development are going.
Increased efficiency in game production, with dramatically lowered costs, doesn’t appear to be on the horizon.
This contradicts his previous point, but here I'm mostly in agreement. With the caveat: "If technological demand continues at the pace set over the last 10 years." I think its slowing down. I really do. So do lots of other folks who probably know more about it than I do. As that happens, standards begin to solidify, and tools & content begin to catch up, and costs can begin to drop. So maybe it's not on the immediate horizon, but I think it's coming.

And that will mean a blurring of the line between both costs and quality for indie vs. high-budget games. I think that the former isalready (http://www.garagegames.com/mg/snapshot/view.php?qid=761) starting (http://www.warcry.com/scripts/images/view_image.phtml?id=19766&site=15) to happen (http://www.darkhorizons-lore.com/welcome.php?44.255).

You can see it as a threat, or you can see it as an opportunity.

That's odd as my latest travels to Fry's and CompUSA showed store games priced high at $39 - $59. Perhaps things may have changed since in those couple months. I typically wait for bargain bins at $9.99 but most of time the ones I want never get there.

I get the occasional customer saying prices are to high as they can get better games at lower prices in bargain bins. But these people probably had very small chance of making sale anyhow. My bet is normal internet customers get exposed to it somehow and don't want to waste time traveling to store and so forth and scoop it up at $9.99 - 19.99. Shoot I found Penguin Puzzle as an extra addon game in a bargain bin for $9.99 when PP by itself on the net cost $19.99, bet the bargain bins barely affects it's sales.