How do you decide what the market will stand for your game?

Some relatively simple games, such as Diamond Mine (www.popcap.com) are priced at the $20 mark, but then you see other games such as Hopmon (www.jjsoftgames.com) which are much more involved, going for just $8.

This seems the exact opposite of what I would expect. I wouldn't have thought people would be willing to spend $20 on a game as simple as Diamond Mine, but apparently it sells by the truckload. And with Hopmon being the fun, attractive game that it is, surely it can command a higher price than that?


Secondly, I have heard that pricing a game at $14.95 rather than $19.95 to increase the chance of a sale is a bad idea, as the consumer doesn't "register" $14.95 as being significantly cheaper than $19.95. Essentially meaning you are losing $5 per sale for nothing. Is this true?




Oops! One more question. Sorry :)

I've noticed a lot of websites don't display the price of the game very prominently. Either the person has to get all the way to the order page before finding out what the game costs, or the price is placed way down in the game description page. Is this a specific tactic to increase sales, ie. is the person more likely to download the demo (and hopefully get hooked) before they know the price?



(great forum by the way!)

I think most larger businesses do pricing based pretty much on the results of past experimentation. I'm sure there are records and studies results that indicate percentage of increased or decreased sales at different price points. Of course, no pricing scheme is universal. The nature of the product will still affect it some. Anyway, I don't know them all, but I know a few:

1. Pricing something at 7.95 is usually better than pricing it at 9.95. You'll see this a lot for bargain bin stuff and old-school games you can buy online. I can even speak from personal experience: for some reason I'll balk at 9.95, but 7.95 I'll just throw down on the table without even thinking twice.

2. Using 14.95 isn't very good. If you want to achieve the effect of seeming 'cheaper' than 19.95, then go with something like 16.95 or 17.95. This is basically similar to the rule above. People think more in terms of just being 'cheaper' than $20, but not so much by how much cheaper.

3. There's also the old rule about 'going too cheap.' A lot of people actually have a cut off limit of where something is actually too cheap for them to even bother buying it, or something weird. I think that happens less in an online environment and more in a store/shelf environment though.

As for the wide variety in game sale prices online, I figure most of the time it has no real reason. Most web-sale games are being marketed by very inexperienced people who pick their price arbitrarily; and all of them probably have different reasons. I've seen people who seemingly overpriced their game, citing theory #3. I've also known someone who priced his game really really cheap because he felt desperate and figured that was the only way he'd get any sales. Additionally, games by people in Korea, Japan, and other non US/European nations will usually price things pretty low, because $8 US seems like a lot more to them than it does to us. :)

There's also the marketing-vs-price deal too. If you plan to market your game, you can raise the price, just because you'll get a lot more 'sucker' clientel (to put it politely, heh). But! You also have to have a marketing budget, which is usually still less than the extra profits earned frim being able to double the price on your game.

- Air
- Hour 13 Studios (http://www.hour13.com)