[quote name="Norman Barrows" post="5095996" timestamp="1379879225"]
a decent PC game like total war, civ, simcity, the sims, etc can provide literally months or years of gameplay for $30-$60 dollars.

that decent pc game has hundreds of devs and thousands of dollars of budget.I'm the only programmer with little to no budget....maybe i'll use the first game as a crowdfunding...buy one hour at 7$,the next part will be longer at the same price...
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unfortunately, your inability to compete is no excuse. the end users don't care . all that matters is how much entertainment bang for the buck you deliver vs the competition.

the trick is to not compete directly with the big boys for the user's dollars.

this is done by targeting markets they don't target.

in their quest to build shareholder value and maximize profits, they are forced to concentrate on the biggest markets (such as AAA shooters for consoles), leaving many dollars on the table in other markets (such as tower defense for the iphone) for other developers to pick up.

So,I should spend hours working on something to sell it for 1$?

I'll typically spend about 5000 man-hours on a big game and sell it for between $20 and $35 dollars.


here's what you need to do:

1. what kind of game is it?
2. who are my competitors?
3. how much do they cost?
4. what's my quality level compared to their's?
5. ok, so i should charge: <some amount>

that's how you price a game.

how long it took is irrelevant.

how much it cost to make is irrelevant.

those are not market factors. game price is largely a function of market factors alone.

that's why you must evaluate a game's sales potential BEFORE you make it - if its to be for profit.

another little hint:

"unbundling" was once thought to be a good way to sell software. turned out to not really work so well. the recent trend in "pay as you go" and "additional content for additional $" is similar to unbundling. you'll probably find a "one low price gets you everything" strategy will help build a long term loyal customer base who can't wait for the new version (which of course they get at 50% off as a registered user).

a famous marketing quote:
"the easiest sale to make is selling to someone you've sold to before."

if you want to get really good at this stuff, check out "software success". its a marketing newsletter for software company CEO's. very expensive, but better than a Harvard MBA.

One can never know beforehand how the price elasticity curve would turn out as was assumed up there, but multiplying two medium sized numbers gives more likely a higher result, than a low number multiplied by a high number.
Though people feel better when they can try something first to avoid the buy cat inside bag feel. The 1st episode could maybe made free and for all others after that they would pay.

definitely start high (but reasonable) on the price then go down. you can always lower the price, raising it is much harder.

one hour of free play as a demo should be de-regeur. that way the only customers you have are happy customers who know what they're getting into. not one's who think you ripped them off.

Each episode is split into 2 parts, each part is only 1 hour long.

I'm just wondering if there's gonna be a problem with me releasing 1 hour long content for about $7.

id software pretty much set the standard with castle wolf-3d. one hour of free game play in the demo. 20 hours of gameplay (including the 1 hour demo level) for $20 in the full game.

this defined two standards:

1. one hour of free gameplay as the typical size of a game demo

2. a price point of approximately $1 per hour of gameplay in the full game.

as commercial games got bigger, demos hit 1/2 gig in download size, and were replaced with YouTube videos of gameplay as a means of marketing the game.

even today, a maximum of $1 to $3 per hour of gameplay is still pretty much the standard.

what you want to do is create 20 hours of content, and give away the first hour, and charge $20 for all of it. then get busy on the next version, which you will also sell for $20, or $15 or $10 to registered users of the previous version.

or make 11 hours of content, give away one and charge $10 for the rest.

the full version must be at least 95% new content above and beyond the demo. 100% is preferable.

shooters originally had 20 levels, one of which was free, for $20. so they really only had 19 hours of new content for $20. ~$1.05 per hour of gameplay.

as you say you're not EA, so your quality and title's popularity can't command the $3 per hour pricetag they get for a black ops type title ($60 for 20 hours of game play).

i'd say that as a veteran indie gamedev I could probably do a game that could command $2 per hour at most. but usually i design my games for maximum replayability - with little or no hard coded content. which in and of itself is a major selling point, and allows me to charge more for the game, as its a better value due to the large number of hours of game play included.

Unfortunately for you as a developer, the overwhelming majority of players don't care how much time and effort you put into creating the game, only about the experience they get out of it for the money they spend. You need to convince players that they will be getting an experience that is worth at least the asking price of your game, or preferably an experience that is worth more than the asking price.

For $7 I can hire 7 weekly movies from my local video store. Assuming I only watch each movie once and using a very conservative estimate of one hour running-time per movie that's 7 times the entertainment value of your proposed pricing, and does match (or very likely exceed) the $1 per hour value suggested by other users above.

Braid costs $10, and according to Steam I played for ~14 hours. Again, that's actually better value than $1 per hour.

Like it or not -- and even though you don't want to compete with large teams and other forms of media -- those are the sorts of comparisons potential customers will make when deciding whether or not your game is worth purchasing. That doesn't mean you shouldn't price your game so that you can hopefully make some money if it's popular though, it just means you need to be a bit more clever about it by reducing your development time and costs or by offering the customer better value for their money.

Is each hour of gameplay replayable, or is it really only enjoyable once?

A racing game might provide several races on different tracks which take the average player one hour to complete, but most players are likely to complete each race several times (thereby experiencing several hours of fun) in order to improve their time and/or finish with a better (ideally first) place. In contrast, an adventure game might provide a storyline and several puzzles which take the average player one of to complete, but is repetitive (boring) and overly easy to replay once you have solved the puzzles once.

If you are offering a shorter experience, you may be able to increase the value for customers by ensuring it is fun to replay, by recognising and rewarding better performance, offering achievements for different play styles, or offering character selections that provide the players with varying abilities.

Can you reuse content you have already created to provide additional value for the customer while only having to expend a smaller amount of effort? In a racing game you might have several different race modes so that each track can be played more than once. In a platformer game you might provide a second unlockable character with a ninja-rope that the main character doesn't have, providing an all-new way to navigate and complete the existing levels. Perhaps by tweaking and re-colouring the graphics for an enemy and then giving it slightly different behavior you can provide an additional challenge. Think about ways you can re-use additional content to provide additional value to players without having to spend hours creating brand new content.

Perhaps you can procedurally generate levels? You would need to spend some more time up-front creating and testing this system, but the result is an absolutely huge amount of content for your users.

What sort of game are you actually making? There are probably ways you can reduce your own development time/cost and/or provide better value to players so that your desired $7 price-tag (or perhaps some middle-ground price of $5?) seems reasonable to a larger number of people.

Hope that helps!

maybe i'll use the first game as a crowdfunding...buy one hour at 7$,the next part will be longer at the same price...

I meant to comment on this earlier but forgot to do so.

That's an interesting idea, but it's probably something that runs counter to a typical potential player's expectation. For years now the majority of games from both the industry and independent developers have had a standard where you get you first taste of game-play cheaper (in the now uncommon case of commercially distributed shareware) or more commonly for free (i.e. a demo). That doesn't necessarily mean it won't work, but it means you'll need to work much harder to excite your potential customers about the game; they don't know whether or not they like your game yet, and you're asking for a larger payment up-front on the basis that they'll get future instalments cheaper -- obviously a risky investment for them!

As a possible alternative you could consider releasing the first hour as a free demo and pursuing more traditional crowd-funding to raise the money to release the entire project in a non-episodic package.

Ultimately, what you want to do from a business standpoint is maximize revenue. Revenue is numbers sold multiplied by whatever profit you take per copy sold. Market principles are such that the number of sales made are inversely proportional to the price of the good or service you offer -- there are various details regarding minimum pricing to consider -- but in general the principle holds. Ergo, give it away for free and the number of copies 'sold' is literally the number of people who are interested, price it too high and no one buys it at all. In either extreme, your revenue is zero -- the only place to make money is in the middle.

Its the market that determines where in the middle you will make the most revenue -- not your desire to sell at 5, 10, or 20 dollars; Your job as an industrious marketeer is to consider relevant factors and determine where your market is centered, then to set your prices there. Factors to consider would include the typical going-price for similar goods or services, the value proposition of competing goods and services, and whether or not there's a dearth or glut of competition.

If you look around the landscape, AAA games have economies of scale that allow them to sell massive amounts of content that's taken hundreds, if not thousands of man-years to produce, for the Crazy-Eddie bargain price of just $59.99. You may not think of AAA games as your competition, buy you're are, in fact, competing for the same valuable entertainment dollars and entertainment hours as everyone else. Heck, for the same $7 you propose, I can go see half of a blockbuster film (or the whole thing, during a matinee), I can buy 1/8th of a new AAA game (or about 1/3rd of an AAA game that came out three months ago), I can buy a paperback book, buy 4-10 songs from iTunes, I can buy 7 whole games from the app store, I can keep my spotify or netflix subscription running for another month, I can put two gallons of gas in my car and spend the weekend someplace nice, or I can go the the bar and buy a pretty girl a drink.

Like it or not, competition for people's entertainment dollars has never been so fierce. They have limited money and time to spend, and other people are literally giving away content just for the chance to convert some of their clients into cash-cows (the so-called freemium business model). You can call it a race to the bottom if you like, but that doesn't change what the market is, and it couldn't care less whether you think you need to charge $7 to keep your lights on.

If you can't make the living you want in the way you want, throwing in the towel and making a living elsewise is a sound business decision. But marketing decisions can't be driven by the results you want to achieve, they need to be driven by maximizing the opportunity that is there.