1) Valve does regulate prices on steam. It's not an open marketplace where the developer gets to make these decisions unilaterally - it's the developer working with Valve as their publisher.

2) Personally, seeing a $2 game on Steam would damage it's perceived value for me, as mentioned above. I would be prejudiced against it.

Mobile games trended towards $1, because they're a lot smaller and simpler than traditional PC/console games.

If angry birds was on PC, it would not make many sales with a $60 price tag. It has a low price because it's not comparable to your typical PC game.

3) Sure there's a lot of competition on Steam, but I don't think we'll see a race to the bottom like we did on mobile, because

- PC gamers tend to want larger, more in-depth experiences which can't economically survive off a $1 price tag.

- PC gamers aren't as tolerant of in-game advertising, which is the mechanism through which most mobile games make their money these days. The typical successful mobile game these days is free to play, but earns millions off ads. That business model doesn't translate to PC very well.

- PC gamers are accustomed to new games costing $60.

4) The last one is pretty important. New release console games in Australia have always been AU$100+... When the US$ crashed, making 1AUD worth more than 1USD, did retailers drop the price of games here? No, they kept selling them at AU$120 -- double their retail price in the USA, because that's what the local market was accustomed to paying. Even on Steam, there's region specific pricing, so the price of a game can be doubled if they detect that you're using an Australian IP address / credit card...

Also, more importantly, simply dropping the price of your game from $10 to $2 is not going to get you 5x more sales, which means it's not a smart business decision. PC game prices tend to be elastic, but not perfectly so.

It's a better decision to spend money on marketing to actually increase sales. This is what AAA games do -- they spend $10M making the game, and then $10M on telling people to buy it. From that $10M marketing spend, they might generate 2M sales (which means a user acquisition price of $5/user)... At $50 each, that's $100M retail, $70M wholesale, profit of $50M after deducting costs, and $25M after tax. On the other hand, if they released it for $2 and spend nothing on marketing, they would get somewhere between zero and 2M sales, bringing in $0 to $4M retail, $0 to $2.8M wholesale, and a loss of $-10M to $-7.2M after deducting costs...

As my browser and this forum are not friends for some reason (Windows 10? The Firefox version I have?), forgive me for not splitting up the quote as I would have liked. I use numbers instead.

1) Well, that might be. I question then though why Valve would let anyone sell their game for 2$... its not F2P, it will most probably not benefit the dev (as you put it later, the low price does not really entice people to buy it), and I have doubts it is good for Steam as an ecosystem (for people quickly browsing through the catalogue of games, seeing tons of 2$ Games screams "App Store Shovelware").

Of course its their store, and I trust that Valve has WAY more expierience selling games and running Steam than I ever will have. Still, I honestly would be interested why they do it, both Valve as a "publisher" and the devs of the games.

2) My thoughts exactly on the first half.... on the second, sure, you cannot build just as elaborate expieriences on mobile as on PC or Console. It also doesn't make sense as the expectations and the way games are played on mobile is vastly different.

But: this is a self reinforcing spiral down to shovelware. If game prices plumet too much because the games produce do not warrant the same prices as on PC/Console, budgets get tighter and games get crappier. Prices will be perceived as too high again, and so on. Granted, this is a very theoretical view.

I still think that given the same game (save a little bit simpler graphics on mobile, and different controls) will not be able to be sold for 30 bucks on mobile, while people will happily pay that much on PC/Console. The better Indie and AAA games on mobile are reaching the last gen consoles in size and graphical quality, yet last gen console games are still sold for 30 bucks at least. Even AAA mobile games (the few AAA games that actually try to be AAA in the sense of PC Consoles) are sold for 15, maybe 20 bucks.

I think the difference in size and quality between mobile and PC/Console is only half the truth on why prices in the mobile app stores are so low.

3) That might hold true for the AAA space... in the Indie space, things seem to be a little bit different:

- Games come in all shapes and sizes (which is good), there sometimes is a game published on Steam which is a direct mobile port. Given the game is good and people like it, it can still have a lot of success.

- While players are used to pay 60$ for their AAA games (though steam sales are teaching them that they should wait a month or two and pay a reduced price), the prices for Indie games are all over the place. BECAUSE the game vary so extremly in size, length, production value quality, and overall quality, it can be difficult to pin down what is the correct price for a certain game. I do see a vocal minority that seem convinced they need to start price discussions about even better Indie games. Everytime along the lines of "this game is way overpriced".

- And yet you are right on the fact that ingame advertising is frowned upon, so this is no possible escape route for Indies cornered with having to lower their games prices too much.

Look, I am not claiming "the sky is falling" and that gamers are forming a mob in the street to hunt down the Indie devs that do not follow their pricing pressure. All I am saying is that I see some tendencies that cannot be good, for anyone.

4) Again, that might be true for AAA devs... how about the Indie who has trouble reaching anyone with his marketing efforts? And how about all the Indie devs that make bad business decisions (like NOT doing any marketing at all), and see slashing prices as their only chance (even if this is, yet again, a bad business decision)?

1) I do think that prices are based on game quality, in part and indirectly. Developers set prices based on what they think will maximize revenue (or achieve some other goal, like building a good reputation for a studio), and it's not unreasonable to think that a "good" game will be popular, generate hype, and persuade people to buy it at a higher price rather than a lower one. We've all seen "bad" AAA games released at the normal price point and then quickly and steeply discounted soon after launch.

2) I agree that player feedback, screenshots, and gameplay vids are far more important than price in my buying decisions. But 10 pictures and 3 minutes of video, while better than nothing, aren't too informative either. What I'm trying to say is that game buyers are in a situation where we are lacking information about the quality of a game before playing it, and its hard for a particular game to demonstrate its quality before purchase. If the buyer is skeptical that it's worth $X, and the game can't improve on that perception before the sale happens, then the price has to drop.

3)

Look, I might be a little bit different in that I really don't care about the price as long as it is fair. Some dev wanting 25% more from me than people from neighbouring countries? ... or I just don't buy it at all. Someone trying to sell me their game for 120$, or locks parts of the game as DLC? No sale, until the game is put in a sale.

I bolded sections where I think we're saying the same thing. When deciding whether or not to buy, price is a factor (though not necessarily a decisive one). My point being that a game can definitely be priced too high for its perceived quality. In the $120 case for you, from your quote, it's a question of whether or not any game could be worth that and your answer is no. If all games were priced at $120, how many would you buy? I would buy, maybe, one per year at that price because I've played few games that I feel gave me $120s' worth of enjoyment.

4)

Point is, I don't believe money plays nearly as much of a role in buying decisions for most gamers than you might think. They might not pay AAA game prices for a small Indie expierience... but the game price differing by the amount of a small chocolat (here in switzerland) or a burger (in the US.... prices for food around here are insane) will most probably not sway a players opinion on what game to put in the cart during a sale, given the more expensive game looks more interesting to him.

If that's true then why is there such savage competition driving prices down, and why would a price floor help things? Whether you think that price is a meaningful factor in game-buying decisions or not, I still think that the solution will involve conveying more information about the game to buyers, not just making games arbitrarily more expensive.

1) Yet AAA game prices are pretty level. True, after some time the success in the market will dictate if the price is discounted or not (if we look at old game cartridges from the 90's, this gets even more accentuated, with even games that are not rare at all sold at higher prices than new IF that game is really good... while the bad ones are sold for 2 bucks during sales).

That is exactly WHY it is so important to release the game at a level price in the first place. If FIFA 16 flops (bad example I know... I just hate the FIFA AND football games :)), and the game was priced at half a normal AAA games price because the publisher said "yeah, we basically took last years FIFA game, didn't change anything besides adding two players, called it FIFA 16 and then spent only millions on marketing because the game will sell itself"... the amount they could slash off the price would dwindle to almost nothing.

If prices are low to begin with, you have a hard time slashing it even more. And the reduced price will look like a worse deal, because a) less savings, and b) price is now so low that people question the quality of the game.

2) I would wager that even 10 screenshots and 3 minutes of video hold a ton more information value than an abstract price put to the game by the dev. The price just shows how much the dev trusts the game... sure, that has some value.

I would rather hear from unbiased players how they rate the game. So as long as you are not the early adopter (and lets be honest, you get screwed >50% of the time by being the early adopter), screenshots, video and most of all the ratings and reviews of other players is where the information value lies, not the price.

3) Price is a factor... for me, and most probably for everyone else too. But not in the way you describe it. I don't look at the price and say "hey, this costs 2$, must be crap"... I look at it with disbelief, then I check the screenshots and the reviews to find out if there is a reason for that low price. If there is, I will not buy it for 5$, not for 2$ and will not play it if you pay ME 2$ to play it.

If there is not, I might be happy about getting a bargain for a very short while... and then, if the game really is good enough for me to like it too, I am sad that I couldn't have given the dev more because at 2$ a copy, he will not be able to produce another game in quite a while.

What I was talking about was the overpricing done by some AAA publishers that try to extort money out of people because "Everyone will HAVE to buy FIFA 16... lets raise the price by another 10%". If there is NO reason why a product is priced way higher than others, I will not pay. Not because I couldn't afford it, or because I pin down price to quality or anything.

To me its a loop of negative reinforcement. If greedy publisher X can extort 10% more money out of players for FIFA 16 this year, he will raise the prices again next year. I am complaining about this just as I am complaining about the other extreme (too low prices). Its only that on the other end, I feel some sympathy for the devs that seem to think they need to price their games so low.

4) There is savage competition because too many game devs want to sell too many products to too few customers. This tends to put the less successfull ones into a more desperate situation, and at the end makes many believe that slashing prices might help them compete.

Then there is the vocal minority of players asking for lower prices... hey, I am a customer too, I like lower prices, and I hate price hikes. Yet I do see that if prices get too low, the quality of the products I buy suffer, and I like this even less. Why invest even 1 hour into a bad game, not matter how cheap it is?

So I think there are multiple factors involved that MIGHT lead to a race to the bottom. Ever increasing competition, players getting more vocal about prices after having been trained by Steam and recent Indie prices that the price of a game isn't fixed, not even at launch... Indie devs that often lack the business and marketing sense of the big publishers, and having way more contact with their community.

If you are really interested into getting more information about games before buying, there are many good ways, a high price variance is not one of them IMO. The forced demo of the OYUA wasn't ideal for all games... but it was an idea worth thinking about. What a trailer is to a movie, is a demo to a game.

Giving the devs more space on Steam for additional videos and images, on one hand forcing them to release more information, but maybe also provide them with better tools to do so.

And improve player reviews, and especially curation so players will find recommendations quicker.

A price floor would help because

a) the devs at the lower end of the scale, especially the self esteem scale, wouldn't feel quite as bad for asking for a fair price for their game (which 2$ likely is not, given you worked some weeks on even a simpler RPGMaker game, IF you want to have a good story campaign, and will likely sell to 100's of players, if you are lucky).

b) the vocal minority of players attacking Indie devs about their price would have to redirect their hatred towards steam, which has way more resources to handle the bitching, and to weather and ignore it.

c) Games at the lower end wouldn't have to fight quality concerns just as much as they have to now. Of course, you can say its the devs fault for pricing his game so low... see above. This is just another way in which price floors can help stabilize a market.

What about the games that ARE not good enough to ask 5$ for? Well, I am not so sure really.

- Will they EVER get bought by ANYONE if they are so crappy? This is not a mobile app store where people buy games just to kill time.

- If nobody is interested in them, what it the value to Valve/Steam to have them on their store? We have seen with Apple that the "1 million Apps" slogan was loosing value quickly, as people found out that its more "1 million, and about 1% of them are actually worth downloading!"

- You would still offer a "free" price tier (for the F2P games offered on Steam)... if someone wants to put his shovelware on Steam, but feels he cannot ask for 5$, he can still make it free (and try to go F2P if he wants to earn money).... he will most probably not loose a lot of money, as at 2$, and with a game that actually does not deserve a higher price, he wouldn't have made a ton of money otherwise.

I think I'd be put off by games only costing $2, I'd assume they were crap.

1)

[1)] [...] That is exactly WHY it is so important to release the game at a level price in the first place. [...]

Sure, it's great to have some place to go with price reductions as demand for a game shifts whether that's due to poor quality, time passing after release, or whatever. But nothing prevents devs from releasing games at a higher price than $2-$5, unless Valve's negotiating strategy is way worse than I'm imagining.

2)

[2)] I would wager that even 10 screenshots and 3 minutes of video hold a ton more information value than an abstract price put to the game by the dev. The price just shows how much the dev trusts the game... sure, that has some value.

I would rather hear from unbiased players how they rate the game. So as long as you are not the early adopter (and lets be honest, you get screwed >50% of the time by being the early adopter), screenshots, video and most of all the ratings and reviews of other players is where the information value lies, not the price.

I didn't mean to imply that screenshots and videos aren't sources of information about a game. What I was trying to express is that they aren't great sources of information about it with regard to quality or fun. If there are 10, 20, or 30 screenshots you can bet that those are the most appealing 10, 20, or 30 screenshots the devs could find-- they are meant to cast the game in the best possible light, not necessarily to accurately convey the game (though they may do that also). A game that I find obviously unappealing based on screenshots is an easy case, but one that looks OK could be anything from an incredible find to a total dud. Reviews are a much, much better source of information.

3)

[3)]Price is a factor... for me, and most probably for everyone else too. But not in the way you describe it. I don't look at the price and say "hey, this costs 2$, must be crap"...

That's not what I'm describing; of course price isn't the ultimate indicator of game quality. What I'm trying to describe is that if, based on other available information, I can't tell the difference between a game I'll thinks is worth $50 and one that is worth $2 I will be more likely to buy at a lower price than a higher one. It's easier for a game to be worth (to a buyer) at least $15 than it is to be worth at least $80. It's a marginal decision. The price won't ever perfectly match everyone's willingness to pay with a nominal price approach, and with across-the-board low prices the mismatch will benefit buyers and hurt sellers. I'm not sure that the reverse situation, where a mismatch between price and my willingness to pay benefits sellers and hurts me, is necessarily better for everyone. You are focusing on developers producing fewer games because they can't afford to do so while I am focusing more on buyers purchasing fewer games because it's a worse value for them (and at some point, less affordable). Explicitly favoring the developers' side may or may not be better for the market as a whole, but I'm not ready to conclude that right now. Especially when developers have a lot of scope to set the price.

4)

[4)]There is savage competition because too many game devs want to sell too many products to too few customers. This tends to put the less successfull ones into a more desperate situation, and at the end makes many believe that slashing prices might help them compete.

I don't disagree, but raising prices arbitrarily doesn't (necessarily) increase sales or enlarge the pool of customers and instead applies pressure in the other direction. I also agree that giving developers more tools to demonstrate the quality of their games to buyers, and especially improving the community reviews, would be way more valuable than allowing prices to approach $0. But I don't agree that destroying whatever limited information price can convey while also raising the average price of games will automatically improve the market.

Instead of making the crappiest games on Steam cost the same as a decent game I would rather invest effort in persuading developers to set prices at a level closer to the revenue-maximizing price, not to chase increasingly meaningless unit sales in a race to the bottom.

I have to work with number again, you know the drill, my browser acting up and all....

1) Nothing prevents the dev. Yes, that is how I understand it. And I am not sure IF the dev should be prevented from doing that.

I just question if the fact that there are games with a certain quality standart, garnering pretty good reviews, and not extremly short, available for 2$ on steam is actually benefitting anyone. IF somebody should force the dev to rethink his pricing decision IDK... I am not for too much regulation. I just fear that IF that new price floor for GOOD games starts to catch on with the "more ruthless" customers (the ones who are just looking for the best deal), and following that the "less self confident" developers (the ones with an imposter syndrome, or just not able to defend themselves agains the "ruthless" customers), a downward spiral might result that might affect AT LEAST the Indie devs at the lower end of the foodchain.

2) If I understand you correctly you are not looking at the price as a piece of "Information"... instead, you use it as a "quality threshold", so you will need less information about the quality of a 2$ game to buy it, than you would need if you had to lay out 80$?

That makes a lot of sense to me. To some degrees, I function the same way (and I think most customers do)... if I see a game that COULD be interesting for 20 bucks, I might just impulse buy it. Just to have some fun, maybe to let it lie in my Steam library until I find the time (happened this weekend with Ori and the Blind forest... must say, game is worth the price just for the artful visuals alone).

Now, when we reach the price of a coffe (here in switzerland :)), I am not so sure anymore if lowering the price further (apart from sales, were its a different effect than just the low price making people buy) has any positive effect on sales.

Given we are talking about a country where 5$ are still almost nothing (like a single meal, or a cheap shirt, or a single bus ride), why would you buy a game at 2$ if you are not ready to invest 5$ into the same game? Is it because you could buy 2.5 games at the same price, in the hope one of them is good enough to entertain you for some minutes?

Personally I feel like there is some price floor, goind under which is no longer making sense for anyone.

3) Most of it is already discussed, but as of the last few sentences and taking a developer centric point of view:

I don't think my point of view is extremly developer centric. Its a pragmatic view given I am mostly talking about developers at the lower end of the food chain. We are NOT talking about prices that will make customers go broke in most countries of the world, or taking away their freedom to choose.

A customer centric point of view benefits the customer only to some extent... after which a negative spiral might end up actually making things worse for the customer.

If we look at markets where most competitors have been forced out of the market (for example CPUs or GPUs, given that there was not too much of a competition to start with, there might be better examples), we see how having NO competition is in the end bad for the customer. Almost no usable advancements from generation to generation, while prices seem to climb steadily.

There is plenty of competition still in the games market. But if you let competition run to rampant in a part of the market, that market segment might end up in the hands of the few that were able to survive the price war. Result: see above.

Preventing a market from killing itself is ALWAYS customer centric, even if it benefits devs shortterm more than customers.

4) Your last sentence pretty much sums up the point I want to make. Although I am NOT so opposed to leveling prices between good and bad games at release (after all, you don't know how BAD a game is unless you release it to the wild)... in the end, price after release is still flexible, thanks to sales and discounts.

3) Most of it is already discussed, but as of the last few sentences and taking a developer centric point of view:

I don't think my point of view is extremly developer centric. Its a pragmatic view given I am mostly talking about developers at the lower end of the food chain. We are NOT talking about prices that will make customers go broke in most countries of the world, or taking away their freedom to choose.

I don't think that it's a question of extremes (though that is almost certainly the case for some, especially on the developer side). It's not that customers will go broke buying games with a price floor in place. It's that inefficiencies in information about game quality currently favor consumers (through any rock-bottom price trends) at the expense of developers. Using a price floor reverses that and favors developers (at least somewhat) over consumers. If a game is worth $10 (assume for argument's sake that there is some reliable way of getting that measure) and is priced at $5, then my buying it is a good value for me and a poor deal for the developer. But the developer could have set a higher price. If the game is priced at $10, then everyone is happy. If the game is priced at $20 the developer will get more money from a sale but I will feel that I got a poor value for my money. If all games are priced at a minimum of $20 (or whatever price level you want to set) then I will view every game priced at the lower end of the allowed scale with suspicion and I will make fewer purchases. It's not necessarily the case that the lost revenue from fewer sales will overshadow the increased revenue from higher prices, but there are almost certainly a lot of configurations of minimum price level and consumer price sensitivity that result in net revenue loss for the developers you want to help.

4) Your last sentence pretty much sums up the point I want to make. Although I am NOT so opposed to leveling prices between good and bad games at release (after all, you don't know how BAD a game is unless you release it to the wild)... in the end, price after release is still flexible, thanks to sales and discounts.

I think we agree, at least broadly. But again, the result of more expensive games, on average, will mean I buy fewer games. If games are priced levelly at launch but the prices can adjust afterwards, then that just guarantees that I will pretty much never buy a title at launch but will wait until I see if the price will adjust or not.

Again, we see the same problems in the Steam pricing trend. I just don't think that a minimum price is the right solution because it 1.) doesn't necessarily solve the problem at issue, 2.) causes other problems which I'm not sure are less severe, and 3.) is probably not the best available solution.

I think we agree mostly, but those two paragraphs seemed to call for a response from me.

While I do agree setting a price floor too high would cause other problems (if the price floor is really high (for Indie games) like 20$)... like people not buying those games anymore, as a dud at that price is felt as a bigger loss than at 10$.

I still think that there are limits. When you have practically the same game, with minor quality differences, or just a bigger more expierienced dev having more guts to ask for a higher price, with one of them 5 times the price of the other, things start to become problematic (and lets be honest, in the sub 20$ price range, this starts to become pretty common... even if its just 2 times the price, its already bad).

Just to clear things up: I am talking about games going below the 5$ price point. IF a price floor makes sense, its a 5$ price floor. I wouldn't dare to floor prices at 20$, that is way too high for most Indie games.

Then it is my opinion that no one should have the upper hand... not the customer, not the dev. If the dev gets the upper hand, black sheep will abuse the power, and customers will start to buy less games because of it.

But as long as the customer has the power, and there is enough competition, there is always the danger of a price war, and devs being forced out of the market. Which means less games to choose from for the customer.

In both scenarios, both sides loose longterm. Both sides have the same interest longterm, a healthy market place that encourages competition to keep prices down, and drive innovation, but at the same time regulates what needs to be regulated to not let prices slip, and kill innovation by a "survival of the fattest" scenario.

You said it yourself. While the customer is certainly positively amazed over getting tremendous value for 5$, that game should be priced at 10$. The customer would still be happy at that price point, given the quality is good. While 20$ clearly would be too much, at 10$ most customers would most probably still have bought the game, meaning 50-75% more revenue for the dev, which for Indies can mean the difference between continuing to produce games or going broke.

a) What kind of information is lost because the game is now priced more accurately at 10$? Isn't it more that information is ADDED because before that information was "misinformation"?

b) Even if there is a second game, priced accurately at 5$, which might be also elevated to 10$ given the price floor would be set that high (which I wouldn't dare to, 5$ sound like a better idea)... no Information is lost, both games still cost the same. The first, GOOD game is now priced accurately, people will still buy it, the dev putting out a good game has a higher chance of survival and can continue to produce (hopefully good) games.

The second game now has a too high price. People will be dissapointed with it. But lets be honest, would the game have been received better at 5$? Yes, we are now higher than what we discussed before, but lets work from the assumption that 10$ is a reasonable price floor for Steam (and not 5$ like I proposed before). If a game is too crappy to be priced at 10$ (*cough*5$*cough*), is that game really worth any money at all?

As said, this isn't a mobile App store where games are mostly bought to kill time. People want a good expierience for their money. There is a minimum threshold IMO as to what quality/length a game must bring to entertain on PC. A 10 minute expierience with shoddy gameplay is fine as a free game... is it worth even 1$?

Now I know very well that we are comparing apples and oranges (see Firewatch and the controversy over the short playtime... and that game costs 15$+)... still, as long as devs can price their game however they want, and there is no "industy standard" price like for AAA titles, I do question the value of different prices.

As to the loss in revenue... I am not so sure. IMO price floors like that help quality games put out by inexpierienced or insecure Indies, and might hurt games of poor quality. As sales of good games are most probably not influenced too much by price below a certain threshold, while the ones of poor quality games will be influenced directly by the price (because they might price their games lower in hope of not getting hit so hard by reviews).

That might now be a very personal opinion, but that is good in my eyes. We should strive to make sure good devs can survive on any tiers, while the bad devs will most probably go under anyway (unless they have an EXTREMLY lean business, bad reviews are hard to recover from). So the net loss in revenue will be IMO mostly where there was little chance of survival to begin with, while on the other hand I would expect a net gain of revenue where the quality is right. A little less units sold maybe, at a higher price.

Completly free markets are a heaven for the big and cunning. Those tend to stop taking risks and innovating at some point however. If all the devs and publishers on Steam left are EA clones of different sizes, I will certainly stop finding games that interest me.