Sell your game or give it away free?
As I also briefly mentioned in the hobbyist game developer manifesto one thing to consider seriously before even starting a new game project is the price tag of the completed game. Earning a dime or two doesn’t sound bad, does it?
Since anyone can publish their work online and setup payment processing with services like Paypal it is not a technical problem. It is easy to ask for money – the real problem is: will people buy your game?
Having followed the independent game development scene for a few years I know that very few small game development companies earn decent money and many don’t earn any money at all. The problem is that as soon as you ask for people’s money your game has to be really extraordinary for them to consider buying it. The internet is flooded with games, many are of these are free, so when people see a payment button 99% of your audience will go elsewhere and find another game. Lowering the price wont always help since that will make your game look ‘cheap’ in the players eyes. A game might sell better if priced at 20$ rather than 10$ and it will without a doubt make more money since you need to sell twice as many games at half the price which is a lot harder than having fewer people pay more.
But what if just 1% of players buy the game then? Well, let us say that you after releasing the game have 100 daily downloads of the demo (not impossible for a good game demo but not easy to reach either) then that converts to only 1 daily sale. If you have a really good game then you might be able to sell it for 20$ but if you try to compete on price (like most seem to do these days) then selling for 5-10$ might be your choice. Now for how long will you be able to keep people flocking to your game demo? New games are released every day and most likely your game will be down to a few daily downloads after a month or two. Old games rarely attract many new gamers.
So don’t sell the game? Only if it is really good and a lot of people other than your friends and family think that it has real quality.
The other option is to give your game away for free. Why do this? Because this will make you able to let anyone play your game and experience all the fun and excitement you created. No one will ever be forced to stop because the demo ended and they didn’t want to pay for the full game. Instead everyone will have the possibility to play your game to end and see the full story and fight the final boss. They might become fans of your game and over time you might even create new games that they want to play. Then you might consider asking a price. But consider it well and don’t be surprised if the price tag scares a lot of them away. If you really need to make some money from your games you could try inserting ads into them before putting up a payment button. This will keep the game free for the players.
Related posts you might like:
January 18th, 2011 - 20:07
Sponsorship is a way to go, you get the money for few in game ads