spiderweb software charges $30 for every game, and he's been making a living at indie games for 15 years now. so i think both a very low price and 10000s of sales per game and a very high price and 100s of sales per game can work (and both have worked), it depends on the context. so i am wary of just categorically saying that prices are too high or prices are too low, because different prices work for different games and for different people.

Spiderweb Software makes my favorite RPGs. They can claim to make a game with 30 hours of fun and I'd believe them, because the demos alone are that good, and the full games are worth more than a week of fun. I've bought Avernum 1, 2, and 3, and because the full games are worth it, I have a lot of trust in them. Along with Unreal World and Dwarf Fortress, I think they've taken a nearly perfect approach.

Spiderweb's got a long track record of making great games and people have a lot of trust in them. With completely unknown games by unknown people, people are going to think many times whether it's worth it. Halving the price halves this reluctance, more marketing makes them trust it more because they hear about it. Both help sales and it's difficult to see which is the better long term solution.

In another sense, you have people who pay $30 on Evony before even getting in the real gameplay. And that $30 barely even helps them win. It's hard to put a value on games. An improvement on an existing concept should be worth more in every industry, but it's not. Higher price should make it seem more valuable in theory, but not many say "Hey, Final Fantasy XXI is $95 and Fallout 5 is $75, Final Fantasy must be a better game!"

Let's say that I wanted to create a random map of an island. Something like what Civilization, Dwarf Fortress, or Conquest of Elysium does. A place with mountains, hills, plains, forests, rivers, etc.

What's the best way to go about doing that? Thanks in advance!

I'm a specialist in speech processing (doing my honours thesis on emotional voice transformation), and I'd have to say that it's one of those things that look simple enough on paper but usually don't turn out so well.

Unless you're already a skilled programmer and have basic knowledge of signal processing, I'd suggest that you not really try to write your own TTS; took me a year to learn from scratch and write a simple input-output thing in MATLAB, not a proper language.

Recording some phonemes and playing them back is as basic as concatenation gets, similar quality to synthesizing it, but taking a lot more space. And it sounds a lot worse when concatenated if recorded.. you have no power over changing the pitches, and less with trying to 'smooth out' the gaps between them.

Though if you guys want to write something from scratch, I'm more than willing to help you guys learn how it works I've got enough references on this stuff to do all kinds of programs.

Oh, but if you really want the best, the one included with windows is one of the top in speech synthesis. It just doesn't give you much control.

Heh, it seems that this thread is reaching that point where people stop reading the post, and start reading the replies to posts and the replies to replies and things starts to get out of context. I'm not really eager to rephrase things and justify stuff, so let's leave it at that :/

I've found most of what I'm looking for, and a lot I didn't expect. The marketing thing took me by surprise. Of course we have to spend a few thousand marketing to customers, but what I've realized from TIGSource is that indie developers won't go with a publisher that doesn't have a good reputation. That nearly doubles the worth of marketing.

Another interesting thing is that games do spread by word-of-mouth. Going from posted figures on certain Facebook apps that don't advertise at all, it seems to reach peak growth at about 5 months, then increases slowly, but steadily later on, reaching a cap of 2.5M in 12 months. This is of course, from a (not very interesting) free-to-play-pay-for-less-grinding game that's designed to go viral. However, awareness doesn't mean sales, and it's still risky to rely on it.

I'm still skeptical of the game industry's approach to price, mainly because of the reasons people choose a price. I believe there's a better pricing model, with higher profit, more sales, but we'll just see whether or not it works

Thanks again for the comments. Let's see how this goes. I'll still be making freeware in whatever free time I have left, so things are not all about business

Yeah, play the ogg as a sound file; it's not supported as "music". But if you play and loop the file, you get the same effect as background music.

For a nicer, custom font, you could use the Text Blitter object, if you're not using it already.

also, i thought you posted this topic to get opinions on the subject from people with experience in it? if you're just going to argue against everything they say, what's the point of the topic?

Ah, no offense meant. The reason I started this thread was because of some disagreements with the standard business model, which means I'd disagree with some things from industry experts. I could go to a business consultant, give him a sack of money, and nod to everything he says, even with bits and pieces I disagree with, and feel like I wasted a sack of money. But I think an open discussion and some arguing on both sides is more interesting and helps us understand each other better. Besid

I think we're all talking about the same thing when it comes to marketing. Everyone's saying that it has to reach as many people as possible as early as possible. I did gloss over it, because I believe my current team's strength is in marketing, enough to reach a few thousand comfortably. But I did take it into consideration and tweaked the pricing to focus a little more on marketing. I'm still keeping the heavy discount before release, though, mainly to reward the people who have the loyalty to pre-order the game.


But back on indie publishing, because it's something I really want to do. The funny thing is everyone agrees that marketing is important, but won't pay someone to do it. So far, the idea has been to 'buy out' something and keep 50-75% of the profits, which seems a bit ludicrous, but they're accepting all the risks involved in it. There's the alternative of leaving part of the risk onto the developer with a very low cut, but that seems like a rip-off.

I'm sort of thinking that no profit cut and charging marketing fees would be the best deal for everyone, but I could see people getting worried that we won't do our best if the final sales aren't tied to the fee. What do you guys think?

I'd have to disagree with that, because I have a few 'friends' who are 'professional software pirates'. These are the guys who buy a game, crack it, burn the cracked version onto a disc and sell it for $5-$10, even exporting them. According to them, these games sold quite a few copies, even though nobody's ever heard of them.

When you have something that sells for the price of a burger and a movie date, people expect it to be at least as fun, and let's face it, most games don't reach that level. You could argue that $20 provides a week of entertainment, but not much, nothing memorable. When you price at the same price as a burger, it's more likely to be a purchase on impulse. I've seen some completely unknown games selling for $5-$10 on impulse.

Trying to make a bigger profit is a real question, though. After all, it takes 2-5 'impulse' purchases to just to cover up for one 'well-thought' purchase. Yet, if there are 4 extra people playing the game, would it mean that they'd invite another four friends?

Paul, don't worry, there's going to be some marketing effort. A lot at first really. The plan's sort of to spend quite a bit getting it rolling, but the idea is sort of that marketing dollars would be better spent subsidizing the price. Of course, we're going to tune the game design make it better to spread by word of mouth,

Not sure I understand this.
Paul said "word of mouth isn't enough"
You said "Yes, we will spend money on marketing"
You said "But we won't spend it on marketing we will spend it subsidizing the price" (huh?!?)
You said "and make the game better so it spreads by word of mouth.

Can you explain what you mean by this?

Hmm.. loosely defined, I'd imagine it to be something like this.
Awareness = AS*e^(-C1*e^(-Viralness*C2))
Popularity = Marketing*Polish*Quality
Viralness = (Popularity-Marketing*C3)*Sales + (Popularity - Quality/C8)*C9
AS = Available Sales = MarketSize - PreviousSales - Pirated + ReformedPirates
Demand = Awareness*exp(-Price/(Wage*ExpectedQuality*C4))
Sales = Demand(1 - Piracy)
Piracy = (Awareness-Demand)/(DifficultyToPirate)
ExpectedQuality = Popularity - Marketing*C7
Profit = Sales*(Price - Cost)
C1,C2,C3,etc are some constants

It doesn't fit exactly to the formulas, but the shape is sort of what I'd imagine it to be. I'd draw a graph but I think this explains it a bit better, even though it's harder to visualize.

In English,
Awareness is capped at the market size, growth is a function of how viral it is.
Popularity is like what Paul said. I'm a little wary about where Ninjabread Man fits in there, though :p
Viralness is how many spread by word of mouth (likely 1 extra sale per 40 customers) plus the sales from how good it looks, with C8 being how bad reviews are.
Demand takes a huge drop with any charge at all, but is dampened by the wage in wherever it's sold.
The actual Sales takes into account sales lost to piracy.
Piracy is from the people who don't think the game is worth buying, but not lost when they can't actually steal it.

tl;dr Using a lower price makes up for it later on. Marketing needs to be high early on to boost sales, but later on it matters less. After a certain point, $1 spent in marketing is better spent for lower pricing.

I planned for the price to go "up" to around $15-$20, still cheaper than most games, and it would still be cheaper than most "cheap games". It'd also show that there's a lot of other people buying it, and that caters for the type of people who actually wait and see how the price is. Besides, if people stop buying, it goes back down.

Heh, bateleur, good point. We were so busy trying to calculate costs for publishing onto CDs, we forgot that it's really free I'm sure there's a market for the smaller gamers who don't want to build up a website + security and do their own market research. If anything, it's an excuse for me to produce my own riskier games without getting investors involved in the creative process.

It's VC funded, btw, which puts a very heavy demand on growth. So, it's likely to rely on a small, professional team.

Yeah, I meant 'browser RPG'. At worst maybe a downloadable multiplayer RPG, something simple to design and code. Extreme prices aren't really a problem, though, there's a minimum and maximum cap on the prices, so you can't really hope/worry about it going up and down too much.

Paul, don't worry, there's going to be some marketing effort. A lot at first really. The plan's sort of to spend quite a bit getting it rolling, but the idea is sort of that marketing dollars would be better spent subsidizing the price. Of course, we're going to tune the game design make it better to spread by word of mouth, like making them more competitive, or some filthy network marketing strategy to give bonus xp to people who invite their friends and such. Makes us stand out from the other producers that force most of the content to be visible from the first 60 minutes of the games.

Craig, why not? There's money everywhere, and investors say "games are bigger than Hollywood", but really, I'm in it because it's something I know. In just about any kind of business, you produce a high quality product, and sell it to as many people as possible, for as much profit as possible. You have to have an extra kind of passion to get into something with both high-tech and high artistic value, and try to charge them less for it

I was also sort of thinking that if it ever goes down to distributing actual CDs, we'd charge less for people living in poorer regions. Because in first world countries, $20 is like two hours pay, but in some other countries, it's like 2 weeks of pay. That's why piracy is rampant in places like China and Southeast Asia, all huge markets, but plenty of people who download a pirated copy and sell it at $3-$8 per game. The music industry made it into these places with lower prices, and I suppose the games industry could do the same.

Anyway, I wouldn't really mind heavy criticism if you guys have any. Don't pull any punches, better to get hit by a fact now than after there's some investment in it. Looks like some of you have dipped your feet in the industry and it's interesting to hear opinions

Hello. I suppose now that I've bothered to actually post, I'm obligated to introduce myself.

I like making games. I'm sure none of you have heard of me, because I'm not exactly proud of any of the games that I've made. I get a lot of ideas, but they don't turn out so well on pixel as they are on paper. Or maybe they're just unpolished.

Most people seem to get some deeper meaning from my games, entirely different than what I wanted them to think. Sometimes I make a game with colors and creatures that evolve and someone thinks that I'm making a statement about how conflict can be instinctive, spawned by other conflict, and necessary for survival and stuff.

I'm a telecommunications electromagnetic wave engineer, graduating next year, from some Australian university near a nice beach. There's a lot of math here, it makes me bleed and is why I'm graduating next year, not this year. Fortunately, it's trained my creative instinct and scared me away from being an actual engineer.

Anyway.. hi.

Hi everyone, long time TIGS lurker and game developer here. Would like to ask you guys for opinions. I'm thinking of starting off a games company and doing a little market research for this.

Overview
The main business would be a light game development business, probably focusing on easier, less risky games like MMORPGs, web browser games, and semi-casual games at first. Later, the plan is to move on to more serious, higher budget games, but that requires money, experience, and good employees. We'd plan to self-publish at first, especially if the starting game is an online game.

Side business
But in the long run, the money is still in high quality games and that's where we want to go. Since we have a marketing team and manufacturing facilities that's not doing anything while the game's in production, we'd like them to gain experience by publishing independent games.

The plan would be to publish independent games for a small fee per unit. If it looks like it has potential, we'd even look into marketing it.

Pricing
My idea for the pricing would be to make the prices automatically dynamic. The goal would be the assumption that sales are viral; if someone likes a game, he'd tell his friend, and his friends would tell friends. So, pre-ordered versions would be very cheap, almost at a loss, to promote more sales and talk about the game. As sales go up, the price also goes up, and once the game loses popularity, the prices drop, to cater for the type of players who wait for prices to fall before buying.


So... any comments on this idea?