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[Valakanaraga]

I'm working on a card-driven wargame similar to HACK-868 or Hoplite. The game is designed to take roughly half an hour to win, relying on procedural generation and CCG-style drafting mechanics to provide variety across runs. Certain genres have certain price-to-length expectations, at least on certain platforms. Vlambeer could charge 12 dollars for Nuclear Throne because it is highly acceptable for an action game to be short. Hell, in most shmups a single run only takes 20-30 minutes. I get the feeling that this does not hold true for "core" (sorry for swearing, couldn't think of another term) PC turn-based strategy games, in which a given run is expected to last at least a few hours.

I'll be frank: I need to sell the game for at least (and probably exactly) $10 in order to have a shot at the wonderful one-in-a-million dream of earning minimum wage making video games. I could pad the length of a single run - probably up to 2-3 hours - but I feel that it would make the game worse. I could make the game infinite but there's a certain stigma against titles in which the only goal is to get high scores. I could add a long-form story mode but having to find a writer - yet another human being I have to convince to work with me for equity and then keep from deserting - is a frightening prospect. I'm lost.

Any and all advice is welcome. Feel free to tell me if I'm completely off and/or a dummy.

[battlerager]

I don't think you need to worry or make your game longer.

Many games have pretty short runs and derive their replayability from variation through ProcGen.

Think of Spelunky, Binding of Isaac, etc.

And it's not just Action games. The entire Roguelike and Rogue-lite genres basically started this approach and a run can be over in seconds there. "Desktop Dungeons" even does this for puzzles.

If you ran into any problems at all, it would be due to marketing the game wrong / to the wrong crowd.

I don't your game (sounds cool though!) but with niché games, you generally can even charge more than 10$. As far as I know, the price point where sales drop off because it seems like a "big investment" is 20$. People that aren't into the niché can't be convinced with "it's cheap!" and people that care are fine with shelling out more than 10$. Higher price can even feel like a seal of quality!

In your shoes, I'd try to keep the game tight, polish it up so a run is great, then make sure there is enough variance in the random elements and content to keep coming back. Marketed to the right crowd in the right way, it sounds like you'll be absolutely fine.

[s0]

battlerager is right. market your game as a roguelike, not a strategy game.

also lots of games with shorter individual sessions add some sort of meta-progression or unlock system to increase perceived longevity. maybe you could include something like that? if your game is card-based with a drafting mechanism, the obvious thing would be to gradually unlock new cards. it could act as a sort of tutorial as well. the player starts off with just a few simple cards and unlocks more complex ones over multiple runs.

also another thing: rather than making the game endless, make it very hard to actually win, but make failed runs still contribute towards the unlocks.

that's what i would do at least.

[Valakanaraga]

Your responses were helpful. Thank you.

[s0]

No problem 

Btw, regarding genres and expectations: Imo, the player expectation of a 50+ hour epic is what's holding RPGs back as a genre.