Indiependence Day Anti-Sale 0% discounts- what do you think?

There are companies or games that i would gladly pay full price for, because i think they deserve the money, wadjet eye games and running with siccors are the ones that come to my mind right now, i dont really care if the company is a AAA publisher or a indie company based on the lead developer's mom's basement... if the takes are worth it i would like to give them my money

Welp, somebody slept on marketing classes. Big sales and sales in general, even makeshift ones are the best way to reach to customers, period. Movies get sales, music, so why the hell not vidya? And for supporting indie devs - make your games worth the price you ask, either with content or with gameplay. If you want to put a 10$ price on something which can be played for 4-5 hours and forgotten then go ahead, but don't whine if you don't have any copies sold as you clearly don't understand the market. Indie devs are often entitled brats and walking PR disasters, so maybe that's the case - invest in better PR and marketing you shmucks or at least get some social skills and stop whining.

Supply and demand. If a person wants a game enough, they will pay full price and not wait for a sale, or will purchase on a smaller sale rather than waiting longer for half price or less. If a game has strong selling power, the developer has no reason to put it into the bottom tier of a $1 bundle. Many developers / publishers / whatever allow for bundling and sales because they recognise the boost in sales it gives them, by getting profits from people who would never purchase something at full price.

While the sales and bundle culture have made people more careful with their money, it is only really a danger to a company that mishandles their own property (for example, Paranautical Activity being on pre-purchase sale for $1 before it even finished it's kickstarter campaign).

By all means, decide not to put your games on sales or in bundles, that's entirely their decision and that approach is entirely respectable, but throwing a weird sense of morality into the equation is just pretentious and presumptuous.

Most people buying game at full price because they really like the game and want to support the developer.
They even buying the collectors edition.
If you're confident that your game meet that condition, feel free not to discount your games.

The gaming market is a mess and I'm all for new ideas and campaigns, but compared to the ingenuity of some indie devs in the past, this 'promotion' is lazy, unappealing, and is more likely to feed some peoples dislike of indie dev culture than it is to have any positive effect on the market.

I think it's a matter of a sale as a half off sale early on can easily more than double what you'd make at full price, but with many of these indie games, most o them end up getting far bigger cuts on steam and end up in many bundles and it seems it's their fault for both.

His entire premise is wrong. "There are more games coming out than ever" is incorrect. Game release have been in a downward spiral since 2088 (hmm, wonder why that year, eh?). "There are more games indie games coming out on Steam than ever" is correct.

Whereas, in the past most of those indies wouldn't even make it into a store, and would sit and rot on the indie dev's site making zero dollar, all while those few that did make it into the stores would sit in direct competition to bunches of AAA, and so be making diddly, now indies are all over the main game store in the world and have way reduced competition from the currently really weak AAA market. So, overall indies have more spotlight and are making way more than they ever could before.

But the laws of the market don't change just because you're indie. Just because you make some art doesn't mean there's people out there willing to buy, just like all the weekend painters can tell you. You have to make something that gets people excited, else you're bargain bin material. (Though bargain bin isn't really a thing anymore, I suppose, so: else your bundle fodder material.)

Indie games or AAA games, customers will purchase the game according to their own price valuation of the game.

So many people bought out GTA V on pre-order, because they think the price is fair. And more of them not bought it yet, because there are risks associated with pre-order, and these people wait until reviews are coming out. Some even think that the price is not fair, and wait for discount. That is the way how free market rolls, people.

Yes, gamers will prefer to buy discounted games, but we would buy full price games, if it meets our price valuation. If I think a game is $50, I would gladly buy it right now. But if I think a game is $5 but the price is $50, I would wait until the game is on a -90% discount, or wait until it is on a bundle, or don't play it at all.

It's not about indie game or AAA game. Personally I would treat all as the same thing. If you produce a great game, I would buy it. I bought out Prison Architect and Space Engineers on full price, on their early days, which are far worse than they are today (today they are great games). Do I feel remorse? Not at all, because it is a great game.

Another thing : if your game is so great, why you put it on a bundle? Putting on a bundle will greatly reduce the price valuation of the game, as "sooner or later" other bundles will show up, not to mention that the price of your game in the market will be way lower.

So... sales and bundles are a bad thing for indie devs now? World of Goo is right there at the top for 20$. Enhanced Steam tells me: "Number of times this game has been in a bundle: 8" They really think the game will still sell for full price this way?

If you don't make enough money developing indie games, you should have a look why you don't. Bundling a game a few months after its release might be one of the reasons actually. Throwing it on sale for 75% around the same time would be another. If you start as an indie dev you can't expect to make money right away (unless you are one of those scumbags that just tries to make a quick buck from an asset flip or some other no-effort scheme). You need to get people to test your game and spread the word about it. This takes time and effort. If your game is actually worth playing people will eventually notice it and that's when you can start to make money from it. If you bundle or discount it before that time, almost nobody will buy the game for full price then. It's really not that hard to understand how customers tick and indie devs should stop blaming ways to distribute their games and just start to use them properly.

Never full price, Never.

Ive got some of those games on bundles. Pay 20 for world of poo? Haha, the devs must be grateful i chosed to play that game from my 500 game library for 5 minutes.

There are way too many indies, they made this mess alone by flooding the market with crap games wanting to get a quick buck or two.

Great indie games dont need to lower they price as people will still buy them. An organization of indie devs its actually a bad idea as the crappy devs may join them, allowing to mix the crap with the cream of the cream, and a bad purchase (like world of poo) will make you think twice to buy again any game from that list. Better fly solo there, create a good game as a studio and dont lower prizes.

That way, good games will be purchased at full price, the studio will survive, while bad games wont sell too much and eventually either force the bad ones to deliver quality products or abandon the market.

Bundles have helped the indie community a lot and it's thanks to them that indies are so widespread today. Think about it:, our steam accounts are "littered" with hundreds of bundle games most of them are completely shitty works but still they gained some money out of the bundle you bought. Would you even buy hammerfight for full price? And yet it moves? or Word of goo which is more a mobile game?How many times did we buy that game because it was 90-95% off? " It's only 1€ let's give it a shot".

Yeah maybe they didn't earn as much as they want but often what they are earning are thanks to bundle and sales otherwise no one would ever bought a shitty indie game for 10-15-20€

I like a game? i support developers, I buy it again to gift it to friends, I buy another copy to giveaway here or just add it to my library again, it happened quite often. Examples:

Portal 2: bought full price for 360, later bought it again on steam during a sale
Castle crashers: Already had it on 360, bought it again on steam during sales and even added dlcs
VVVVVV: bought 3 times or more
The orange box: bought it a couple of times, cause I've find it at a nice price.
Terraria: bought a couple of times

Would I have done it without a sale? nope.

Right now there are way too many games and way too many developers want to get rich with their shitty 1 hour long games. Bundles and sales grant them the chance to make something out of them, without those (and with such arrogance) they would bite the dust immediately.

The thing is, most indie games are either insanely short, or insanely sucky. There's only a few exceptions to this. Very few. In fact, with many indie games? Even when I buy it on a mega-sale, I think I over-payed.

I buy the games I love at full price. Here's the catch though: that's only a small portion of the games I buy. Most of the games I buy are ones that I think look interesting or I'll get a bit of fun out of or it's a genre I like. Point is, by putting it on sale, you're getting a sale from me, when otherwise you wouldn't.

For any particular game, only a small part of your audience bought it because it's a favourite game; most bought it for other reasons, and since most people aren't rich, they wouldn't have bought it at all except for the sale or bundle. Indie devs need to get a grip and realise they have it better than ever. It doesn't mean they're owed success, sheesh. (And this is especially silly as the average indie game isn't some classic or anything).

Haha idiots, how about no?
People who can afford paying full price buying the games at full price. People like me who rarely can afford to pay the full price buy the games at discount. It's either wait for a discount or pirate the game. Also some games are not worth the full price.

$10 - $20 EACH for casual clickers and platformer pixelarts bunded half a dozen times over the years for a couple dollars total?

Is this real life?

Oh sure! If I would pay 10€ for a game like And Yet It Moves I would propably shoot myself in the head with a large caliber bullet. No thanks.

When Steam started releasing indies for the first time I was buying all of them for a full price just to support the developers. Back then all those games were worth it. But Steam is now junkyard of shitty indie games or overpriced alphas in early access, I don't want to support that at all. There are some games worth the full price but who wants to buy that now when everything gets bundle few weeks after release... hell, some indie games are already getting bundled prior to the release.

I think I'll pass on this "sale".

No offence but fuck the average indie developer. The average indie developer is the one currently filling the steam storefront with garbage. I'm not saying indie games are bad, have a look at my library, it's mostly indie games, there's plenty of good indie developers out there that truly deserve our support, and people do support them in most cases. But then you have these lazy cunts that make garbage which they put up for free/1$ on mobile(with some crappy microtransactions) and then come to PC with prices of 5-15$ telling us how those are completely fair prices for PC gamers, and how we have enough money anyway since we buy them expensive AAA games. Yup, and these are the people asking us to buy their games at full price.

It's so simple it's impossible to not understand, you can't force anyone to pay a certain amount for your games, people will always seek to pay exactly what they feel your product is worth, especially since we're buying digital products. Even if somehow all sales/bundles vanished right now. if people can't buy it for the price they feel it's worth they won't buy it at all.

next christmas steam sales: full price for everything!

So what I took from this is that the creator of this website decided his indie game will be a very expensive (for indie games) $20, and not go on any kind of sale for at least 6 months... so he dragged along a bunch of other indies into a 'pay full price' promotion to make it seem like this is a reasonable choice done for the good of all gamekind, not just for the money.

The blog goes into how saying AAA shouldn't be priced higher simply because they cost more to produce, which is semi-true - but leaves out how having a full studio to support a game almost certainly means better graphics/bugtesting/replayability/multiplayer/longevity and a whole lot less risk to purchase - all of which are why we pay more for them (and even then, I and many others wait for 75% off unless we're very excited to play them). Sure, a game can be enjoyable without those things, but wouldn't it be even better with the gameplay you love plus all those things too?

Sum of the story, I sure hope that game's worth the $20, or else certain people are going to be feeling as silly as this 'sale' was.

Really hard to bunch all the indie devs into one basket, there are some really good indie games out there that really do deserve our money... there are also more than a few pretentious a-holes delivering second and third rate games that seem to think that they're entitled to far more than their 'game' is worth. For the indie devs making decent games and keeping the pricing reasonable for what we're getting... much love!
As to the full-price/no-specials idea... I know it's a damn competitive market, but if the game is good and not overpriced to start with, then there should be little need to jump on big discount sales bandwagon in the first place.

Looks at title
Reads description; disagree but curious
Clicks link
See Tale of Tales games
Walks away laughing