Let’s cut to the chase: Monster Girl Therapy launches March 10 and will cost $6.99. There’ll also be a 20% launch discount during the first week—for everyone who takes a leap! :D
That said, I also want to explain the thoughts behind these numbers. And the most important thing right up front: a large part of my decision-making is based purely on vibes. As a semi-professional solo developer, I can afford to listen to my gut sometimes—and luckily, the brain tends to go along… most of the time, at least.
Dating
There’s a lot of well-meaning advice out there on when to launch a game: autumn is packed with huge releases that suck up all the attention, you should avoid holidays, and so on. But I also realized that for every rule, there’s plenty of exceptions. In the end, the core idea seems to be intentionality. Just think about it?
Originally, I wanted to release my game in January or February, but I just couldn’t finish everything in time. (That’s right: SEMI-professional!) I also thought about Valentine’s Day, but that might have been a bit too cheeky, especially since too many people are already expecting a dating sim. March 10, on the other hand, is interesting because it’s one week after Steam Next Fest. Quick side note: I considered participating in Next Fest, but I was unsure about the demo… and in the end, I simply missed the deadline. (Alright. Maybe not even semi-professional?) Releasing right after Next Fest, now, feels like an opportunity: the hype has probably cooled off, the demos have been played, and hopefully people are open to something new and unexpected. We’ll see whether that idea works out! I’ll also try not to think TOO much about the fact that a new WoW expansion launches a week earlier and the second live action season of One Piece on the same day.
More importantly… the game is ready (aside from the German translation), and I really don’t want to sit on hot coals any longer. That might be the most unprofessional sentence in this entire post, and yes, it would probably be economically smarter to gather more wishlists and maybe catch the next Next Fest—but hey, I’m allowing myself this particular lack of professionalism.
The reason for my little translation miscalculation, by the way:
As for the release time: one commonly established idea for international launches seems to be 7 p.m. (Germany) / 10 a.m.–1 p.m. (US, depending on time zone). In Europe, people are sitting down at their PCs to chill, while in the US gaming journalists are grabbing their (second? third?) morning coffee. And since I don’t have a strong reason to go against that bit of established wisdom… Monster Girl Therapy will launch on March 10 at 7 p.m. (Berlin time)!
Pricing
Early on, I found myself somewhere between $5 and $10, and luckily my beta testers mostly agreed. $10 would feel somewhat expensive for a short RPG Maker game with relatively simple mechanics, while less than $5 would feel… kinda of cheap for a game that takes itself seriously. At least as a base price! There’s also that marketing joke that $12 feels like $10, but $13 already feels like $15, and so on. ($2 is basically free!) So I went with 6.99$ in the end.
The more you do these number games though, the more they start screwing with your head. Enter the launch discount! I definitely wanted something that feels substantial—10% is basically “nothing!”, to generate some momentum at launch. But going to 30% drops the price below $5… and that just feels wrong? Not only because value is something that matters to me, but also because 30% or 40% start to feel like a clearance sale, like you’re trying to push people into impulse buying.
And sure, in the end all of this is manipulation and (kitchen-)psychology at play, kind of. But as I’ve said before: if I feel like I’m tricking people, I’m doing something wrong. Going with the gut, 20% feels like a nice, much more honest middle ground.
And this is probably one of those moments where purely rational decision-making would lead to different results. 30%, or maybe even 35% would almost certainly be better for wishlist conversion—and that’s my only shot at pleasing the Steam algorithm. But yeah… when in doubt: gut beats brain. Gut beats numbers!
Next time: A love letter (to RPG Maker)