Pricing an indie video game is very hard.
I believe I made a mistake pricing the early access game at $30 USD right now.
To test this, we ran a 67% off sale for the last 2 weeks. This spawned several questions wondering if it's a sign the game might be abandoned.
No: Archmage Rises is still full steam ahead full active development with 12 full time devs.
Short of death, nothing else has or will stop me from making this game.
While hard, this is the best job I've ever had and the team feels the same.
Before Jul 16
Before the 67% experiment:
- Daily average sales 7 a day, or about $200/day.
- New customer reviews ~50% positive.
- Returns ~11% of sales
After a successful launch, where we were in the top 10 selling games on steam for a little while, we were heading in the wrong direction, dipping into Mixed recent and Mixed overall.
We read every single review. A significant number of negative reviews (and even some positive one) seem to all say "This game in its current state is not worth $30 USD. When done? Yes! But not now."
After Jul 16
Moving the price to $10 USD (via a sale) obviously resulted in a big spike of 1,100 sales off our wishlist of 38,000. That is great, expected, hey it's $10k I didn't have before. But not the data I was looking for. I wanted to see the no-hype boring old long tail daily numbers at the end of the sale period when it is organic traffic discovering the game. It is not possible for me to know the psychological impact of $30 - 66% = $10 vs just $10, I recognize it is an intangible thing I cannot measure.
- Daily average sales are 90 a day, about $900/day (4x revenue)
- New customer reviews are 17/19 positive (89.4%, up ~40%)
- Returns have dropped to 3% (down from ~11%).
Beyond the numbers, the feedback in reviews and forum posts is $10 is the right price for right now.
Numbers show Customer Activity.
Reviews and forums show Sentiment.
When Customer Activity and Sentiment are in alignment you know yer onto something.
I got it wrong, so now I have to make it right.
Our New Pricing Strategy $10->$40
Steam strongly advises devs to charge "for what the game is today" not "what the game will be" and to then increase the price along the way or at 1.0 full release.
Minecraft is one of the most successful games ever, and Notch did his own "Early Access" of staggered pricing $10, then $20, then $30 at release (Bedrock).
I ignored that advice. I fell into a trap of thinking I'm smarter than Steam + Notch combined ːsteamfacepalmː There are many reasons but I'll list two in order of importance:
- My sense of loyalty and appreciation to the super fans that pre-ordered at $30 long before Early Access.
- All the indie biz advice (newsletters, people like Simon Carless and Chris Z, other indies) all say "don't price too low! You can always go down but never up!" I was following 'best practices'
I had the right model right in my face and didn't follow it.
Time to pivot. Now I am.
It was always my intent to sell the 1.0 version of Archmage Rises for $40. This was hinted at in the Early Access blurb "priced differently during and after Early Access?" Apr 24 2023.
My thinking was the $30 price point was a sufficient Early Access discount for jumping in early. It isn't.
Starting today the regular price is $10 USD.
Then it will be $20
Then $30
Then $40 at 1.0
We will soon be updating our Roadmap to show the pricing changes which will occur at release of that Content Update Milestone.
For anyone reading this who bought the game at a previous higher price, I'm sorry it will be cheaper for a while. Your early support was integral to us being here right now. I can't thank you enough.
I'm trying to figure out how to do this indie dev thing well. I do and will make mistakes along the way.
Fortunately we have the same goal: enlarge the player community, sustain the development of the game, and deliver the complete game experience.
I believe this new pricing strategy achieves our goal.
I hope this helps in understanding what's happening and why we've chosen to reduce the price. Thanks so much for being on this journey with us and we're super excited to get Mage Tower out to you.