Hello everyone! Today I'd like to talk about some decisions we had to make concerning pricing of the game.
We had to find a way to increase sales to speed up the development because the current sales (and wishlist additions) were not high enough to meet our goal of a December 2019 release that we promised. We therefore considered some options:
First of all, we could lower the price to increase the number of sold units. However, there are a lot of other cheap games on Steam and given that I alone invested something north of $250,000 (*1) worth of work into making this game already, I simply could not give it away for less than the current price of $8.99 (with the exception of discounts of course).
So the second option was to increase the price. We requested Valve to set it to $24.99, hoping this will make the game stand out a little bit more from all the other voxel games since we use a custom-made engine with very sophisticated optimizations to support orders of magnitude more blocks visible at the same time compared to other games. To be exact, it is something between 32x and 128x as many, depending on how exactly you compare it (*2). This is one thing that you will most likely not find in any other game because there are not that many people who could do these optimizations (mainly people who write graphics engines) and of those, probably no one will invest thousands of hours to make a game like this because they got a job that likely comes with a six-figure salary.
We know that the price increase is quite high, and as much as we would love to sell it to you for less than that, our top priority is developing the game so you enjoy it for many, many hours and we hope that this step helps us achieving that goal.
We also got feedback from friends who told us that they ignore games under $10, simply because there are a lot of bad or small games in that price range. We want people to know that this is not a small game and we will not rest until all the features mentioned in the description are implemented. In fact, we want to develop this game to a point where we can raise the price to $45 or more because you will spend hundreds of hours filled with fun and excitement in the game.
Footnotes:
- Based upon the number of hours it took to develop the game and a reasonable salary in Germany.
- 512m render distance with 250m sea level compared to Minecraft with 256m render distance and 64m sea level gives 4x the number of blocks in X- and Z-direction and about 8x the number of blocks in Y-direction, for a total of 4*4*8 = 128x the number of blocks.