Game Dev

How to price your game

Pricing can be a very difficult decision in your game making journey, if you've never published a game you might have no idea what price you should charge.

Unity has been doing a really interesting series of blog posts recently, they call it the Indie Survival Guide, and the latest entry is all about How to Price your Game.

This is a super detailed blog post with lots of stats and graphs, honestly it might even be TOO detailed but if you're looking for info on this topic then this is absolutely excellent. If you want the super quick TLDR, price your game at $10 or $15, unless it's a really tiny or really premium game.

But for more detail read through the full blog post.

It's important to realize that price does not exist in a void, when the player sees your Steam page they look at everything: Trailer, screenshots, description, social proof, reviews, etc; all of that in conjunction with the price. Your target audience is also important, casual players will likely only be willing to spend a small amount, but niche hardcore players might be willing to pay extra for a very specific experience. What do comparable games charge? How desperately do players want YOUR game? Don't forget to localize prices!

In general you should charge more than you think. The reason is because finding players is the toughest part and if you charge $5 instead of $10 then you need to reach DOUBLE the amount of players in order to get the same amount of revenue, and reaching double the players is a very tough challenge.

Another reason to charge more is because it gives you more room for discounts. A $15 game at 50% off still gives you $7.50 while a $5 will only give you $2.50, and for players the discount percentage matters more than the final absolute number.

Pricing is a crucial part of marketing and selling your game, if you want to learn more about Steam Game Marketing check out the videos I did with Steam Expert Chris Zukowski.

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Tech

AI Chats to YOU!

Normally you go up to an AI chatbot and ask it some questions, that's how it usually goes. But now Open AI has unveiled a new feature called ChatGPT Pulse and this one is the reverse. You have an AI go out on your behalf to do some research, and when it's done it actually messages YOU!

You can tell it what topics to research, or just connect it to your calendar or chat history to have it look for information on its own. These messages could be follow ups on some research you did, some reminders of an upcoming trip and what to do at your destination, maybe if you're training for a marathon it can give you personalized training tips every day, etc.

Honestly most of the time new AI features come out I can't really see the use for them, at least for me personally, but this one I do get! Personally I like to stay up to date with the latest Game dev news, that's one reason why I write this newsletter every single week. And normally I go out and manually research and look for interesting things that happened in the week, but with this I could have an AI go out and do research while I'm sleeping and read a nice report every morning, that could be genuinely helpful!

Sadly it is locked behind their Pro paywall ($200/month) and it's Mobile only so it's not accessible to most users. But I imagine it's just a matter of time until either they make it accessible or some other AI chatbot makes a similar tool available to everyone.

Gaming

Awesome stuff at TGS

This week was the Tokyo Game Show. Xbox had an event as did Sony so lots of news and announcements.

Perhaps the biggest one is gameplay for the upcoming Wolverine game and it looks awesome! Lots of action blood and gore. It's by Insomniac games so it's bound to be excellent.

Forza Horizon 6 was unveiled, it's set in Japan and is coming in 2026. 007: First Light got another trailer. The devs behind Returnal are back with Saros, another impressive-looking third person bullet hell game.

Battlefield 6 campaign trailer looks quite awesome, personally I always enjoy these campaigns even if they are forgettable. Deus Ex is being remastered! A Halloween game is coming out next year. And Gungrab: Blood Heat looks like some awesome over-the-top action.

Fun

Algorithms IKEA-fied!

IKEA pamphlets are awesome! It's amazing how they can create instructions for some complex builds without using any words at all, just icons.

Now one dev took that idea and applied it to all kinds of algorithms in this website.

For example do you know how Quick Sort works? This nice visualization can help you understand.

What about how Public Key Cryptography works? This one might be a bit tricky to understand if you don't know anything about the algorithm, but basically you have a Public key that everyone knows, and a Private key that you keep to yourself. If someone else locks a message using the Public key, only your Private key can decrypt it. And if you lock something using your Private key, anyone with the public key can decrypt it and by doing so they know for a fact that the message came from you (because the public key only unlocks something that was locked with your private key)