They offer you some money but you not gonna take it, because you feel entitled to have everyone pay the full tag price no matter what. You know this type of thinking used to be the norm in video game publishing realm until Steam came along and proved for a fact that it's more profitable to make a cheaper sale than to make no sale at all - something that should be patently obvious to anyone. Odd that after so many years of Steam existing, some people still hold on to this backwards thinking.
Heck this even applies to physical goods. Imagine you're an indie automaker and you built a supercar that cost you $1 000 000 to do, and you set a price tag to $5 000 000 because that seemed fair to you. But nobody wants your car for 5 million, what do you do? Let it sit in the garage until it rots away and eat the loss of $1 000 000? Or maybe try to sell it for $2 000 000 instead, for potential $1 000 000 profit? If nobody buys it for two million, you can try selling it for one million, in order to break even. Even then, it's still better to sell it for half a million, at a half a million loss, than to not sell it and tank a full million loss.
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In poor countries, PC is a poor man's gaming platform. Low end PCs are very cheap, especially second hand, and piracy plus relaxed regional pricing makes PC gaming affordable on a shoestring budget. Consoles on the other hand are more expensive bar high end computers, and console games regional pricing is very stiff, rather close to original US prices, plus it's very difficult to pirate on consoles. Not to mention PC is a far more useful product than a console, it has much greater value by itself. People in poor countries play on PC precisely because it's a very cheap option. So it's kind of a backwards logic to say that since you can afford the cheap gaming platform, you must afford the expensive game pricing.
And so I was right to begin with on all accounts, and you called me a troll for that.
My friendly advise is still the same: implement a subscription model and more flexible regional pricing. You'll make more money that way. If it's good enough for iRacing...
This is why I specifically mentioned that this effect is unique to digital goods, because producing a digital copy costs nothing, whereas for a physical copy you have a minimum sale price that equals to production costs, and to make a profit you have to price it even higher.
You can play around with some parameters https://www.desmos.com/calculator/nul66dz2ut
D means demand flexibility and C is costs of making a copy. Green line is how much money you make in total at any given price point.
The way I see it, this is less of an argument and more of a rationalization.
At the end of the day, if you insist that people who can only pay 3£ must pay 18£, that's 3£ you never gonna see, nevermind the 18£.
At the end of the day, if you insist that people who can only pay 3£ must pay 18£, that's 3£ you never gonna see, nevermind the 18£.
That's not wrong and I can't say I disagree. Fundamentally, economics is governed by human psychology, and humans don't always follow basic logic and reason, nevermind rigid equations. That said, it still explains well the bulk of the bell curve of possible behaviors, and has a respectable predictive power provided you have exhaustive data for it. The A/B test being one of the most widely known and effective probing tools, and there are many ways to obtain the relevant data. The same way as Newtonian physics is really good if you know coefficients of friction, the gravitational constant, viscosity values, and so forth, but if not - it's nigh worthless.
Study of economics is flawed in the same way as Newtonian physics is: if you aim for the stars using nothing but textbook equations and neglect to make course corrections in assuming it was perfect to begin with, you'll be terribly off mark. That said, Newtonian physics is still better than Aristotelian physics, or no physics at all.
Whether the intention is to milk first time customers or build an audience, is on per-game basis. However, most games share the same regional pricing either way. Take a look at that of Factorio, a known long-standing indie game: https://steamdb.info/app/427520/ or Skyrim, a long standing AAA game: https://steamdb.info/app/72850/
Whether the intention is to milk first time customers or build an audience, is on per-game basis. However, most games share the same regional pricing either way. Take a look at that of Factorio, a known long-standing indie game: https://steamdb.info/app/427520/ or Skyrim, a long standing AAA game: https://steamdb.info/app/72850/
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Economy wasn't my university major but I studied quite a bit of it - I do understand the basics.
I'm just explaining how to make more money AND make more customers happy in doing so. Feel free to ignore all of that. But like I said, do take a look at Steam regional pricings - surely these people know what they're doing, maybe it'd be beneficial if you followed suit.
Net income (gross income minus expenses of producing & shipping the copies which is virtually nil) would be more appropriate yes.
Counter-intuitively, company running costs are unrelated to company income - you must minimize one and maximize the other independently. Uniquely to digital goods where once produced, the supply of copies is virtually infinite and free, you can't scale down production of copies to improve the price to cost ratio. Also uniquely to digital goods, there is no penalty for setting the price at arbitrarily low points, as long as that moves additional units. Of note here that increasing sale price in budgeting for various things such as "future development costs" only reduces your net income. Also of note here is the sunk cost recouping, trying to allocate purchase money for something you've already paid for in full, such as "past development costs" - this is fallacious in addition to reducing your net income. As I said, company income and company running costs are separate and independent. Like a lot of science, this is counter-intuitive so when making decisions on such matter you must exercise 100% of your conscious ability and disregard intuitive & common sense thoughts entirely.
And 2 500£ is average in Turkey, with median being far less. The point stands unshaken.
Adding to my previous post. Here's a chart that illustrates pricing vs sales vs profits of digital goods. It's a gross simplification and doesn't do any justice to humans purchase psychology, but it clears up certain ideas. If you sell at a price point that's too steep for your audience, you make less total profit than if you sold it for a more agreeable price. Of course demand isn't infinite and at some point you reach a limit of how many units you could move even if you gave them away for free, so care need to be exercised not to price the product too cheaply.
Allow me to reiterate some economy 101 basics. Firstly. An ideal sale price is exactly as much as each individual customer is willing to pay at most. The next best option is to sell basically the same product with minor differentiation at different price points. Finally, you can tweak the price point until the total net sales reaches the maximum. Secondly. It costs nothing to produce a digital copy, so there is no such sale price at which you'll be sustaining losses through grossing less than your expenditure. This means each copy you didn't sell is a bit of money you didn't earn, no matter how little. Unless you're at the point where for most people the price isn't the deciding factor in getting the product, you'll be actually sustaining missed income losses for not lowering the price, through underselling. Thirdly. UK household disposable income is about 25 000£ while in Turkey that's more like 2 500£, even with 50% discount it's still 5x more expensive for a Turkey citizen to buy LFS than for a UK citizen. And considering a videogame is a very frivolous luxury purchase, this makes it a a lot more than 5x harder sell to a Turkey citizen.
But you don't have to take my word for it - just look at Steam regional prices. Basically every publisher that's not out of their mind* sets Turkish regional prices to 80-90% discount from British prices.
*Not to be taken as a jab at LFS team - average person isn't expected to have economy higher education and know any of this. But when you have a whole department of economy majors and PhDs and you decide that you know better, that makes you certifiably crazy.
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Virtually every success requires working hard and making good decisions. But also, a lot of it has to do with luck. What made Angry Birds stand out from thousands of the same physics games? Quite literally nothing. The original one was just a shovelware clone of Crush the Castle, which itslef was a shovelware. What made something as silly as Fallguys to blow up so much, only to immediately fall into obscurity? It just happened to meet the flavor of the month. Why didn't Among Us gained any traction whatsoever for several years after release? The fact that it did was a sheer fluke, is why. And that's not unique to indies: Quake Champions was poised to be THE modern competitive arena shooter, and yet it didn't go anywhere - and these people knew what they were doing. Don't make the mistake of thinking that just because you mostly hear of success, means that success is the norm. Could anyone here name a bunch of good racing simulators that inexplicably failed hard and nobody knows about them? Yeah, exactly, nobody knows about them. Rest assured though, failure to success ratio is easily upwards of 3:1, if you count success as "it broke even". When you're trying to learn how to make indie gamedev your new job, you learn all about it pretty fast. And it's why I think your situation here is kind of a miracle - the fact that it worked in the first place is amazing enough, but then you add the amount of time it worked for? Crazy.
Deadzones typically work like this: a flat value is subtracted from absolute axis value, then boosted to offset max range loss, then clamped to 0..1, and then the sign is restored for the final value. See attachment. Note that deadzone is usually applied before any input mapping such as nonlinear factor.
Or actually I can just provide the code. Disclaimer: some parenthesis might be mismatched.
axis = (max(0.0, min(1.0, (abs(rawAxis)-deadzone) / (1.0-deadzone) ))) * (rawAxis > 0.0 ? 1.0 : -1.0);
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Why would I be a troll? I'm an amateur game developer, somewhat like you except I don't do it for a living nor do I have any actual worthwhile games to my name - hence amateur; I've been at it since 2006 or so*. On account of my hobby I do quite a bit of research on related subjects, monetization being one of them, piracy being another. So this is the way I see it - a miracle that it can pay three people salary. And that it's probably not a coincidence that ongoing economical recession eventually resulted in patching the seams to get better income. Like I said, I don't blame you, you're moving in the right direction.
* Maybe I could've gotten a sizeable game out in 2016, might've pushed a few million units on mobile, but it became math-heavy and virtually impossible to multithread, and then I've hit a brick wall with a mathematically unsolvable problem - an octic equation (no, numerical solutions are no good here). Well my current project for VR involves no such issues - all my maths can even be done on GPU - so maybe that one will work out.
Oh I'm not complaining. I understand why it's done; as far as I see it, that was the least worst option. Though probably it would be for the best at some point to just bite the bullet and implement game subscription. A lot of people would be upset but I suppose that can be smoothed over by just letting people who already own content packs to get a month of "free access" with another free extension available each month*. Pretty sure this can convince a good number of people to get annual subscription without causing much of an uproar. I'm not an expert in game PR though but yeah making it one-time payment model to begin with for this type of game was a mistake.
* That would probably be better to implement as "buy 1 year / buy 3 months / keep playing for free using your Sx license".
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It struck me as odd decision to prevent your own hosting. Then I remembered that you're an indie company so you need all the money you can get, so I figured being extra tight on piracy is fine. But then I realized that your monetization policy was to one-time charge for content packs, that's obviously an unsustainable approach for a game that's meant to exist for more than a year. So it makes complete sense that you'd try to take money from online players who are still playing. Again, you need that money and your current monetization model only profits off of new players, not sustained audience, and it's not like you can exactly just change one-time payments to annual subscriptions. So I guess having exclusive ability to host online servers and charging for access to them works well in lieu of having a game subscription. Calling it anti-piracy measure was basically just so that no one thinks it was a scummy move, wasn't it? It's not like you're nickel&diming like EA. Just be sure to make the server package downloadable when your company goes out, otherwise it'll become impossible to play online a perfectly good game.
It's not like you're nickel&diming like EA. Just be sure to make the server package downloadable when your company goes out, otherwise it'll become impossible to play online a perfectly good game.FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG