Jeff Vogel: Indie Games Should Cost More, Part One

Spiderweb Software’s Jeff Vogel tackles the subject of shrinking prices for independently developed games in his latest series of blog entries. From part one:

When I first founded Spiderweb Software, in 1994, I spent a lot of time thinking about pricing my first game, Exile. Back then, there was a good rule of thumb for pricing your shareware product:

Charge half as much as the comparable product being sold in boxes on store shelves.

Back then, new games sold for $50. So Exile was $25, which was a very common price for shareware games back then.

A few years later, I started sending the registered version on a CD (instead of E-mailing a registration code). I charged $30 for a CD. Sales changed very little.

Two years later, I went back to an E-mailed code system and lowered the price back down to $25. Sales changed very little.

Three years ago, I looked at all of our expenses (credit card fees, postage, insurance, etc) and went “Holy crap! We need to raise prices to account for this.” We raised our price to $28 (still about half the price of comparable products on store shelves). Since then, our money intake has actually increased. We’re doing quite well now.

And yet, in the last few years, Indie game prices have been falling through the floor. They get more and more expensive to write but are approaching unheard of levels of cheapness. ($10. $5. $1.)