One of the less commonly spoken of elements of designing a game for publication is that of pricing. It sometimes seems to be a bit of a black art! At Metatopia 2018 I know that there was a panel on making pricing better, but I didn’t get to that and it hasn’t appeared on the podcast yet.
So my question is this - what do you think are the main considerations for setting the price of print and pdf versions of a game? Especially publishers, but also as purchasers?
Cheers
a few thoughts come to mind…
If its your first or second product, you don’t want to make it too expensive, you need to establish your brand/company etc, free samples or extra classes/playbooks etc for use with your game help with this. This is one of the reason most kickstarters have a basic and more expensive options.
The games that are more expensive (eg over $50 USD for 300 pages) generally have tons of art, like watermarks on each page and a full color art piece every 5-10 pages. While art is good to break up the wall of text, clever layout with maps or quotes or examples can help achieve the same goal.
Size of the product counts too, for example due to weight there is an air freight cost added to books sent to Australia (and other places) adding $15-$45 to the books, which out prices many from touching the game.
Another thing to factor in are the fees of your marketplace and their payment portal! I discovered that setting a product really cheaply ($1-5) on itch.io, for example, is okay if you leave the itch commission to 10%, but not okay if you then discover the PayPal/Stripe fees are effectively 30-40% of a $1 sale.
Same goes for PayHip, who pay you the sale minus their fee, and then PayPal pays themselves back the fee out of that, so it makes for complex/confusing accounting.
This is part of a really big discussion.
From my perspective, there’s a missing question here: are you a capitalist or a community member?
You cannot authentically act as both. You must choose, or do both poorly.
If you are a capitalist, then you must charge as much as the market will endure. You have set your goal as extraction of wealth, and must seek maximum rewards.
If you are a community member, charge as little as possible. This is for your friends and their friends, and the money is an unnecessary extra.
It’s a hard choice, and one people rarely fully make.
I’d say you are doing the community a disservice if you do not charge what is sustainable to yourself and to your environment.
That means undercharging can be as harmful to your environment as it may be to yourself.
I am ALL about anticapitalism, but I feel like the dichotomy presented is missing the mark. Mathias said it: we need to price RPGs in a way that makes it viable for people in the community to live off their work IN the industry, not treat it as a side gig. Ironically, the “price as little as possible” approach is actually more detrimental to the community, since alienates anyone who can’t both support themselves in a capitalist society AND dedicate themselves to design. They need to make money off of RPGs to do it at all.
It’s important to consider accessibility when pricing products, which is why I’ve seen creators add discounts for people who need it (Avery Alder has it in her store) and outright state that if you want the game and can’t afford it, they’ll send it for free, but that doesn’t mean charging as little as possible.
I find it really interesting that Avery Alder’s affordability thing basically works on an honor system. To be clear, I think that’s really rad. Making it an easy option like that is probably the only way to implement this kind of thing without it being a lot of work for the creator and also an additional barrier for the folks who need the discount.
I wonder if there’s a good way to do something similar in Itch.
Price is something I’m trying to keep clearly in mind as I work on Plunderlight. The intent of the format is that folk either print it out or (eventually) purchase it PoD and write their own notes and house rules in the (very large) margins of the game. So, I want the end product to be at or under $20 for the dead tree copy. I don’t want purchasers to feel like the book is too expensive or precious for them to mark in, especially since I may already be running up against a big social stigma against “defacing” books.
The short answer is always yes you do have price as a design element.
It’s much bigger in board games because components change how you develop, because if you want a game to retail at 60 you can really have a tonne of little plastic figures in it because that makes it unfeasible.
Same with RPGs, though for most of that it’s based around things like word count, art count, printing costs (POD vs Offset, etc) and also how you plan to distribute it. If you are looking at your game, you’re always going, 'Okay I can add this section but that’s now going to cost X more … what does that mean for my per unit cost."
Because if you are making a game, you should always, always, always, be making sure that you are trying your best to cover your costs and have enough for your efforts. We’re really bad as an industry for that and we need to get better at it, without forgetting the larger social context around it.
Regarding Avery’s honor system: In my extended group, there’s a transkid whose maybe 20. They weren’t sure if they qualified for the hardship for MH2 because no longer a teenager.
But, trans and nearly homeless and with living with mental illness. They wound up emailing Avery to ask permission. Which – of course – was given immediately.
It’s hard to get people to say yes to a lowered price once you’ve set the market expectation.
I agree with @Luiz that it isn’t as simple as that. We live in a capitalist world where people need money to live and where creators and artists are routinely told their passion is something they should do for free around the edges of ‘proper work’. An attitude which hugely undervalues people’s art and time and usually ends up with large corporations making money off the labour of maginalized people. Until we live in a different system then art needs to be valued in the same way as everything else.
We have adopted Avery’s model in our last two kickstarters and honestly it has worked really well. We operate a policy of ‘if you think this applies to you then go for it - you don’t need to justify it to us’. The honour system works well enough that we can roughly predict the split of people taking those reward levels and that gives me a wonderful sense of hope in the community.
Becky, what is that predictable split, if you can share? I’m really curious.
“Predictable” might be over-egging it slightly, but with a 30% price reduction on PDF and print, 20-25% of people who bought the relevant format paid the discount price. (This doesn’t include people who bought fancier versions of the same product e.g. hardback, or people who paid for high-level reward tiers with extra stuff.)
I 100% agree that people need to charge an amount that enables them to make money. There’s so many reasons for this. One is, you deserve it; you’re not some massive company using the funds to buy a yacht, you’re paying yourself for work. Second, it enables you to do good stuff like investing in a better product (pretty art, freelance writers, etc) next time if you want to, at reduced risk to yourself. Third, it means people value your product, and more widely this contributes to people valuing indie games. I could probably say more, but you get the idea of my position.
Some other thoughts on this topic - mostly from a Kickstarterish perspective:
Ok, that’s far too many words. Nobody wanted that many words.
Can I just say that I really appreciated that amount of words. A substantive answer like that is really helpful! Plus it moves the discussion on in interesting ways.
Cheers
I don’t think this has been mentioned yet but asking for money confers credibility to your game as well, at least for the moment. Meaning that a game someone buys for $2 is about 1000 times more likely to actually be played than a game you give away for free. Charge $10 and it is a million times more likely to actually hit the table.
This may change, and it isn’t a good thing, but it is a thing.
By the way, a thing I’m trying to do is record my hours. If you don’t know how much time you spent making and promoting your game, it’s hard to know what to charge for it. I’m hoping this will help.
Of course I won’t know the full answer until I’ve recorded my hours for a full RPG project end to end, but still.
I think I would be frightened to record my hours! Even looking at a rate per word makes me feel a bit imposter-y.
I get what you’re saying, William, but my lived experience of 40 years is that what you’re presenting as a binary is in fact a continuum.