I shall have to call in the numbers guy for that @rabalias
Choosing price as a design element
“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.)
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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:
- Different people are willing to pay different amounts. If you can find a way to give people different options, they will generally choose to pay more (presuming it means they get something nicer). So e.g. it’s better to have softcover and hardcover if you can, because it means people have more options, and the opportunity to give you more money if they want to.
- (You can call this horrifically capitalist if you like, but my experience is that people who buy indie games want to give you more money, to help support what you’re doing, so you just have to give them a reason. This is where community and capitalism needn’t be in full conflict.)
- However! Having different formats is expensive. You may have to pay more to do softcover and hardcover. You need to have some idea what level of support you’re anticipating, or else these decisions can actually cost you money, even if you raised more funds.
- Also, setting your exact price structure is hard. Do you want to make it cheap to upgrade to softcover from PDF? Or you could make it cheap to upgrade to hardcover from softcover? Or space them out evenly? Our experience to date (sample size of 3) is that people’s choices are mostly driven by price, so you can (broadly) predict which formats people will buy based on the price you charge. (Maybe people secretly have an amount they’re willing to pay in mind and don’t care that much what format they get? IDK.)
- I almost feel I don’t need to say this, but you should obviously set a price structure that allows you to pay people who do work for you. That includes you! Do not be an abusive self-employer.
- Also make sure you set a price structure that doesn’t mean you get hosed the moment the price of paper goes up. Or (taking an example entirely at random) your stupid-ass country decides to exit a major economic and trading bloc, torpedoing your currency. Not that I’m bitter.
- However! Don’t forget that what you raise at Kickstarter is probably only the start. We found that with Lovecraftesque we sold twice as many copies after the Kickstarter as we did during. From what limited information I’ve picked up from indie panelcasts etc, that’s not unrepresentative. So there’s nothing wrong with raising KS funds to cover costs, then using after-campaign sales to pay yourself, if you can live with waiting for the money to come in.
- Also don’t forget retail. You can make money selling to retailers, and that’s a good thing because it means more money for you (good thing) and your great game reaching more people (good thing). But! Don’t forget retailers will want substantial discounts on your cover price, so set the price accordingly. Don’t price yourself out of the retail market by setting a price that only works for direct sales.
Ok, that’s far too many words. Nobody wanted that many words.
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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
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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.
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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.
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I think I would be frightened to record my hours! Even looking at a rate per word makes me feel a bit imposter-y.
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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.
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As a trans game designer, I can confirm that charging a fair market rate for my games means that a trans person gets paid for hard work. There is no universe in which I’m about to let anyone guilt-trip me into being an abusive employer to myself.
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What do you think is the balance between recording your hours (and this working out what your hourly rate would be) and allotting a price per word (as is common for editors and perhaps when commissioning work from other people)?
For me they’re totally separate. I’m recording my hours so I know how much of my time it takes to write a game, playtest it, kickstart it, deliver the physical product. This will help me know whether my game design work is paying me a reasonable hourly rate, and also potentially to establish fair charge-out rates eg to run someone’s kickstarter campaign for them.
The per-word rates are a pretty arbitrary way to pay people a consistent amount for freelance work. As a concept they make no sense, because sometimes you can write 1000 words in an hour, other times it could take ten times that and it isn’t easy to predict which way it will go. As an employer I can’t say “I’ll pay you by the hour” if I have no idea how many hours the job might take. So per-word is just a benchmark, a way to generate an arbitrary yet reasonably fair pay rate.
All that said - when I’ve got better data about my hourly rates, I’ll rethink what is a fair freelance rate. I will at that point know roughly how long it takes me to design and then write a given number of words of game (including any playtesting) and I hope that should help me calibrate the per-word rate.
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Makes sense.
As it happens I’ve been keeping track of time since January this year, so I know that I’ve spent 32 hours on my game on a combination of hearing from playtests, revising rules, sending them out for further playtests and planning kickstarter.
Although it wouldn’t be particularly accurate, I could guess that in the Jun-Dec timeframe when I was producing the first and second draft of the game I would have spent about 75 hours based on my rough proportion of time. I could add on another 12 hours of playtesting and 20 hours of research in the early days on top of that.
I mention this because right now I’ve got no idea how many hours people normally spend on things, but in a spirit of transparency I’m happy to let people know how long it is typically taking me, in case that is of any interest to them. I’d be very interested to see how much time it typically takes other people on doing things.
Cheers
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I’ve certainly seen in other areas of life that the price something is given sets the scene for its perceived value. Sometimes very valuable things in themselves are seen as given too cheaply and thus are not valued so much by the recipient. I remember particularly seeing that sometimes with children, where those who had to work to obtain a thing valued it more than those who were just given it for the asking.
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My most recent project in development has 85 hours recorded, including playtests. Separately I’ve got about 50 hours for delivery of Flotsam, and a very incomplete record of work running Kickstarter. Those numbers are probably underestimating by 20% or so given that not everything gets recorded, and all are for partially completed projects. So I guess a finished full-fat A5 RPG book project might be 250-300 hours all in, but that could easily be more. We’ll see!
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So far, I haven’t charged for any games because it involves too much tax-related paperwork for the marginal revenue from my perpective.
Also considering the hundreds of hours I put into game design, I can only justify this as a passion and not as a sound business. If I really want to focus on making money, personally there are other domains where I’m much more profitable.
But I agree that pricing a game even just 2$ changes its perceived value.
Sometimes I am also shocked to see what people charge for poor game design. More than once I have seen games that slap premium cover art on top of half-baked game mechanics and charge a two digit price for that.
As a buyer, after a couple years of impulsive Kickstarter backing I have become much more selective.
Unless I know the game designer and blindly trust the quality of their work, as a general rule of thumb, I am very reluctant to spend more than 10$ on a PDF game.
Also, if I don’t blindly trust the game designer, I’d like to see the core game mechanic as a free PDF before backing a KS or buying a PDF.
I appreciate it when projects offer a special price for people who cannot afford a game based on their own judgement.
I only care for extensive artwork in physical color books. Thus, I’m not willing to spend extra for artwork in PDFs.
When I love a game, the sky is the limit of what I’m willing to pay.
If more games offered shipping within Europe, I’d buy more physical books.
I would love to buy more card-based indie games.
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Doesn’t this basically assure that currently-marginalized creators remain that way?
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I know what you mean about European shipping - these days I back kickstarters at pdf level only as it means I can back more of them - because shipping to the UK from the US often doubles the price.
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It’s annoying, because shipping from the UK to the US is actually quite cheap. I feel US creators could almost do better getting their books printed here.
(Hey maybe we should start a handling agency for US creators.)
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The corollary to “a price tag adds to the perception of value” is that if your game then disappoints at $2, you’ve lost a $20 customer way down the line. So take pride in your work and playtest and edit it, regardless of what you charge for it. Early games will and should be terrible, but make them terrible because you swung for the fences, not because you didn’t care enough to try it out and see if it worked, or because you didn’t bother to copy edit your words.
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In the past I’ve used DTRPG as a Print on Demand sales channel, because that means that I can get local shipment into US and into EU (well, the latter for a few more days at least, although what happens next is anyone’s guess).
I did come across one oddity with DTRPG though - I was looking at shipping prices for cards (as I’m considering them for a game) and shipping prices for those to the UK are huge compared to the price of shipping them in the US or Canada. The difference is so great that I’m wondering whether those are only printed in the US (and whether it would make sense for me to print them in the UK with a specialist and then ship them out to overseas from here - a much cheaper option, apparently).
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