How much should a Game cost?

99 cents. I think it is ridiculous to pay much more than that for a video game. Make it inexpensive, everybody gets their own copy, no incentive to pirate or copy.

I can tell you what should not be in it:
Lootboxes.

And eliminate all profit margin. Great way to spur interest, investment and development in an industry.

As for how much they should cost: $60 is fine for AAA games. You may think that sounds expensive, but I remember paying $50 or so for 8-bit NES games 30 years ago. Accounting for inflation, games really haven increased in price over the years. Despite the fact that those AAA games today now have 3–5 year development cycles and cost hundreds of millions to produce.

Also, nowadays, those $60 games drop to $40 within a few months then down to $20 or less within a few months more.

There is a curve to how many people will pay for a game based on price, which is different for the sort of game and who it appeals to.

In theory, if you could make an accurate function for how many sales you would make at each price point, with the other axis being how much money you actually take home, you could find the ideal price to make the most money.

But no one can predict the actual number of sales you will make with any particular game.

And a game designer may have other motives than making the most amount of money. If they’re a software engineer, and want to make the most money, they probably should try something other than games, whose profits are unpredictable, sometimes less than zero, and often not very much, with occasional exceptions.

I would suggest looking at similar games (if there are any) and looking at what they are priced at, and how that price changes over time. (Many “Triple-A” (code for, made on a multi-million-dollar development budget and also a huge advertising budged and their companies are connected with media so the games get people excited enough that they are willing to look for it and pay for it at full price) games cost $50–60 initially at retail, but then go on sale and discount.

There are so many games made, and so many of them are on sale or discount, that unless you have that marketing buzz going for you (in which case you probably have a Director of Marketing in your company instead of asking Fluther), that an Indie game in particular is competing both for attention/visibility and price with many games at lower prices.

On the other hand, there are many indie developers who make niche games that are so unique that they effectively have no competition and will be found and sold to fans, so they sometimes cost $30–60 and may nearly never lower their prices, which may particularly make sense if your game is niche enough that even at a lower price it’s not going to attract a lot of sales except from people who appreciate it and will pay more for it.

I worked with a guy 13 years ago, at night and on weekends he would develop CGI for SEGA. He was not cheap and there was a reason; the quality of his work.

@zenvelo Out of curiosity, how much is a good book worth to you?

@gorillapaws $15—$20. But I don’t view books and video games as economically substitute goods.

I’ve never understood that attitude of “it isn’t my thing, so it’s not worth anything”.

@Darth_Algar I like video games, but paying $60 is crazy to me. A lot of companies sell games for 99 cents on app stores and do very well.

Those mobile games are:
1. much smaller in scope, quality, content.
2. have only a handful of developers.
3. are filled to the brim with micro transactions, which is the actual revenue source of these games.

It is like saying that movie tickets for the latest blockbuster should only cost a quid, because you can make a cheap movie with a camcorder in your overgrown backyard.

@ragingloli so the next Avengers movie should be $40 because it has four or five superheroes and a lot of special effects? Nope.

30 of your wasteland bucks is what a blu ray costs upon release.
And that is only because a film already made hundreds of millions in the cinema.
Imagine how much they would cost otherwise.
Games are not being shown in a cinema.
Frankly, books should be under 1€, because they are just paper and are written by one guy sitting in his mum’s basement.

@zenvelo Some videogames have stories that are much deeper and richer than the vast majority of novels, especially with the branching logic and interactivity. Add in the technical skills time and money of writing, testing, debugging and updating the code, art assets etc., then add in all of the server costs and networking administrative overhead and community management for a game with an online component and you have a project that’s orders of magnitude more complex and expensive than a book.

As @ragingloli correctly points out, there is a huge delta in terms of scope with a videogame. You can code up a crude version of snake, asteroids, or card matching in a day. For a AAA game you could be looking at hundreds of thousands of man hours in development time alone—that’s excluding ongoing updates, maintenance, bandwidth and community management.

While a book and a game are not direct substitute goods, they are competing in the broader entertainment market for consumers free time.

@ragingloli

You can get books at that price point all day long on sites like Amazon. Frankly, most of them are awful.

You can get good books for nothing at libraries.

You can also get good books and games for nothing at some web sites, even legal ones.

@Zaku

Yes, but those books at the library aren’t quite the same. They’re not some dude crapping out a book a week and selling on Amazon for a dollar. Books you get at the library are from professional authors who produce quality work and get compensated well for it. You may be able to borrow it for free from your library, but the library has purchased that book at full price.