This is a really basic business concept; business 101 stuff. They definitely didn’t make it up, they’re just using it.
It works against the general population, if this particular one doesn’t, don’t get too busy strutting, there is almost certainly something else that does work on you.
Buy shit because you need/want it, not because it’s a deal.
Same reason that shit on TV is five easy payments of 29.95.
I’m willing g to spend $29. I’ll even spend $29 five times. But not $150.
I had my sewer line backing up into my basement a couple of months ago. My regular plumber was busy so I had to call in a company that I knew was an overpriced scam (“Dream Team” lol) but I had no choice since I had guests in the house for my father’s funeral. They came and of course they couldn’t clear the line and said they had to dig up and replace the whole thing. The guy had a special tablet that he showed me the three options and the prices on and it initially showed them all in dollars per month with “zero-interest financing”. I was like dude just show me the total cost. The three options were $17K, $22K and $36K total but the monthly payments actually decreased with increasing total price (naturally the payment option didn’t show how many total payments you would have to make).
Fortunately I called my regular plumber and he was so outraged at these motherfuckers that he came out that afternoon and cleared my line for me. Total cost $850.
Holy shit. Hold on to that plumber, lol.
He does like to launch into racist rants, but sometimes you just gotta hold your nose and swallow.
Ah that sucks but hey at least he’s not scamming you
The only time this breaks down for me though is that I still struggle to pay $0.99 for a mobile app I use often sometimes. Really not sure what it is.
It’s wild, I released a shareware music creation app for Windows back in 2000 and it was easy to get people to pay $29.95 for it. I now have a vastly superior iOS version and nobody’s willing to pay a dollar for it. It’s a very depressing situation for an independent developer.
It’s cuz people expect free or close to free mobile apps to be scummy and have a bajillion paywalls and need a monthly subscription and steal all your data so on and so forth
When there’s truly good apps, it sucks
Yeah. I used to have a $20 shareware product back when kagi was a payment processor. Apple introduced $1 pricing as a dick waving contest and fucked the entire indy developer community.
I originally sold my app on Beyond.com (which was originally software.net). They took 10% which didn’t seem too bad. One day they contacted me about giving my app a “freebate” – basically the app was still $29.95 but buyers could fill out a form and send it in and eventually (like months later) get their $29.95 back. Per their data only about half of buyers ever bothered to do this so it was effectively a 50% off deal. Beyond.com was supposed to give me about $10 per copy sold instead of the normal $27 to cover the freebate and they would make $5 per copy instead of their normal $3.
I said OK and they featured my app on their front page and sales went up like 100X and I was of course pretty happy. The funny part was that their accounting system was all fucked up and I kept getting $27 per copy sold even though the freebate was still in place. I actually tried contacting them multiple times about this to get the situation corrected and I could never get through to anybody who had any clue about what was going on. Eventually they went bankrupt and shut down and years later I got one of those class-action settlement checks in the mail without any explanation of what it was for. Maybe sales of my app were even better than they were telling me, I dunno. I’ve never once met a person in the real world who has ever even heard of the app so that doesn’t seem very likely.
On iOS I have no problem paying 20 euros once or 10 per year for an app I like. Sometimes more if it’s really useful and/or the desktop app is included. Monthly is a harder sell though.
I payed 7 euros for Collections Database and goddamn I wish it had cost more or the developer would add a tip jar.
It works against the general population, if this particular one doesn’t, don’t get too busy strutting, there is almost certainly something else that does work on you.
That is very well put! I feel like I’ve talked to so many people who see one ad that doesn’t land and say, “ads don’t work on me.”
The $8 tier has been around for a decade, for exactly this reason. MMO subscriptions, bargain games, podcasts, delivery fees. People love charging you $8
This feels like a Discworld scene.
It does, but it also makes sense to me.
I mean the best parts of Discworld, no matter how absurd, still made some sense; of course we have to believe in a jolly, present delivering, pig man, otherwise the sun won’t rise in the morning, a great big ball of flaming gas would rise instead.
It’s almost Cut Me Own Throat Dibbler type math, but it does actually make sense to me.
… Dibbler was an extremely good hot sausage salesman. He had to be, given the nature of his sausages
The best bang for buck Steam purchase I’ve done is Halo MCC for 39,99€. Five great games plus Halo 4.
Getting the Orange Box for $10 back in the day has to be my all-time best.
I’m curious now if anyones selling it used that’s such a steal
It’s frequently on sale for 3.99 on steam!
Oh sweet! Thanks for saying! Have a great day!
Unfortunate they want to shut those servers down.
Meanwhile factorio devs being chads and going with a round number for pricing.
Well it’s different when you’re selling drugs
Surprised Factorio 1 isn’t free so they can hook you before Factorio 2 comes out.
Isn’t factorio 2 basically the space expansion pack?
I usually look at it from cost per hour perspective. Tears of the Kingdom was 70 but I played it for ~140 hours, so 0.5 per hour. I’m ok with 1 per hour too but anything higher I start to ask myself “is the developer / publisher worth my support?”. Not all games can be judged by this metric though (eg outer wilds, unpacking)
So far, nothing beats the value of factorio. Mindustry (being so cheap) is a close second.
For me, it goes:
0 - hell no
1 to 5 - sure why not, that’s about as much as a bottled drink.
6 to 10 - maybe once a month.
11 to 15 - better be a pretty damn good game, or I’m refunding.
16 to 20 - I’m waiting for a discount, not worth it.
21 to 60 - hell no
61+ - I’m blacklisting your company from my recommendations.
I get that this is Lemmy and users here are a certain way but calling anything over 16 dollars not worth it is genuinely insane.
Yeah, I’m with you. There’s tons of games I’ve paid a lot more than $16 for that I would absolutely tell past me to buy again instantly. Most recently Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. $40 with all dlc and I’m over 100 hours in, enjoying every minute. Over 100 hours of entertainment from something that cost me less than an hour of labor, in what world is that not worth it?
Yeah man, every single game I’ve got a ton of hours in or thought was a truly great game has been over $16
You can always do the XKCD trick
But even this seems to have gone stale over time, as retro game prices get sticker (even going up as vintage games come back into fashion).
One thing I don’t see on this list is “piracy”, which is a bit weird if your line is $15. I find a lot of bargain bin games to be as bad or worse than FTP games. $20-30 has historically been my sweet spot
I think for a good game, by a good company worth supporting, $30 is very fair and reasonable, especially if you get more than a few hours of play out of it.
We seem to spend $60 on movie tickets and snacks for two and leave the theaters after 90 minutes disappointed and never complain as a society beyond saying the movie sucked, but then going to watch the sequel because everyone else is watching it.
The only reason I wouldn’t personally spend more than $30 or so on a game is because generally everything more expensive is published by a major studio, and thus sucks ASS.
Considering the huge number of games I have that I haven’t tried yet, I don’t think it’s crazy at all to have a high threshold for buying yet another one.
imo over 16 it better have workshop support or an active online playerbase
Saying indies are expensive seems wild, but I kind of get it since the Steam Sales on pre-2015 games go hard. And easy piracy of anything up to PS2.
The biggest challenge I have with pirated games - especially Nintendo games - is the controller.
Yeah, I can get Metroid Prime or Mario 64 or Super Smash easily enough. But I can’t have that classic experience on a PS knock off controller.
It’s not the end of the world, of course. But I feel it.
What do you have against OpenTTD and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead? \s
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
I spawned as a nun in-game on the rooftop of a cake restaurant. I’ve got nothing but a bible to wreck zombies. And there are so many, there is no tutorial, the controls are tanky, the devs are out of their mind.
0/10
I found some good stuff in the F2P demo/early access. Especially if you’re just looking for a few hours of fun. Every now and then you can find a release F2P title that’s not monetizing you. But without the marketing budget or polish they don’t take off in popularity.
Some of the best games i’ve ever played are in the 1-10 range. With that in mind, i do brlieve that a 60+ game would at least be über eccellent and have much to do. Which might unironically make such games bloated, if they weren’t costly that is. Just to add to this, terraria is about 10 dollars on steam at most times.
Not only is the game fun, but it can last forever if you want. There are many cases of games where the monetisation model is donation based. I bought an offer for pixel dungeon despite the game being free, mostly because shattered pixel dungeon singlehandendly revived the game.
I have not spent more than $30 for a video game in over a decade and a half. I have no idea who’s affording all these “AAA” titles that go for $50+, or who’s keeping that market alive.
There are some miserable, well-off parents out there in liberal America who just throw money at their kids and ignore what they do with it I guess.
So I suppose you are not doing
pacman -S endless-sky endless-sky-high-dpi?
A reminder that you don’t need to know advanced maths to be a developer. Just call the necessary functions to do the job
Glances at this guy’s main() function
Instantly dies
I remember when I saw my first main() I just started writing code only inside of it. That seemed to work so I kept going. 20 years later I’ve only ever written code inside that same main(). I’ve changed jobs 4 times. Just… if(job==0)… or if(job==3)… Works like a charm.
I haven’t touched software development in years. Fuck that shit
This is just this scene from The Jerk in written form.
That trick with the $ x.99 all over again.
Ugh, sometimes we’ll be in the grocery store, and my wife will look at something that clearly says $7.99 and she’ll say “oh it’s only seven dollars”. Every time. I can’t believe how well that works on her. If I didn’t like her so much, I don’t know if I could handle it…
For me, the price listed is the price listed. If it’s $5, it’s $5. $8 is $8, etc.
This kind of ratio would just confuse me otherwise.
Basically everyone thinks that, and yet the data shows that basically everyone falls for it anyway. No matter how aware of it you are, you are not immune to manipulation
Vibe pricing.
The crafty madmen
Still waiting for ANNO 1800 with all extensions to fall to the 5$ category. Until then, I’m enjoying me some ANNO 2070.
1.99 prices > 2.00 prices
Maybe I adapted to that with time, like .99 always felt like a scam pricing strategy, but for me everything involving number nine is worse than, say 1.20. Double nines are the worst. Flat prices with zeroes make me more confident and interested somehow.
That seems very subjective. Personally I always round prices correctly (yes I’m pedantic), and every 2.5€ block counts. So 7.99 ≈ 7.50 to me.
How about a different pattern;
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Figure out what your breakeven is - in other words, how much money you need to make to recoup salaries, licenses, and generally keep the lights on.
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Put out a free demo (and I mean free - no DRM either). See how many people download it within a month or so.
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Project the production budget for the next game.
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Price based on a 2% retention rate of the demo downloads to accommodate breakeven + next game + 5% profit for op-cap.
Rinse and repeat as necessary.
Ain’t no one surviving on a 5% profit margin
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