kazgar
Arcane
From the west of loathing/kingdom of loathing dev's podcast (asked about price points, and I underlined the bit that was interesting for me)
Q: Why $11 as the price point? Do any of you find shorts to be easy or comfortable to wear?
A: (laughing) Riff, I don't think I've ever seen you in shorts.
R: I had a raggedy pair of cutoff jeans. But now I just don't leave the house in the summer.
J: I used to more or less exclusively wear cargo shorts in Arizona. It was just as stylish in the summer as in the winter! Now I just wear jeans everyday. And so do you HotStuff.
HS: I wear shorts about 20% of the time.
J: And that's why WOL is $11! HS: The price point was a big point of contention for a while. At first, we were at $10, but we thought it would cost us way too much for that, thinking we were going to sell 5,000 or 10,000 copies. Then we thought $20. That's a "Firewatch" or a "Gone Home".
J: Or a lap dance. A discount lap dance. But you don't want the high-end stuff -- it's not relatable.
HS: Then we got some good advice: that the game doesn't look like anything at all to someone who is not familiar with KOL, and they're not going to pay $20 for it.
J: And we started to learn how to make the top-seller chart on Steam, how few sales you need to do that.
HS: And we avoided things other companies don't realize: every SKU competes separately. So we didn't do bundles. We didn't do presales.
J: We know a lot of people who have been successful on Steam, we got a lot of good advice.
HS: We would have fucked this whole thing up.
J: If we didn't live in San Francsico, this wouldn't have been possible to do. The thing that gives me such a profound feeling of relief that this has gone well is not only that we get to keep the band together and keep making games, but that the last three or four years worth of decisions we made were not stupid failure decisions.
HS: It was super-unclear up until Thursday morning.
R: I was confident that everyone who played the game would like it, I just wasn't sure if we would be able to get the word out.
J: We did a bunch of work promoting it. The biggest part of it was hiring Emily Morganti. She usually only works with adventure games, but this was enough of an adventure game for her to do it. Also she had worked with Campo Santo to do PR work for Firewatch. She did not know anything about KOL, so she stopped us from having messaging that made no sense if you didn't know that. She was a great early sieve for a bunch of things that we didn't know we didn't know.
HS: She would say "are you sure you want the game to be $11?" And we'd say "Yes, it's dumb, but it will resonate with our fans and make them laugh." And the 10% off for launch week would put it under $10 which is really critical.
J: The idea is that if you can chart and you're under $10, people will just buy it because it's not much of a risk. We also got really lucky with early good press. We didn't think this was streamable at all, but every YouTube streamer I'm familiar with did a really warm and really positive stream. I think we made the right choice pricing it here. We talked to the Campo guys and said "if we're only going to sell 5,000 copies at $20, we'll make twice as much." And that's like saying "we'll fail twice as fast."