Pricing on Steam
Setting the right price for your game is a big problem every single indie developer will have to face when launching a game on Steam.
Here are some
SteamSpy stats to help you make the right choice.
$9.99 is not the answer
Let’s start with what everyone else is doing. It is obvious that $9.99 and $4.99 are the most popular price tags on Steam. That’s because Steam has two pages dedicated to games
under $9.99 and
$4.99.
Does it mean that your game is going to sell better if you price it cheaper? I don’t think so. I think we have several distinct categories on Steam when it comes to pricing and setting your price too low or too high will give people wrong expectations about your title.
As you can see fitting into the right category will affect your revenue. Of course, most of your sales won’t come at the full price, but your original price is a starting point and can only go lower. So choose wisely.
Content matters
Of course user expectations for titles are the most important thing. You don’t want to sell a tiny game at AAA price, because you won’t sell many copies and you’ll make your gamers feel ripped off.
It’s interesting that we see a clear drop off in average playtime for the full priced games sold at $30.00 to $49.99 —basically AAA price I was talking about. That’s probably because most of the games at this price point are expensive cinematic experiences that don’t leave anything for users to do after they’ve completed the storyline mode.
But games priced higher at $50.00 to $69.99? That’s Call of Duty, GTA and other expensive titles with either an open world or multiplayer mode attached.
Regional pricing
Steam advises setting local pricing for some markets with lower GDP per capita — mostly BRIC and developing countries. Please, follow its advice, because it matters a lot.
For example, Russians and Chinese are infamous for pirating games and if you check geo stats for
some games you’ll see that these countries aren’t buying much.
Except when your game is priced according to expectations in this region (and localized properly, but that’s a topic for another post). An average share of China in paid games is around 1%, but for
GTA V it’s 10% — and we’re talking about 250 thousand additional copies sold because of the right price. The same is true for Russia — Russians can buy up to 18% of your game copies if you price, localize and market it right.
Effectively you can double your sales and increase your revenue by up to 50% if you cater to the most important markets outside US and Europe.
***
Of course pricing isn’t the only thing you have to worry about when releasing a game on Steam. We’ll talk about those other things later.