Indie Game Pricing Experiment
This weekend, I released a minor update of my arcade game Bubblomania X, with 2 important changes.
The first change is actually a change to the price of the game. There has been some talk about micropricing recently among indie game developers. But this blog post on GameProducer, and the comments on that post, convinced me to change my price from 14.95$ to 9.95$.
I’m doing this mostly as an experiment to find out what the optimal price is for Bubblomania X. I think that 9.95$ is a price that will encourage impulse buyers, while 14.95$ is a bit of a weird price, that makes you think twice. 
Also, I changed the in-game price for European customers to 7.95 euro. After adding the VAT, around 20% in most countries, this becomes a price point of about 10 euro. Anyway, we’ll see how it turns out!
The other change I made was as a result of user feedback and a review: I made the small bubbles more transparent to make it clearer that they are decoration. Some people tried to pop them, and quickly got frustrated with the game. This is also mentioned in the Tips & Tricks I recently posted.
I plan to let this new version float for a while, and concentrate on my new game now…
Related Articles:
- Is There Money to Make by Selling Game Merchandise?
- The Smiley Puzzle Project
- Indie Game Sales Statistics
- Bubblomania X 2.1 released
- Bubblomania X 2.0 released!
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March 7th, 2006 at 7:18 am
Notice - I don’t suggest that people should automatically *lower* the price. I believe in *testing* different prices. After that $9.95 experiment… you might want to try $19.95 as well.
My opinion:
“You must set a high price - and make sure your product achieves that quality. At least don’t change the price lower if nobody is buying - they won’t buy after that either. First you gotta try what’s being said there. But you could *try* different pricing to make sure it’s optimal for you… who knows if $10 or $20 price tag is optimal for your game - you really gotta test it.”
Good luck with your experiment!
March 7th, 2006 at 9:54 am
I understand your point. But given the nature and history of Bubblomania, 10$ is a probably a better price point than 20$.
The original version for classic MacOS, released in the ’90s, was also 10$. Upon releasing the MacOS X port, and improving the game, I raised the price to 15$. But given the fact that the quality of competing indie games has risen dramatically, and Bubblomania is still based on older technology and graphics, I think 10$ is a more correct price.
I agree with achieving better quality, but in my case that would mean a total rewrite of the game! And since sales are currently very low, and the new price probably wont change that a lot, I’m going to concentrate now on my next game…