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Missing from this imo is how drastically it all changes with the scale of the numbers involved. If you aren't likely to sell big numbers in the first place you're better off pricing out the people who only buy at low prices since they're also the ones who aggressively refund and write shit reviews

Derek Yu@mossmouth.bsky.social

Any advice Tom has on making indie games is worth listening to, but I really want to highlight his thoughts on price point - it's well explained. I do think that the movement to get indies to charge more mostly just hurt new indies - with fewer players, fewer/worse reviews, and lower sales.

"you sell twice as many copies at half the price" is presumably true at some point but it assumes a level of visibility that the author may not realise is hard to get now, and Steam visibility is obliterated the second you go down to Mixed, which happens sooner the cheaper your game is

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If you have a ton of avenues to press and a large following and so on I'm sure a lot of things are true that aren't true for the majority of devs, the same as Valve at one point were advising "actually the less you charge the more you make!" from their unexamined position as owners of the storefront

At some scale there's a flip: for ME, if I sell 1000 copies at 10 bucks each, that's worse than if I sell 500 at 20 bucks each. Neither number is enough to cascade into big bucks, but the 20 buck people are better customers. The worst reviews you ever get are the day you do your deepest discount

I think there are a lot of really successful indie devs who still think of themselves as small enough businesses for their advice to be super relevant because they genuinely aren't huge and don't realise they are in fact still operating in a completely different space to the folks they're advising

Any success big enough to see you through a few years places you in an alternate universe to the folks coming after you who are superficially in the same position. The folks your (maybe really good!) lessons are truly applicable to, you can probably count on one hand

I'm not sure about lowering the price resulting in lower Steam scores. While it's true that people buying your game who aren't part of your niche are more likely to negatively review your game, on the other hand, people tend to be more forgiving of cheaper games.

I find the opposite is the case, especially the lower you go. You get down to a layer of really nasty, entitled, shitty people, possibly children to be fair. I always get my most forgiving reviews from the people buying the most expensive stuff at full price