Dev Behind Highly Regarded PC Game Explains Why He Raised The Price: "Go Pirate It, I Don't Care"
Dev Behind Highly Regarded PC Game Explains Why He Raised The Price: "Go Pirate It, I Don't Care"
David Szymanski is hoping publicity from the upcoming film makes up for lower sales volumes right now.
summary:
The article discusses game developer David Szymanski's decision to raise the price of his game "Iron Lung" from $6 to $8. Szymanski explained that he raised the price to make more money and believes the game is worth the higher price due to added value/content. He openly stated that he makes games to earn money and that if people don't think his games are worth the price, they are free to not buy them, wait for a sale, or even pirate them. Szymanski acknowledged that the price increase was a gamble and that the game's sales volume decreased as a result. He expressed hope that the upcoming film associated with the game would help make up for the lower sales. Szymanski also mentioned that he is open to adjusting prices based on feedback for future releases.
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Not knowing anything about the game, $8 for a PC game is not unreasonable, though raising the price after the fact is a little questionable and it sounds like the dev mispriced his original creation and is trying to correct for that. Though, if he had called it “early-access” and then doubled the price it would just be accepted as normal.
It's a horror experience/game, very short at that, like 30 min or so. And afaik literally no replayability.
Imo, 8 $ is abit stretching it, but it's a free market.
You would spend more on a movie ticket for a matinée showing.
Those generally have better quality/effort. Most of these cheap horror experience games look absolutely terrible (and wouldve 20 years ago as well) and last an hour at most of you aren’t brain-dead. At least a movie is generally two hours
And get 4x as much runtime. But it's not apples to apples; movies aren't interactive, and I've spent way more on games that weren't worth either their price or the time to play them through to the end.
I mean, it can be argued that games depreciating their value overtime is not a natural phenomenon set in stone, but rather a way to squeeze more sales out of the product once it stops being the latest, hypest thing, and everyone who really wanted it already has it.
If you accept that, then it is not hard to accept the opposite: a game that starts not being the hypest thing, and thus needs to start at a low price because nobody really wants it; but then becomes the hypest thing due to some unforeseen factor (in this case, getting a movie based on the game), and thus appreciates in value because people now really want it.
From that perspective, I honestly don't see an issue with it, it's just staying consistent with the rules that give us lower priced sales in the first place, this is just the rare situation in which it works the other way around.
I'm pretty sure the price of the other From Software games (Dark Souls titles especially) went up after Elden Ring got super popular. And I know my interest in them did as well (I'd only played DS1 prior). Seems like a reasonable market reaction to demand, but damn there went my hopes of getting them cheap for my patience lol
On the opposite end there are games like Terraria which was inexpensive from the start and in bundles and everything but grew to like 10x it's original scope, I think somehow without a major price bump.
inflation had doubled the cost of most things. If he priced it originally in early 2022 or earlier this is not even keeping pace.