Pricing is the question other small developers ask us most, and it is also the one we are worst at answering with a straight face. There is no magic formula taped to the studio wall. There is a tactical fighter, a space shooter that costs less than a vending machine snack, a typing brawler, and a cozy cube rolling puzzle game, and every one of them went through the same slightly sweaty conversation: so, er, what do we charge for this?
Here is how those conversations actually go, mistakes left in.
The ninety nine cent experiment
Star Shredders is priced at 99 cents, and that was a deliberate choice rather than a lack of nerve. It is a prologue, a slice of a bigger story we want to tell, and we wanted the barrier to entry to be roughly the barrier of changing your mind about a pack of gum. A tiny price does a very specific job. It lets a curious player say yes without a single second of hesitation.
$0.99 the price of Star Shredders, chosen on purpose, not out of fear
The trade off is that you have now moved into the land of volume, where a few hundred sales can feel like nothing, and where you learn quickly that a low price is not the same thing as a marketing plan. People still have to find the game before the price can do any work at all.
Free is a price too, and it is the scariest one
Our demos cost nothing, and that zero is still a price. A free demo is you spending your best first impression up front and hoping it buys attention later. We have written before about how nerve wracking it is to ship one. The pricing lesson underneath all that anxiety is simple. Free is not a discount, it is a sample, and a sample has to taste like the full meal or it does more harm than a locked door. If your demo leaves people satisfied rather than hungry, you priced it wrong even though no money changed hands.
Why the slightly bigger games ask for a few dollars
PaddleUP and Type Fighters both sit at $4.99. That number did not fall out of a spreadsheet. It came from a gut check we recommend to anyone. Picture a real person who liked the trailer, imagine them seeing the price, and ask whether their face falls. At a fiver, a game has to clear a believable bar. It needs enough content, enough polish, and enough reason to come back that nobody feels silly for having paid. Type Fighters shipping with over two hundred secret techniques is not a random flourish. Depth is part of how you earn the right to a higher number.
The mistakes we keep making
We still anchor too low. When you have poured months into something, the instinct is to apologise for charging at all, and a price that is too low can quietly tell players the game might not be worth their time. We have also learned that slashing the price on day one to chase a splash can train your audience to wait for the next sale forever. And we have learned, the slow way, that currency conversion, regional pricing, and store cuts are a whole second game you have to play after you think you are finished. A clean dollar figure on a store page hides a surprising amount of arithmetic.
What we would tell a newer version of us
Price for the player you actually want, not the one who only showed up because it was cheap. Pick a number you can say out loud without flinching, make the game good enough that the number feels fair, then stop fiddling. The price is a promise, not a plea. You honour it by shipping something that makes the player glad they said yes.
We have not got this fully figured out, and anyone who tells you they have is probably selling a course. But if you are staring at the price field on your store page right now, quietly sweating, know that we have sweated over that exact same field more times than we would like to admit. You are in good company.
Now, back to the workbench. No sharks were harmed in the pricing of these games. Finn double checked the maths.
