Release a game for £2.50 or £5 ???
Miscellaneous Forums/General Discussion/Release a game for £2.50 or £5 ???
Which would make more money? It's not a trick question. When geometry wars showed up on Steam for £2.50, I bought it because it felt like it was almost free. So I didn't care, if it had been £5 or more, I might have thought twice, as I already had it on Xbox. SO I'm thinking, would you get more than double the sales selling at £2.50 than at £5? Cause that way you've make more cash. The ratio could be even greater. I'd rather sell 10,000 copies at £2.50 than 500 copies at £5.
I buy lots of games on xbla simply because they're only £3.50 so I don't even notice the cost. Am I a common buyer in this sense?
Problem is that if you put a game out at £2.50, there's not going to be very much left after BMT/Plimus/ShareIt/Whoever else has taken their cut.
Use paypal, they work on a basic % rather than a "minumum + %". I think there is a minimum but its like pence.
Ive stopped using them personally because if i use share it i dont have to do all my own VAT calculations on every order, simply raise an accounting invoice once a month.
Also customers get it at 16% VAT (german rate) rather than the 25% Scandinavian rate. This is because share-it are classed as third party "shop" rather than a "bank account".
If you live in the UK though you probably dont have to worry about VAT on sales <50K or something.
Trouble with Paypal is that you're responsible for manually sending products to paying customers.
Quite a few people have come unstuck with Blitzplay and some other program recently (I think it was Dabz who paid and received nothing) when paying via Paypal.
True
Also to throw this into the cooking pot, supporting x2 the number of people @ £2.50 each or supporting half that at double the price!
What i guess i am trying to say, is there probably will be support issues for any software released, even if you did manage to sell it to that many more people - wont you just be making life hard for yourself?
All good points. I'm not about to release anything sale worthy, but it was just a thought for when that day comes. I'd have thought you could have an automatic download using paypal, like when you sell software via ebay?
And yes, in the UK, unless your revenue is over £70,000 then you don't have to charge VAT. Which is great if your working for yourself and taking 90% of the profit. Means you can be earning over £60,000 a year before needing to worry about VAT. Of course that does mean selling 25000 copies of my imaginary game every year. Or 2085 copies a month. Wow, I'd have to mail out 68 copies a day if it was physically delivered.
Nope, paypal just handle payments - they don't do digital delivery.
Has anyone used OSCommerce? That's a free open source online-store application but I don't know how easy it is to set up.
Im sure if you put your mind to it you could setup an automated paypal system.
Just a simple cron/schdtask php/blitz applications could check an inbox for payment confirmation details and then automatically bump off an email to said person giving them log in details for your website where they can download said product.
If your serious about the selling then it could be something to think of.
There's a world of difference between buying on XBLA and buying on an independent website, so the comparison doesn't necessarily hold. On XBLA, you have that one channel, not hundreds and thousands of site, and (correct me if I'm wrong) but I believe you can load money into your account and then buy items at another time, so the payment process isn't as tedious either.
When it comes to selling 10,000 at £2.50 versus 500 at £5.00, it's true of course, but you're missing out the most important factor. In order to get 500 sales at any price, you have to get 500 people to try and enjoy your game. IE: you need to advertise or somehow get the word out. Now exactly how many people that equates to is unknown, but it's likely to be a five figure number, and could even be a six figure number. Even if your conversion ratio increases massively, you're going to need to get even more eyeballs to get 10,000 buyers, except that you've now got half as much to spend on advertising, because your profit per sale is halved.
Leaving aside the big numbers, let's say shifting just twice as many copies at half the price, which is the least number you can sell without being worse off. It's hard to do when getting eyeballs is difficult and expensive in the first place, and even more so when your advertising budget is halved. Unless your conversion ratio is sky high (and if it is, are you really sure you couldn't be selling it for more?) you could easily be selling lots of copies and losing money because you're paying out more in advertising than you're making in profits.
That doesn't mean it's not worth exploring, but there are some big downsides to weigh against the possible benefits.
(I think it was Dabz who paid and received nothing) when paying via Paypal.
Yes, it was me... Though, I've put that down as a bad job, if the author isnt good enough to email the product or a link to it, and ignores emails and registration requests on their support (I'll use that term loosely) forums, then they are no bothering with, apart from ripping their so called company apart on the forums across the net.
Yes, I'm talking about empowergames, which have a tool in the toolbox called EasyBuilder3D. If you want to waste money on nothing, find a cliff and chuck your money over the ledge instead of fannying on with that!
They know who bought what.. So in my eyes, theres no excuse apart from being a lazy theiving set of fatherless children.
I have played with paypal sandbox in the past under ASP.NET, and there is a return url option when a payment is made, with a little jiggery pokery, it can be used to display to the user any product information they need, either automating an account setup or otherwise... Which I'm currently tinkering away at the moment.
Rather than selling a product for £2.50, it might be worth considering giving the product away for free and looking for alternative ways to monetize it, such as advertising.
Apart from credit card fees eating up the lions share of that amount, there's also an issue of perceived value.
Sell for at least a fiver. I mean what isn't worth five quid?
When Geometry Wars appeared on steam for $2.50 though, was that a promotion? Like "get it at this price till sunday"?
Cause for those, a crazy low price like that might work.
Though as others have stated, after you take into account what paypal or share*it would take, you'd probably be losing money if you charged that little yourself. Valve can do it because they've got a Visa charge account so they can charge almost as little as they like.
I would not sell any game for less than $10, and if you can charge $10, then you can probably charge $15.
And if the game's any good, I would definitely charge $15-$25 depending on just how good it is. That's the price of a DVD, and they price DVD's there because that's the impulse buy range for entertainment like that.
I wouldn't charge over $25 for a game, unless we're talking something big and commercial quality which has a lot of hype surrounding it.