Is PC ONLY a viable business option?

[Thomas]

(22-02-2011 05:31 PM)Stuart Wrote:  As of February 2011, there are over 1,250 games available through Steam and over 30 million "active" (logged into in last 30 days) user accounts. I have checked today and there are 206 Indie games on Steam ranging in price from £0.99 to £17.99 (so about a sixth of all games I had been loking mostly in the Mac section which has a larger percentage of Indie games ).

Bejeweled 3 is there at £13.99 so I think we should bring in Rotasphere at £13.99 also. I know this seems high but if we believe its a good game we should reflect that in the price as people are obviously willing to pay this amount on Steam for a puzzle game. I know that personally I would be more likely to check out an Indie Game at a higher price point as it appears more professional. Also if after a month or two its not selling we can just drop the price.

Just to expand on this, this would be a good move from a business perspective because if we start cheap then we mantain the public appearance that we are a company releasing cheap games which is not the target audience we want if we ever hope to release AAA standard to the mainstream hardcore market in the future. We could potentially typecast ourselves and any attempt to release higher value games will alienate our customers.

I will say though that if we are releasing at 14 quid we had better make sure the final product is DAMN GOOD. If we pull it off, we will have a significantly lower sales target than my original projected 1000 a week. 250 a week (or maybe 300 taking into account tax) should enable us to break even while running at a professional capacity! Exciting times.