I doubt this’ll be well received, but I actually don’t think Silksong should be used to set price expectations. Hollow Knight made a shocking amount of money, massive sales were guaranteed, and the tiny dev team has enough money to pretty much vibe and make cool stuff forever.
Please don’t compare other indie game prices to this, when those games can’t guarantee their financial security, or massive sales number to turn a profit regardless of price.
Also, unrelated, but reading through the Bloomberg interview, and knowing what they charged for HK, 20$ is actually exactly what I assumed Silksong would cost well before it was announced, the shock for that kinda caught me off guard.
The thing is, producing another copy doesn’t cost you money. So, if you price it at $20 and 4 people buy it, when only one person would have bought it at $80, then you’ve made the same money.
They only decide it to put the price as high as they do, because they hope to extract as much money as possible from the fools that buy at release. Then they later put it on sale in hopes of also collecting the money from those not willing to pay $80.
On some level, I assume these folks know how to make as much money as possible, but the same time, I do feel like the hype around Silksong would be a fraction of its size, if the game cost $80.
I doubt this’ll be well received, but I actually don’t think Silksong should be used to set price expectations. Hollow Knight made a shocking amount of money, massive sales were guaranteed, and the tiny dev team has enough money to pretty much vibe and make cool stuff forever.
Please don’t compare other indie game prices to this, when those games can’t guarantee their financial security, or massive sales number to turn a profit regardless of price.
Also, unrelated, but reading through the Bloomberg interview, and knowing what they charged for HK, 20$ is actually exactly what I assumed Silksong would cost well before it was announced, the shock for that kinda caught me off guard.
$20 doesn’t make sense for AAA games with budgets in the $100 million range. Maybe we need fewer of those though.
The thing is, producing another copy doesn’t cost you money. So, if you price it at $20 and 4 people buy it, when only one person would have bought it at $80, then you’ve made the same money.
They only decide it to put the price as high as they do, because they hope to extract as much money as possible from the fools that buy at release. Then they later put it on sale in hopes of also collecting the money from those not willing to pay $80.
On some level, I assume these folks know how to make as much money as possible, but the same time, I do feel like the hype around Silksong would be a fraction of its size, if the game cost $80.
maybe it’s the other way around. I’m not convinced budgets in the $100 million range makes sense.
The larger the scale of games gets, the more people need to get paid to get them made.
Sure, you can argue that the scale doesn’t need to get bigger, but people vote with their wallets.