[bnralt]

Being passionate doesn’t guarantee a game being a success, though. Look at a game like Knights of the Chalice 2. It's definitely a labor of love, and many people who play it think it has the best DnD combat of any game out there, and maybe some of the best turn-based combat as well. It has mediocre graphics, though, and a high price point, so it’s had extremely slow discoverability. It also has a somewhat niche audience (people really into complex DnD combat), so it’s not clear how much of an audience is out there even if discoverability wasn’t an issue.

[hwbunny]

People are in their own bubble and believe everything that people say to them on the internet. People lie all the time, plus they don't want to create friction by saying that a specific game is, well, shit. That game is built on already outdated foundations. You need to give something to users that will stimulate them.

[bnralt]

> People lie all the time, plus they don't want to create friction by saying that a specific game is, well, shit

The places I frequent say that about games all the time. For instance, though the game I mentioned gets highly praised there, almost everyone trashed the author’s previous RTS game. Some places might give every game universal acclaim, but plenty of places have people who will openly call a game garbage.

[hwbunny]

List those places please...

[somenameforme]

That price point is one of the most ridiculous I've seen, and is just lighting money on fire! The game looks great (erm.. so to speak) - clearly extremely heavily influenced by the Gold Box games, but I have no clue at all what the dev was thinking with that price. I am his demographic, and I'm not even considering the game at that price.

[johnnyanmac]

>I am his demographic, and I'm not even considering the game at that price.

That the dev spent tens of thousands of hours on a very niche genre, and that it was better to sell to 10k fans @$45 than to risk selling 25k copies @ $20 (random sales numbers).

It's a common strategy in Japanese game development. Some games are just very niche, so lowering the price doesn't necessarily increase sales proportionately. It just means less money from financially inflexble fans. So keep the price AAA level and target those fans.

[somenameforme]

Haha, when I initially wrote my comment I referenced a little inside 'joke' of sorts I have with some friends in games, referring to stuff as 'Japanese pricing.' I decided to snip that off because I figured it might be too esoteric. But I guess none of us is a snowflake, are we? The thing I'd observe is that Japanese pricing fails, hard - even for Japanese games. It seems a handful of Japanese publishers have realized this. NIS is a great example - they publish a huge amount of stuff, nearly all of it's niche, and it sells crazy well - because it's sold at a reasonable price. SEGA is the equal but opposite example. They still seem to think this is 2001 and they're selling games on a ringfenced console to players starved for content. And so their games are completely flopping.

Compare Etrian Odyssey (SEGA) with Disgaea (NIS). Both games are a fairly comparable genre, with fairly comparable production values, targeting the same demographic, and both were also PC ports/remakes of older classics. Disgaea is less than half the cost and has is pushing an order of magnitude greater sales. Also I think the concept of "niche" is somewhat obsolete.. kind of circling back to the point that none of us a snowflake. The market is so huge and diverse. Even for the most niche titles, there tends to be huge market potential, because "niche" markets now a days are larger than the whole market not that long ago. Games like Mount and Blade are just niche Eurojank embodied, yet has sold millions. Siralim is another great niche game. It sells excellently, especially considering the dev keeps releasing pretty much the same game ever couple of years.

Finally, the West is an increasingly small part of the overall market. There are huge numbers of Chinese, Russian, Indian, and so on gamers. Region pricing kind of adapts to this, but not really. In terms of exchange rates it's extremely favorable, but what really matters is PPP - how much a unit of currency is "worth" in domestic prices. So for instance the $45 game is sold for about 1000 rupees. I don't live in India but a quick search turns up a rent-by-day place in the cheaper parts of India can go as low as 100 rupee a day. So even though $45 exchanges for like 4000 rupees, it's worth far less (in terms of how far it goes in America) than even the 1000 rupees that the game is sold for India. So when you set the price of your game high in dollar terms, you're setting it to just LOL terms for most of the world.

[johnnyanmac]

>Also I think the concept of "niche" is somewhat obsolete.. kind of circling back to the point that none of us a snowflake. The market is so huge and diverse. Even for the most niche titles, there tends to be huge market potential, because "niche" markets now a days are larger than the whole market not that long ago.

The market is larger, yes. I don't think it's gotten that much easier to target your marketed towards those audiences. the privacy changes on IOS/Android are great, but it has an unfortunate consequence that these more intimate styles of ads are now nearly impossible to channel to the right person. So you have to go to the good ol' fashioned social media blitz. Something everyone else is also trying to do. It's never been harder to get a person's attention.

Essentially, those titles you mention relied heavily on word of mouth (except Mount and Blade, but that was from a different era of gaming). I'm not sure I trust WoM enough to stake my entire livelihood on it. Gamers can be fickle, or timing can just take some cruel turns and ruin all that trajectory built up.

>Finally, the West is an increasingly small part of the overall market. There are huge numbers of Chinese, Russian, Indian, and so on gamers.

I don't disagree. But the top factors still apply. Very few are going to risk losing the USD to try and get more rupees/yuan. Russia and China in particular are pretty infamous for their piracy rates.

On top of that, getting a good localization can be too much for a smaller indie, and even those who afford it can never assure quality. Localization is a very hard process for games that need more than simply UI text to be done.

[bnralt]

Yeah, the developer is a bit eccentric, which seems to be common when it comes to these passion products. At one point I believe some of the really big fans of the game were pushing him for a price reduction to increase the amount of players (it comes with a NWN style module creator, so a bigger community is important). From what I recall the response was something like, “You know, you’re right, I’ll go ahead and make a 10% discount during the next Steam sale.”

Or you have developers like Iron Tower Studios (Age of Decadence, Colony Ship RPG). The lead developer actually seems to have pretty good business acumen, and is pretty open about the studios finances. But he’s also a perfectionist, and the huge amount of time between games means that the studio requires a lot of sales to stay afloat. The last update from them I saw was that the launch of Colony Ship was good, but it’s still unclear if it’s good enough to support them for several more years while they make another passion project.