How Right Is The Price?

It’s so far past my bedtime it’s not even funny but while I struggle with my sleep rhythm and lay here hopefully soon to fall asleep I couldn’t stop thinking about the recent resurfacing of the ancient and yet evergreen issue of how to price indie games- PDFs especially. And as with many things lately, my instinct was to design about it. After the fugue state was over I found I still had some thoughts, so here we are. 

Have you ever scrolled on itch and found a game you wanted to get and thought…

“How much should I pay for this PDF?”

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Step One: Keep this handy chart and a d6 ready on the side

Step Two: Pick a game off your wishlist on itch.io or from one of the many games on the browse pages

Step Three: Go to buy the game and before confirming the price, roll 1d6 and follow the instructions on the IVA-Chart

I Value Art Chart (IVA Chart)

1. The suggested price on the Pay What You Can Suggestion + a $15 tip

2. $50, if the game is over $50 roll again

3. Whatever the price is + a $10 tip

4. $30, if the game is over $30 roll again

5. The suggested price on the Pay What You Can Suggestion + a $25 tip

6. $100, change the course of that designer’s entire week for the better 

Step Four: Pay for the game accordingly. Congratulations, you have made someone’s day, possibly someone’s whole month! You might be the reason they get groceries today, you might have put a smile on their face that comes up every time they remember your purchase, you might have restored some of their faith in humanity’s appreciation for the arts. 

Bonus Round: Leave a nice comment and rating on the game you just bought! You don’t have to do it immediately but when you’ve read or played the game you can choose to do so. Your reward is helping fuel a creative to keep creating, and saying thank you for designing something you find cool is just a really nice thing to do.

This game has infinite replayability and you’ll never get the same ending twice🫡 

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All jokes aside… things are tough for a lot of people, and the arts are, as they often are, under attack. As long as I’ve been a game designer, as long as I’ve been creative in a professional-ish capacity even, pricing has been a nightmare. It’s a hassle to figure out, inflation is daunting, nearly every public  discussion about the pricing of creative work is fraught with argument and judgement. 

I’ve been told to value myself realistically and found everyone had different ideas of what ‘realistic’ means. 

I’ve been told to aim low and try to catch sales in the $5 below pages and hope the number of people that go for it outweighs the hypothetical number that would buy at a higher price- something I can never know for sure. I’ve been told the opposite. I’ve been told nobody would ever buy my games at retail-usual prices- even though many of my games took months or years to develop and come with streaming assets ready to plug and play with that value in thousands of dollars of unpaid work- before I even begin to calculate the unpaid hours that went into the game itself, OR its layout. 

I’ve been afraid pricing myself at a ‘realistic’ rate for the work behind many of my games would prevent the games I’ve put so much heart and soul into from ever being played or even read, cutting me off internally from one of my greatest motivators, you.

The readers, the players, the GMs. Everything I make I make for two people. Myself, and the fictional person in my head who sees/reads/plays my game… and falls in love with it, the fictional person who counts my game among their favorites of all time, who seeks comfort in it even in just thinking about it like I do in my favorite games. The idea that asking to be valued for my work and time could stop a game from ever getting out there to start with breaks my heart and honestly, I think the cure for that is to loudly, proudly and firmly come together and demand creative work be valued higher than it has been, and that can happen from the consumer side too. In fact it is imperative that it does. 

Artists, like I’ve said, are constantly struggling to value their work monetarily and many like myself are constantly debating their pricing and considering if upping or lowering a piece by even just $1 would make or break them. That’s where you come in, because you can cut through all of that noise with a single “name has bought your game for $$$” 

Your money has power, this is not a new concept, hell I’m not even the first person to write about this this week. Now, if you’re living in poverty, if your rent is just dollars away from not being covered, if you make no money and rely on free community copies, this game wasn’t made for you, at least not now. I can’t count how many “to buy when I have money” collections I’ve seen my games in (it means a lot to me I appreciate the sentiment a lot), but I made this for those with the ability to spend an extra $10 (or $100 if ur nasty) a month to help make an actionable difference in the vast community of creatives out here making games and passing the same $5 back and forth. 

Ironically one of the most viewed pieces of media I’ve made was a guide to industry fair pricing for the production of AP and Web series for indie Studios, an area that homes many a predatory start up in disguise, forcing people to seriously acknowledge all the moving parts and hours that go into these shows. That, people understood, for the most part. Some struggled a bit with my notion that you are indeed not entitled to the labor of others and not entitled to success, but I digress. 

So the web series/AP/TV adjacent pricing, people mostly get, but indie/solo game design comes up and suddenly we’re in the same circle of discussion we’ve been in since far before my time. 

Tip your game designers and begin the practice of paying (within your means) more than the suggested and often far too low to be compensatory prices. 

If you buy a $5 game at $10, read or play it and go…”Holy Shit, that was incredible, so much care went into that/ That’s going to stay with me a while/Something similarly touching.” Go back and add another tip, find the creators Kofi or PayPal or whatever and tip them again, or if you can pay a full retail-esque price, have at it. 

Show artists that you see what they’re worth and that you’re willing to do what it takes for them to see it. Which is pay them. 

(How Right Is The Price? The ‘game/guide can be downloaded for PWYC on cutestpatoot.itch.io/how-right-is-the-price