Thread by @rdonoghue

So, here's a counterintuitive pitch - The excess of games is a reason for you to *raise* the price of your game, not lower it. Especially online.

Why this is counterintuitive: Simple scarcity, right? More games should be pushing prices down!

Nope.

RPGs have decades of fear based pricing behind them. We're underpriced by every metric imaginable because of this (and we also underpay as a result). Compare an RPG book to any comparable product in another field and the price delta is HUGE.

But the FEAR has always been that introducing a barrier to adoption would (like fair pricing) might scare people off, and our sense/fear has always been that people are EASILY scared off.

Read whatever psychology you want into that. It's a rich vein, but I'm not gonna touch it.

Fast forward to now: The audience *exists*. They do. Accepting that is weird and hard, but it's real.

And they're going to buy your game if they feel like it is offering them what they want.

And by extension, they are willing to PAY MORE if it's what they want.

To be clear, I am not saying price sensitivity is not a thing. Hardship and bargain seeking are also real factors, but they are not good *defaults*.

Charge what your game is worth, offer hardship discounts and participate in bundles. You'll hit all these folks.

But the heart of the challenge is this:

There are so many games out there, the hard part is *finding* your audience. They may exist, but how do they connect to your game?

Lots of answers to that, but "lower prices" is not one of them.

The simple reality is that a low price, in RPGs, is not a differentiator in any useful way. You are competing against an underpriced field, with a SUBSTANTIAL free component.

Competing on price is a fool's strategy.

Caveats and qualifiers if you're operating at a scale where you make boxed sets or need to think about where in the physical store your product goes. For those products, price point is part of the math, but it's STRATEGIC, not "oh god, if I'm cheap enough someone might buy me"

There is an illusionary sense that if we price our games cheaply enough, then we can't *really* fail, because *someone* will buy them. If, on the other hand, we charge a fair price and no one buys it, we have to face the possibility that it has no audience.

It is emotionally easier to lose thousands of dollars on a business venture than it is to face the possibility that no one likes the thing you love.

(unless you can't afford the thousands of dollars, in which case it's just all doubly worse)

Now, the good news is, your game PROBABLY has an audience, and your challenges are more in the design & marketing space. But even that can be hard to hear. Easier to just charge less and shrug.

Also, if you genuinely don't care about the business end? Charge whatever you want. But if you're charging less than it's worth, consider that maybe there's an unacknowledged reason.

And, of course, Free is an option. In many cases, it's a better choice than undercharging. Depending on what your goal is, free products, support or similar can (and maybe should) be part of your overall plan.

The trick is to do it *deliberately*.

To boil it down:

Price deliberately, not reflexively.

Reflexive pricing will be foolishly low, because we want to be liked and we want to follow the crowd.

Deliberate pricing means our price (like the rest of our work) reflects what we value.

As an aside, this is actually one thing where online platforms create a little more friction by charging a percentage. For a print product, if you add $5 to the price tag, costs don't change. For a PDF on a platform, they do. Does odd things to incentives, both good and bad.

I note, I do not say this blithely. There are still a LOT of challenges for a designer putting their work out there. Discoverability has always been a bugbear, but it's been steadily growing into a full fledged boss monster.

But I'm saying that undervaluing your work won't help

Oh, right, scarcity.

Ok, so the elephant in the room is that *other* games are cheap. How can you charge $10 for your RPG when someone could buy ten $0.99 RPGs instead?

The answer is this: Because games are not interchangeable.

Price substitution math depends on the idea that all else is roughly equal, and that we're talking apples to apple.

Games always struggle with this a bit, because there's a fair question to ask about what you're *buying*.

If all you're buying is a way to spend time, then games are largely interchangeable. And more, you now want to account for OTHER ways to spend time in your price math! Why buy your game when they could spend that money on netflix?

The good news is, people don't work this way.

Actually, it's not 100% good news. If people actually did the math on cost vs. hours of entertainment, RPGs would look REALLY GOOD. But people have been making that argument for decades without moving the needle.

But the reality is that people are more specific in what they buy, and make decisions for MANY more reasons that price. Again, while price sensitivity exists, it is not the primary driver behind *which* books or movies a person buys.

They don't buy A book, they buy THAT book.

Which brings us back to our single $10 games vs ten $1 games.

The price question is a distraction. If one of those 11 games is the game I WANT TO PLAY, then that's the one I buy, whether it's $1 or $10.

If I'm uncertain or merely curious, am I more likely to buy a $1 game?

Yes, absolutely. And that also ABSOLUTELY means that any given $1 game will probably get more sales than the $10 game in terms of units moved.

But it's not going to sell 10x as many units. More like 2-3x.

Again, many caveats and exceptions and edge cases apply, but speaking generally, the potential upside of the drastically lower price tends to cancel itself out unless you are selling a commodity product.

It is possible to sell an RPG commodity, if you're feeling cynical enough. DM's guild definitely as products that feel like that's the business model, and that's fine - THEY can and should compete on price and "quality".

But presumably you aren't making commodities.

You are making a unique thing which offers a unique value.

Given that, pricing it on externalities is going to produce pretty bad results, so instead you are probably best served pricing it on the value of your effort. At least in a ballpark sense.

This is hard.

Valuing your effort can feel like swagger. And, worse, it is the thing that opens the emotional door to tying it to YOUR value. Separating "The value of my work" and "my value as a human being" is HARD AS HELL, but also necessary.

Because some things just won't sell. No matter how brilliant you are. No matter how much you love them.

And if you can't separate the economic value from the personal value, that become a referendum on YOU as. perso,. That is profoundly terrible place to be.

You as a person. Man, I reread that paragraph like 4 times and still missed that typo.

Ok, so here's where I contradict myself:

It's your game. Price it however the hell you like. The price you choose is the right price. That is how it *should* work.

But the point of all this is: Don't think you HAVE to charge the smallest amount possible to succeed.

It is not unreasonable to think that the value of your work is higher than "The absolute minimum possible".

Yes, if you raise the price, there are some sales you will not make.

But the sales you DO make will be to the people who WANT YOUR GAME, not just a bargain.

Yes, it is possible to price your game so high that you drive people off and see diminishing returns

Possible, but unlikely. If RPG pricing ever gets CLOSE to this being a common problem rather than a dangerous hypothetical, I'm willing to worry about it.

Today is not that day

I want to double down on something:

You WANT the people who buy your game to be the people who WANT your game.

That seems obvious, but it's not the pattern we follow - our practices largely are those of people who want EVERYONE to buy our game.

That is a recipe for disaster

Your audience is not and should not be everyone.

This can be hard to accept, because everyone has a lot of money, and we'd all like to be loved.

But it's the path to making a half assed game.

If you cannot look at anyone and say "This game is not for you" then it's unreasonable to expect anyone to ever get excited about it.

If I make a knitting RPG, and I make it for a universal audience, I'm going to water down everything unique and interesting about the game to the point where no one is likely to care.

If I double down on the knitting? A lot of people will hate it.

That's ideal.

I am making this game for the slice of players who are REALLY into knitting. Who love it like I do. They're a great audience to have because they'll buy the game, enjoy it and share it. It helps create FANS, not just customers.

But to do that, I need to make a product that the non-knitters will find crappy.

If I'm deliberate, then this is fine. It's an indication that I'm doing it right.

If I'm not, then I panic and add some skirmish rules in hopes of appeasing this angry audience. This will fail

This comes back to pricing in this way: If you make the thing that people love, they will *thank you* for creating it. The price tag will just be a detail. You can afford to charge those people enough to pay your bills, and they will understand why you're doing that.

If you're trying to please "The market", then your hosed. The market resents every penny it has to spend, and will make you feel bad for your temerity in trying to not starve.

The market is a dick. Ignore it. Find your fans instead.

I say this blithely, but it's hard work. it demands that you do the work in finding and reaching those fans. it demands you LISTEN to them. It demands humility in finding the great product, not the hubris of delivering your brilliance.

Hard, hard work.

If you don't want to do that work?

99 cents is fine. Don't sweat it.

Not saying this unkindly. Finding and connecting with an audience is a LOT of work, with uncertain rewards. A lot of people just want to make a thing and get it out into the world. That's perfectly reasonable and valid.

So long as you're honest with yourself, it all works out.

A rough truth is this: If making the thing is its own reward, then you're set.

But if you want ANYTHING more than that, whether it's profit, acclaim, to just the satisfaction that people are using your thing, then you are now challenged to step into a new arena.

This feels profoundly unfair. The act of making things is a lot of work. Shouldn't that be enough?

I got no answer about shoulds. All I know is that - barring a lot of luck - it's not.

And that SUCKS.

Sorry.

Leads to a somewhat separate topic, but if you've stepped into this arena, it's probably time to start learning more about marketing. Actual marketing, not the thing you imagine marketing to be. That's probably advertising or Public Relations.

Done right, marketing is the set of practices that helps your game connect with the people who would love you game, but who would otherwise continue their lives unaware that this treasure is sitting there, waiting for them.

Spoiler, this is also work.

But as we enter a world with SO MANY GAMES, this practice becomes more important.

If your game has the perfect audience out there, how would they know? How are they even going to know to *look* for it?

Lots of answers. Some of them awesome. None of them easy.

TL;DR
* Consider charging more than the bare minimum for your games, please.
* Marketing is not a dirty word.

Crap, that was a good closer, but I realized there's one other addendum

As soon as you start talking about raising the price of your RPG, or that of RPGs in general, you are going to get a reply from the person who fears being priced out of the hobby

This will break your heart.

Sometimes, this will just be an asshole troll deciding to flex their whatabout, but often it is a genuine concern. TTRPGs are a refuge for a lot of people who deal with a lot of hard stuff, and often that hard stuff goes hand in hand with financial hardship.

There is a fear that "You deserve to charge more for your games" is the same argument as "RPGs need to go more deluxe to compete in the marketplace. $100 boxed sets are the future."

They are not.

But just saying so is not very reassuring, especially because yes, there IS genuine market pressure to "upscale" the RPG market in ways that the boardgame market has modeled successfully. The $100 barrier got broken a while back, and it's going to keep getting broken.

But charging $5 or $10 for your PDF rather than 99 cents is not the same thing.

And you need to believe that.

RPGs can support as diverse a range of prices as it can ideas.

I call this out explicitly because we are, by and large, good hearted and empathetic people, and one of the things that keeps us undercharging is that we don't want to be gatekeepers with our price tags.

This is admirable, but at the small scale, self destructive.

If you don't *believe* in your price, it's going to chafe on you, simple as that. And hardship seems a valid reason to undercut your own belief.

So, please, separate the considerations. There are plenty of ways to offer hardship options for your game which *don't* devalue it.

(I am mostly calling this out because it is a pressure that I am INCREDIBLY sensitive too. But that says more about me than anything about making games accessible to people. )