Why this is counterintuitive: Simple scarcity, right? More games should be pushing prices down!
Nope.
Read whatever psychology you want into that. It's a rich vein, but I'm not gonna touch it.
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.
Charge what your game is worth, offer hardship discounts and participate in bundles. You'll hit all these folks.
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.
Competing on price is a fool's strategy.
The trick is to do it *deliberately*.
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.
But I'm saying that undervaluing your work won't help
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.
Games always struggle with this a bit, because there's a fair question to ask about what you're *buying*.
The good news is, people don't work this way.
They don't buy A book, they buy THAT book.
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.
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.
But presumably you aren't making commodities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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 double down on the knitting? A lot of people will hate it.
That's ideal.
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
The market is a dick. Ignore it. Find your fans instead.
Hard, hard work.
99 cents is fine. Don't sweat it.
So long as you're honest with yourself, it all works out.
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.
I got no answer about shoulds. All I know is that - barring a lot of luck - it's not.
And that SUCKS.
Sorry.
Spoiler, this is also work.
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.
* Consider charging more than the bare minimum for your games, please.
* Marketing is not a dirty word.
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.
They are not.
And you need to believe that.
RPGs can support as diverse a range of prices as it can ideas.
This is admirable, but at the small scale, self destructive.
So, please, separate the considerations. There are plenty of ways to offer hardship options for your game which *don't* devalue it.