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this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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Trying to raise the "standard" price to $80 will have very nice ripple effects of more pricing diversity, where each game will really consider what it's actually worth, which we haven't had for a long time. Even now we're getting first-party Microsoft titles releasing at $20, $30, and $50.
I think all it will do is raise the ceiling of what publishers are willing to price games at. If they think they can get away with it, they'll charge $80 instead of $70, with the rest being $70 and less just like it already is now.
Steam doesn't advertise at the scale of Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. It won't have a ripple effect because it won't change the degree to which artificial hype drives people towards the "Buy" button.
A lot of games priced at $70 right now are having a rough go of it, so charging more on top of that isn't going to help, but there are the likes of South of Midnight and Clair Obscur launching at $50. If your game isn't as hot of a commodity as Mario Kart, you're probably going to try to lure people in with a lower price.
Beautiful games, both. But again, they aren't having the full court press of advertising like a new Call of Duty or Final Fantasy or Diablo would.
That's the real cost savings. You don't need to change $80+ for a game if you aren't focused entirely on presale figures to justify your studio's budget.
Incidentally, you also get to focus on a better game. Balatro didn't need wall to wall subway ads in New York to end up on everyone's phones.
Steam doesn't need to. It's got the steam sale and a hundred million people to share memes of "sale so good spent all my money no time to play all the games I bought in such massive sale"
You don't need to promote if everyone else does it for you lol.
How much is Factorio worth though, everything?
The amount of time I've put in it could have cost me $200 and it would still be one of the best $/hr games I have
I bought it long before the steam release, back when multiplayer was in experimental. So glad that there are 1000s of hours that were never tracked so I don't need to see those.
If they charged according to value no one on Earth could afford to buy it