I recently saw a couple of blog posts discussing the price point of indie games. Here’s a good writeup by Dave Gilbert, author of games like The Shivah and The Blackwell Legacy. Another good piece is the How to Afford that $15 Indie Game comic. Be sure to read the comments there for a variety of opinions.

Like so many other indie developers I’m finding myself on the fence regarding this. $15 and $19.99 is often a lot of money for an indie game, but I think that a price point of below $5 is ridiculous. That’s pocket change. That’s also one of the reasons I’m not considering porting my games to iPhone or iPad or i-whatever – it’s impossible to charge anything worthwhile there, and the amount of sales required to make any kind of money is ridiculously high.

All in all, I think that $15 is a good price for a decently long indie game. Maybe $10, if it’s just a couple of hours’ worth of gameplay. But that means a proper game of course – not just a cute single-screen timewaster with a clever innovative game mechanic. It’s a little like calling the kettle black, but in my own mind there’s a difference between simple flash games and a game that’s crafted to deliver a story or provide a progression of sorts.

“Wait a second,” says the observant reader. “If you’re so bleedin’ keen on selling games for $10-$15, how come your newest game Wildhollow is priced at $19.99?!”

Good question! The answer is that I don’t want to charge $20 for a game, but due to simple economics I’m pretty much forced to do so. My business model dictates that if I want to continue to make games, each game must make more than it costs to produce. This is so that I can afford higher production values for each new game – which in turn (in theory at least) will generate higher profits for the newer games. My ultimate goal is to produce very good games with very good production values.

With Wildhollow I made a couple of bad design decisions, and the end result isn’t perfect by any means. But the game has sold more than it cost to make, which means that it’s good enough for quite a few people to buy at a price of $19.99. My guess, before launching the game, was that the amount of extra people that would have bought the game at $10 or $15 would not have resulted in a higher profit than what I’m getting right now. And I firmly believe that that assessment was correct.

For my next game, working title Spandex Force: Superhero U, I have high hopes for a larger potential customer base which might mean a lower price. However, I’m also increasing the production budget, so nothing is set in stone…

My latest game Wildhollow was released before Christmas, and while I’m still no millionaire it’s selling enough to finance my next project. I’ll do a proper Wildhollow postmortem later, but right now I’m going to babble on about upcoming things. Interestingly enough, when I started working in Wildhollow it was just going to be a quick intermediate game before my next real project, Spandex Force 2. Stuff(TM) got in the way, though, and in the end I got delayed about a year. But now I’m back on track again, and the next game has the working title Spandex Force: Superhero U.

Just a crappy placeholder logo. Artwork and final title is still pending.

I’m pretty excited about this game for a number of reasons. If everything goes as planned, these are some of the highlights:

• More puzzles and more game types
• Battle mechanics innovations
• More customization with skill trees, sidekicks and items
• Wacky superheroes/villains combined with a superhero university setting. “X-Men meets The Tick meets Harry Potter.”
• Larger budget for backgrounds and (hopefully) GUI artwork
• Some voice acting, if the budget allows
• Possibly some online battles…
• And finally, I’m aiming for a release before summer

Another big thing about this game is that I’m trying a new development platform: Actionscript 3/Flash, which opens up a lot of new possibilities… I have some very cool ideas for that, but I need to see if everything is feasible first.

So yeah, this is what I’ve been occupying my time with for a number of weeks now. If nothing unforeseen comes along I think the schedule might hold, but we shall just have to wait and see…