Today indie gem PixelJunk Eden went on sale on Steam for just one dollar, and Q-games' Dylan Cuthbert explained just how much that kind of sale can be beneficial to an indie developer.
Throughout the history of video games, there have been titles that permanently shifted the industry. These games are generally not hard to spot, as their influence quickly earned them a place in our pop culture. Tetris, Super Mario 64, Halo, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, each of these games caused massive shifts in their respective genres and gaming as a whole. But for each of these, there are also games whose influence, though significant, is largely forgotten.
From GI.biz: "Towards the tail end of 2021, Q-Games accomplished something very rare in this industry: it had reclaimed its intellectual property, specifically for PS4 exclusive The Tomorrow Children.
In the announcement tweet, the Japan-based company described it as "a historical move by Sony Interactive Entertainment" and it's hard to argue with that. The game was originally published as a second-party title, funded by PlayStation, and it's typical for the platform holder to retain the IP rights in such a partnership."
PixelJunk Eden 2 manages the perfect balance between engaging gameplay and a relaxing, entrancing audiovisual experience.
Hopefully this is noted by the big greedy corporate dogs & they can take note that intentionally trying to bleed there customer base dry is not the best way of doing things!
Like hearing stuff like this , happy for pixeljunk.
even though they said this console gamers will still not understand. they even said they made as much as the money the generated since its launch in one day. but pc gamers dont support games. it took 8 hr to make what took them to make being exclusive to ps. this makes what every ps fanboy say about sales irrelevant.
This game is crazy good and challenging as hell, if you haven't played it, do yourself a favor and get this now.
On the one hand, this makes you think perhaps the price of games at launch should be lower, or at least that the permanent price should be lowered further and sooner after launch than is traditional these days.
But it does sort of beg the question... if the price didn't appear to be such a shockingly low number in comparison to the usual price, would the droves go out and buy it up as they did? If you could get it for $1 all the time, how many of the people that bought it for $1 during this sale would not have bought it anytime soon because it's just another every day game for a buck, the kind of thing you just say "I wonder if it's any good?" and "Maybe some day, if I'm bored and there's nothing else to play."
But when a $10 game is temporarily sold for $1, it makes people jump out of their shoes to buy it because they know the price won't last.
And to add even more on top, the fact that the sale price is occurring during a huge sale across the board, with thousands of titles reduced, that over-arching sale brings people to the door (so to speak) so they can discover the $1 sale price of this particular item in the first place. If this was the only game on sale, would I have even heard about it? But because it was reduced along with the majority of the entire catalog, I was drawn to visit the site in the first place, and discovered this excellent deal.
Then again, there's also the matter that since so many other games are available for such a good price along with this one, that it draws attention away from it.
Long story short... finding the correct price, and when to have sales and when to do permanent price restructuring, etc., it's a very complicated decision process, and getting it just right to maximize your profits in a digital distribution world where each sale is practically entirely "profit" (because there are very little physical expenses that go into distributing each new instance of the item).
With this distribution model, selling 50 million copies for 1 dollar each is OBJECTIVELY and UNIVERSALLY better than selling 1 million copies for 30 dollars each. That isn't the case necessarily for products that are distributed physically, but in a digital world, the more gross income you make, the better you are, no matter how many times you had to give away those bits of data to earn the revenue. In this industry, revenue = profit, so you can be a lot more flexible with your pricing structure to maximize that revenue without having to worry about things like taking a loss on the item by selling it below manufacturing & distribution costs for a physical good.