How to price your indie game without guessing

At some point the store form asks for a number and you have to type one. Most developers pick it in an afternoon, based on a vague sense of what games like theirs cost, and then spend the following year wondering whether they got it wrong. It is one of the few decisions in a release that is both highly visible and almost impossible to undo cleanly.

There is no correct answer waiting to be found. What there is, is a set of things your price is doing whether you intended them or not: signalling how substantial your game is, positioning it against specific other games, and setting the ceiling on what discounting can do for you later. If you make those choices deliberately, the number at the end tends to take care of itself.

This article covers what a price communicates, how to build your own comparison set instead of borrowing someone else's rule of thumb, why discounts have to be part of the plan from the start, and why the right price is not one number but a different number in every country you sell in.

Your price talks before anyone plays

A price is read as a claim about the game. Before a single review exists, it tells a shopper roughly how long you think the game is, how finished you think it is, and how seriously you take it. That claim gets checked against your screenshots and your description within about two seconds, and any mismatch is felt as one.

This is why pricing low is not the safe option people assume it is. A price well under everything comparable does not read as generosity, it reads as a warning: an unfinished project, a template asset flip, something not worth the hour it would take to find out. It also caps what the game can earn per copy forever, since you cannot correct upward later without cost, and it drags the floor down for everything you release afterwards.

Pricing high is a different bet: it raises expectations to a level the game then has to meet, and the judgement about whether it did lands in your reviews. The mismatch to actually fear is not high or low in the abstract — it is a price that promises something your first hour does not deliver.

One more thing a price does that people forget: it filters your audience. A higher price brings fewer, more deliberate buyers who chose the game specifically; a very low price brings impulse buyers who may not have looked closely at what they were buying. Those two groups write different reviews, and review sentiment early on affects how the store treats you.

Build your own comparison set

The most common mistake here is comparing against the wrong games: the famous ones. Whatever the breakout hit in your genre charged is not evidence about what you should charge, because its price was supported by a marketing budget, a reputation, or a scale you do not have. Survivor bias is severe in this exercise — the games you can easily think of are the ones that succeeded.

Build a set deliberately instead. Look for games that match yours on the dimensions a shopper actually perceives: genre, scope, roughly how many hours the game lasts, production values, and whether they came from a solo developer or a studio. Recent releases only, because pricing norms drift. Aim for a dozen or more, including some that did modestly rather than only the ones you have heard of, and record what you find rather than holding it in your head.

Title | Price | Approx. hours | Review count | Released | Solo/team | Closer or farther from mine?
------+-------+---------------+--------------+----------+-----------+------------------------------
      |       |               |              |          |           |
      |       |               |              |          |           |
      |       |               |              |          |           |

Fill 12+ rows. Then answer:
  - What is the price BAND these games sit in, not the average?
  - Where in that band does my scope honestly sit?
  - Which of these would a shopper see next to mine, and how do I look beside it?

What you are looking for at the end is a band, not a number. Games genuinely like yours will occupy a range, and your job is to decide where inside that range your game honestly sits — then place it there rather than at the bottom out of nervousness.

Resist one specific temptation while doing this: pricing by hours of content. The idea that a game should cost a fixed amount per hour of playtime is intuitive and does not survive contact with reality. It penalises tight, replayable, dense games and rewards padding, and shoppers do not do that arithmetic. What they do instead is decide whether the whole thing looks worth the number, which is a judgement about the experience rather than its duration.

Assume discounts from the beginning

For most games on most storefronts, a large share of lifetime units are sold at a discount rather than at full price. That is not a failure state, it is how these stores work: seasonal sales are when a huge number of people go shopping, and being visible during them matters. So your base price is not really the price most buyers pay — it is the number the discount is calculated from.

That changes how you should choose it. Set the base price so that the discounted price you expect to sell most copies at is still a price you are happy with, and so that the discount percentages you plan to run are believable rather than desperate. A game that launches at a price it discounts steeply within a couple of months teaches its own audience to wait, and that lesson sticks: people who bought at full price feel penalised, and people who did not learn that they were right.

Launch discounts are their own decision. A modest launch discount is a normal convention and gives wishlisters a reason to buy immediately, which concentrates sales into the window when visibility is highest. A deep launch discount does the opposite of what it looks like — it starts the game's price history at a low point, and every later sale is measured against it.

Storefronts also impose rules here: how soon after release you may discount, how long you must wait between discounts, and how a price change interacts with an ongoing sale. These rules change, so read the current documentation on your store's partner site rather than relying on what someone posted a few years ago. Getting this wrong can mean missing a seasonal event entirely.

The right price is different in different countries

Your price is not one number. Every storefront that sells internationally converts it into local currency for each region, and what makes a game a reasonable purchase differs enormously between countries, because incomes do. A price that is an easy impulse buy in one market is a considered purchase in another and simply out of reach in a third.

The classic mistake is to convert your home price by exchange rate and call it done. Exchange rates say nothing about what a game is worth to someone living on a different income, and a mechanically converted price frequently lands somewhere that reads as absurd locally. Storefronts publish suggested regional prices for exactly this reason, and they are built from more information about local purchasing behaviour than you have. Start from those suggestions and deviate only where you have an actual reason.

There is an interaction here that pricing discussions usually miss. Price is only one of the two barriers between a player in another country and a purchase; the other is whether they can read your store page and play your game at all. Lowering your price in a market where nobody can read your description does not help you, because the objection was never the price. It is worth checking which of the two obstacles you are actually facing in a given region before you decide that the answer is to charge less there.

Once you have sold in a region for a while, your own back end will tell you more than any guideline: where your wishlists and units come from, and where traffic arrives but never converts. A region with heavy traffic and almost no conversions is a place worth investigating specifically, and the cause is as likely to be a language barrier as a price one.

What you can and cannot change after launch

Price changes are not symmetric, and understanding the asymmetry before you launch saves regret afterwards.

• Lowering the base price permanently is straightforward mechanically and irreversible socially. Everyone who paid more remembers, and it resets what your game is understood to be worth
• Raising the price is possible and legitimate — especially after a major content update or leaving early access — but it must be announced in advance and justified, or it reads as a bait and switch to people who wishlisted at the old number
• Discount depth ratchets in the audience's memory. The deepest discount you have ever run becomes the price patient buyers wait for
• Regional prices can be adjusted independently, which makes them a lower-risk place to experiment than your base price
• Bundles, demos, and free weekends change what people get for the money without touching the price itself, which is often the better lever

Given all that, the practical advice is boring and correct: spend a few hours building a real comparison set, place yourself honestly within the band it reveals, start from the storefront's regional suggestions rather than your own conversions, avoid a deep launch discount, and give the price six months before you conclude anything from your sales figures. Pricing is one of the few release decisions where doing the homework genuinely narrows the range of reasonable answers.