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bo -> RE: Pricing on release (10/2/2013 3:53:01 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Numdydar
quote:
ORIGINAL: aspqrz
From what I understand of pricing for print products (tabletop pen and paper role playing games, see my Sig below) print RPG books are priced at 5-6 times the printing/layout/cost in order to make a profit. Based on it being a P&P RPG Book (which is a huge assumption, and almost certainly not completely accurate), I'd guess that the three books for WiF would cost out at around $4-6 depending on the size of the print run, paper quality, number of b&w vs colour pages, artwork other than screenshots (if any) and the like. Around 2/3rds that if they were softcover ... but I believe they're supposed to be hardcover
Again, assuming they were RPG books, that would mean that I'd guess you'd be looking at $20-36 per book, if they were being sold retail as stand alone books.
So, the books alone are nominally worth $90-110 or thereabouts (assuming 700+ pages between the three) ... add this to the price of the actual game itself ... assuming some similarity with WitP, with one game book, that would mean about $65 + $75 or around $140.
However, there is reason to believe that the game will be priced more like CMANO, so about $100 + 75 or around $175.
Now, that's piling conjecture on supposition - I have a fair handle on RPG pricing, at least the ballpark, but I am not the slightest bit au fait with Computer game pricing ... however, I'd suggest that the $140-175 figures I have suggested are probably in the ballpark, give or take.
YMMV.
Phil
I have to disagree with your analysis about printing. Printing costs in volume these days are extremely cheap. Especially for someone like Matrix. Additionally, the coding cost is far more costly than the printing cost. So they are not looking to make a profit on the manuals since without the code they would be pretty much useless [:)]. So the manuals are there to support the code base, not to be their own profit center.
There is also no way they could even come close to covering the development cost of the game either. So any 'normalized' P&L analysis on cost of goods sold and selling price has no real meaning in this case.
This entire effort was really a labor of love by Steve and Steve alone. To be honest, it was the only way this conversion was ever going to happen. If a typical game company developed this using a normal' development cycle, the game would have costed over $1M imho. But obviously that is just a wag [:)].
Steve stated that by his calulation, he has spent 99 months working on the game. Which is about 8 years. Assuming a normal work load over that period, that is about 16,000 man hours by Steve alone. But it is most likely higher than that [:)]
If we assume a 30% profit magrin (which is pretty high. After all Matrix is NOT Apple lol), Steve gets a 20% cut of the profits, and the game sells for $100 we have 0.3 * 0.2 * $100 = $6 that Steve would get from every sale. Let's be optimistic and say that 100,000 copies are sold [:)] That would mean that Steve would get $600K. Not too bad right?
But then divide the $600K by the number of hours so we have $600,000/16,000 and we get about $35/hour. Pretty cheap for a programer of Steve's talents.
Of course if they only sell 50K units then Steve's cut is halved to only $17.50. If 10K then Steve is down to $3.50/hour.
My guess at this point is that while Steve certainly deserves as much as he can get from the sales of WiF, the pricing of the game will have little to do with the cost of manuals or providing Steve with a decent hourly rate. The price will be set to move units. So I would be very surprised if the price was over the $100 mark since it wold be a huge departure for Matrix to price a game that high.
This of course does not mean they can't or will not, but crossing that $100 mark is a HUGE deal in a LOT of customer's eyes. Especially for a very nich game like this. Regardless of how well done it is.
As far as the customer population goes, I am positive Matrix and ADG know exactly how many people subscribe to both sites for this game. If they assume that this represents the 'buy' population then they have a pretty good idea for the amout of expected sales between release and the end of 2013.
They can futher assume that this represents the top 20% (or maybe 10%) of the entire WiF customer base. So they can also expect a lot smaller sell rate from this larger population as time goes on. So if there is 1,000 people in the 'buy' population, this means that the entire population that could be interested in buying the game is about 100K.
Assume this would mean about an 80% buy rate in the 'buy' population and maybe a 20-30% (if that) in the rest of the population. That would mean a projected units sold of 20-25K.
They can take the sell rate of Command (which is selling pretty well but has a much higher 'buy' population than WiF) and do various projections on price points and impact on sales and determine what the best price compared to units sold would be.
So this is a rough idea of how the process will work. In WiF's case, the price point will be determined to sell the maximum number of units and at the same time maximize profits. Not so much as to recoop Steve's LoE (sorry Steve).
So the pricing of manuals, CDs, etc. would all be contained in the cost of goods sold. From that point it is just a question of the difference in the sell price and the cost of goods (i.e. the cost to actually print, box the game, etc.) that determines how much pie (profit) there is to be passed around to all the interested parties, Matrix, Steve, ADG, etc.
Based on the above, I can easily see a $99.99 price point. But anything over that, will definately need to be well justified to the community.
There was a huge discussion over at the Distant Worlds forum about how much the base game and all the expansions would cost in order to have a 'good' gaming experience. Befiore Shadows was released, Ledgends was the third expansion. For a new person, the total cost to get to Ledgends was $125, base game $50, each expansion $25. A lot of people refused to buy the game because of this. While not quite an apple to apple comparision, it is still telling how people feel about price points above $100 for a computer game.
Of course if Matrix wanted to maximize the profits from just the 'buy' population then they can set the price at wherever they want [:)]
The other thing to remember in all of this is that, we, the potential customers, will be paying AGIAN for the game when the AI is released, hopefully next year. Command HAS an AI, WiF will not at release. So this needs to have a major impact on the price point as well.
The only game of similar nature is Decision Games War in Europe which does not have an AI either (and never plans on having one). It sells for $60. http://shop.decisiongames.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=2100 So with the extras and the planed AI release for WiF, I again can easily see a $99 (or less) price point for the game. Especially since we will be shelling out an unknown amount at a future point for an AI [:(]
I was going to post the very same words Numdydar [:D] word for word. Ok I lied. Well said SIR!
Bo
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