Interesting Perspectives on Indie Game Sales

[DarthMol]

I read 2 very interesting articles this morning about Indie games sales on Steam that provide two related but different perspectives:

The first, Are indie games too cheap? talks about the difficulties that Indie developers face in pricing their games right. One of the most interesting parts of the article was when they consider not just money but the time investment and how important that actually is for the success of on indie game:

Clearly, none of these strategies is easy. They all come with big risks. And besides, there's another argument to make about all this. Your Steam pile of shame is testament to a big constraint being not so much your money but your time to play them. When you consider a snap purchase, do you think about your wallet or whether you'll want to play it over your other games?
...In games, perhaps the scarcity is players' time. And if that's right, perhaps an indie dev's real battle is to prove their game is worth time, rather than simply money. Thinking about it this way might help to pull indie games out of a current market price which is unsustainably low for the numbers many sell. And that really does matter to us all. If creative developers can't make a living, that's not only bad for them, it's also bad for us. We lose an important layer of experimentation, and PC gaming as a whole suffers.

The next article, Secrets of the developer who sold half a million videogames you’ve never heard of on Steam tells an interesting story about a rookie developer who's had great success in selling small, $1 games on Steam. By being very honest about what the games are - short, simple - and by incorporating support for the game such as achievements, trading cards, cloud saves - he has managed to get his games noticed by the people who would want to play them.

There are three key pillars on which Nickerson’s success was built: tell the truth, tick every box, and don’t get too emotionally involved. These all add up to an uncommonly pragmatic approach to selling games on Steam. “A lot of people are incredibly critical of Valve, and their systems where they open the floodgates for anyone,” says Nickerson, “but I have had tremendous success with Valve’s discovery updates.” This statement alone will be a headspinner for many developers who have cried foul at Valve’s various attempts to make their storefront into a level playing field.

If you get a chance, have a read through the articles they give a fascinating insight into the world of Indie game publishing.

Do you think Indie games are too cheap?
Have you bought and enjoyed playing a cheap $1 game?