I said it to developers in different forum. With your approach this is another game I will not buy.
Decision to never give discount but increase price from time to time is not for me

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For your usual game, I'd tend to say it's fair that they don't add inflation to the price as games should depreciate over time (over time, more of the game's potential audience already own it and you shouldn't expect to make money off the same old picker indefinitely... room should be made for people who create new content).

However, Factorio has been one of those games where the developers have added a significant amount of new content to their game for free (more than can be reasonably expected as I believe most game devs would charge for that kind of extra content with dlcs). So if they want to add a small price bump, I wouldn't say it is necessary as I'm sure they made a lot of money from the game, but I wouldn't say it is unjustified either given the amount of additional unpaid labor they've put into the game. They are just now deciding to monetize some of that (and not as successfully as if they had charged pre-existing owner with dlcs). Yes, short of changing currencies, inflation only goes one way.

Honestly, it's messy enough and enough people get scr*wed over when it goes up that I think it going both ways would just add to the mess and I'm sure they'd figure out a way for your regular working class bloke to get the short end of the stick either way (chaos tends to favor those with resources to capitalize on it).

But yes, overall, surges of inflation are a bad deal for regular employed people. Unless they have incredible leverage (ie, highly skilled workers), their wage is sure to lag behind and given that they are unlikely to have dedicated people focused on managing their savings full time, their savings are likely to shrink as well (as interests they earn from them are unlikely to keep up with inflation).

Well, pkk234 is apparently in Japan, which as a developed country did experience chronic deflation since the 1990s, so he may have a point in the context of Japan prices not going down (although if you have deflation, overall prices are going down, so perhaps the deflation was confined to individual markets). Anyway, prices do tend to be sticky when falling, and frictionless when increasing.

Factorio does look like an interesting and fun game though - I might have to pick it up.

Without this thread, it would probably have slipped under my radar again.

To be fair, inflation is a b... I live in a country with cronic inflation for the last 7 decades and last year we had like 90% inflation (yeah, that's not a typo). I guess the developers or someone in the publishing sector has lived through some inflation like this and understands than when there's inflation, prices increase because the currency is worth less than before. Though I guess the US was like maybe 8% last year? What 15% in the last two years after the world economic catastrophe we went through? What I don't like is that they increased the price already in the past and there is no excuse for that one... Do the math before you release the game.

Any other games on Gog that can replace those two ?

I do think that when this game would have seen release in the good ol days its price would have been, for Europe standards, 40 euro's. With the game hours many people spend with this game, then even 40 euro's might be a bit on the low side. The 1st price increase might as well be a greedy dev's heart as well as an unconscious (maybe) feeling for product groups.

Not on GOG, but Mindustry and Dwarf Fortress come to mind.

Both available DRM free and the former is even open source.

https://mindustrygame.github.io/

Free reminder: Factorio has already sold several million copies at the 25 and 30$ price. Even accounting for life maintenance, when accounting for the currency conversion rates, they could have just shouldered the price instead of inflating it again.

I'd also like to suggest Dyson Sphere Program, which you can buy here: [LINK COMEDICALLY MISSING], you can see GOG has done well to foster the right sort of games, by genuine people and not just libertarian tech bros.

I don't really see any issue with the price increase.

From buyer's perspective, the only thing that should matter in the end is: are you willing to pay whatever they are asking? Then buy or don't. It makes no difference whether the price was different at some point in the past. What matters is whether the current price is acceptable to you.

From seller's perspective, it gets a little more complicated. But I completely understand the view that a niche product might not want to bet on huge sales volume at low unit price. Avoiding deep discounts may or may not help the bottom line.

If anything, I think games are too cheap these days and the market is oversaturated. People have hundreds or thousands of games in their libraries and they constantly get more in neverending sales and bundles. Only for most of them to rot in library and never be played.. I feel like there's a cycle of gamers maybe not appreciating their games as much as they would, and at the same time, game developers competing in a race to the bottom.

Consequently, well crafted indie games are starting to seem rare. Whether you like it not, Factorio is a well crafted one. Along with some other titles like Shovel Knight.. which by the way hiked the price up. The treasure trove is 40 eur. Then you have e.g. Stardew Valley and Terraria, which are hugely popular and far from niche. It doesn't surprise me at all to see their prices being much lower.

Come to think of it, I kinda feel the expectation of discounts is just hurting the niche indies that have lasting appeal (and can expect to make a return in the long tail). You can make a superb game but people hold off buying until it says -50% or whatever. You can engage in psyops tricks like making the base price higher so that you can pull off that discount but that kind of behavior just encourages people to not buy games at base price.

What's the problem?

Either you bought this game prior to the price hike - then absolutely nothing changes for you.
Or you didn't buy it until now - then also nothing really changes for you.

People who waited for a better price to come, will simply continue to do so.

And to anyone who says: "yeah, but if they offer a 50% discount now, the price will be higher than it would have been at a 50% discount, prior to this price hike!"...

...I say:
did you buy it at 50% off?
No?
You were waiting for a higher discount?
Well, then wait now for an even higher discount.
There's no difference.
You weren't buying it, anyway, before it hits the "sweet spot" for you.
Now the only thing that changes, will be the percentage of the discount you'll have to wait for, until that sweet spot is reached.

Haven't played Rimworld yet, but I think Factorio would be a tough act to replace for me.

Factorio was one of the few games where after inadvertently sinking an entire weekend into it, I had to stop playing in single-player mode, because this game is as addictive as crack (figure of speech, I never partook). I deeply regret that the game wasn't around back when I was a primary/high school student and had more time.

Now, I offer to play with select friends when they come over to put some constraints on the time I sink in the game.

I enjoy a couple of other different games equally, because they are different and it is like comparing apples and oranges, but short of the Factorio creators starting a sequel from the original codebase and vastly improving upon it (something that is not a guarantee), I don't see another game being its equal or supplanting it at what it does in the foreseeable future.

I can see how they would feel comfortable charging in the higher end of indie games prices.

If I hadn't bought the game already, knew what I know now and had at least 2 weeks to kill, buying the game at the current listed price would be a no-brainer for me.

All this nonsense just because of a 5USD increase for a game that still is maintained? I would understand it if a mediocre game got AAA++ price tag on it, like Biomutant and CyberPunk did with their insane 70+ price tag, but this?

Also, CoffeeStain will do the same with Satisfactory (as they've been clear about for a long time now) and they're both great games with a plenty of content.

5USD is like 2 liters of milk here, well worth it in my mind, and sometime in the future they will get discounted, as all games eventually do. Exactly.

as i read in some czech source (factorio creators are czech company) they have politics to set solid price and never to make / join sales. and as the game is getting bigger, gradually to rise its price.

as for inflation, they are under it anyway.

we can only accept or reject their terms...

Thanks for the headsup. I'm not into/haven't really tried games of this genre, but figured that if I were to dabble, this would be a great starting point. Will think about getting it before the deadline.