Gaynor: One of the nice things about being on Steam is that they share their guidance with you based on their data. So we have looked at what games that we feel are in a similar realm as us have been charging and how they have done. We’ll talk to our steamer when we get close to time. But to us, regardless of what the number is the thing that is interesting I think about being on steam as you lead distribution platform is that a huge percentage - easily more than half as far as I’ve heard - of your units moved come during steam sales.

So, we’re more interested in calibrating our base price in terms of what it will break down to during a 25% or 50% or 75% off sale – to be attractive when it is highlighted in one of those sales.

There is an arc of successful Steam game selling which has become fairly well-established now. And that’s great, because you can say “here is a proven model for how games make a profit”. You launch with a small sale price to encourage more people to buy on launch day – that’s 10-15% [of total sales]. So, you have that big spike. The next big spike is 3 months later at 25% off in a weekend sale or something. And then the next is 50% off in a holiday sale, the summer sale for example.

And then maybe a year down the line you do 75% off in a flash sale and at that point you’re pretty much looking at a Humble Bundle or something like it as next thing you do, where somebody could be paying a penny for your game and a bunch of other people’s games as well.

“Put your game up for 50% off and 50 times as many people buy it that day.”

There are two aspects that make this make sense - and this is the whole point of doing a sale in supermarkets or whatever – put your product on sale at 50% off and more than twice as many people buy it. So, that’s a good day for you. On Steam you put your game up for 50% off and 50 times as many people buy it that day [sc. as on a day when it is sold at full price].

You don’t want be in a Humble Bundle before your game has been sold 75% off because then you have tens of thousands of potential buyers who have bought the game as “pay what you want”, who might have bought it for a discounted price, which would guarantee a better price per unit to you. That said, assuming that you go down this logical path of having sales events that are big one-time revenue generators for you, it is a solved problem, in a way. At least it’s a thing you can point out and say yes, that’s how this works.

The nice thing about that I think compared to retail is that, generally, with retail over time your product is straight up devalued - you launch at $60 and then six weeks later you’re at $50 and three months later at $30 – and that whole time there are used copies selling for less where you get none of the money.

The Steam sale means your base price never changes unless you decide it does. You launch at $20 and your price is still $20 whenever somebody who just hears about it feels like buying it. And then when there are these sales that bring a bunch of eyes onto it, and people who’ve been waiting for a sale decide that this is the time to buy. That provides a huge boost in sales for you.