Thoughts on the 'no sale' promise for indie devs?

[CM30]

It's a concept where to avoid gamers only buying games when they're on sale, the developers promise to never lower the price of the game. Instead, they keep raising the price the longer the title is out:

http://randomtower.com/2016/04/the-promise-of-the-no-sale-promise-might-just-be-snake-oil

http://thecastledoctrine.net/seedBlogs.php?action=display_post&post_id=jasonrohrer_1389812989_0

It's an interesting concept (the game mentioned that uses this model charges $8 for the alpha version, $12 in launch week and $16 after that), and I guess it makes some sense for 'early access' type deals (people shouldn't have to pay full price for an unfinished game), but I'm not sure how viable it is in general.

I mean, you're losing out the publicity some of these sales and bundles might bring, which might be more of an advantage than the extra cash for selling it at full price.

What do you think?

 

[benoit489]

It could work if the game is priced appropriately. That can be hard to judge sometimes as indie games can be real hit or miss. I'm sure quite a few indies made more money due to sales. More established publishers (like Nintendo) have the luxury of high prices due to their history of making high quality games. A new indie game that's priced at $20 ain't gonna sell too well though unless it gets a lot of coverage or positive word of mouth. If it's fairly niche, not having sales will most likely hurt it as people won't be willing to drop $20 on an unknown entity.

That all said, I do think Caste Doctrine's pricing is fair as that model successfully worked for Minecraft.

 

[cpvr]

This happens a lot in my industry as well, but game owners generally like to bring "retired" items back into the game and sell them to their users for a certain amount of cash. I'm not a fan of this no sale promise though.

 

[Westwood]

Charging less for an unfinished game I can understand, but never having a sale? I mean, sure, you don't want to just give the game away, but the older a game gets the less people even know about it, so having a sale will net you something instead of nothing. I can't really see this as a smart move from the developer's POV.