Early-Access pricing

Fengol

A game I've been lovingly following is Elite: Dangerous, and after watching a Let's Play video of the new multiplayer additions I decided it was time to buy in. However. After looking at the price I was shocked into closing my browser lest they charge me just for viewing the site.

Join the Alpha - £200
Join the Beta - £100
Standard game (once released) - £50

The Alpha includes nothing other than the ability to download the work-in-progress game and provide feedback via the forums.

Is it just me or do this numbers look incredibly skewed? I would think a lot of people wouldn't pay £200 even for a final, highly polished game; let alone an incomplete one. What I also don't get is why the Alpha and Beta are more expensive than the standard game.

rustybroomhandle

I see this confusion all the time. Peeps were equally baffled by the very high beta buy-in for Planetary Annihilation. The story goes thus:

Kickstarter projects tend to have backer award tiers, with higher tiers offering the privilege of earlier access to the game. Sometimes though, the dev will also put the game into something like Steam Early Access, where I guess logically you'd expect to pay suggested final retail price or even cheaper than that. Except if they did that, they'd be pissing off thousands of their Kickstarter backers. So they end up pricing the alpha/beta access in accordance with the award tiers that they had on their Kickstarter.

In my opinion, the solution is either to not do public alpha/beta, or to plan ahead and not do backer tiers that will cause you to have to overprice your early access pricing.

omegadrakk

actually, the prison architect dev said he priced the alpha higher so only people interested in helping him would join and not just people complaining about bugs.
But £200 seems quite exaggerated.

dislekcia

I think it completely depends on your game's fans and what you're trying to achieve. Elite: Dangerous would probably be better served if they called it a "slacker backer" buy-in because their prices are informed by the Kickstarter they ran.

Suggesting higher prices in order to highlight your megafans that you want to be talking to is smart. We sold DD early access at $10, $20 and a limited $75 version. We advertised $5 savings on the $15 and $25 final game prices, loads of people bought the more expensive $20 version just because they loved the free game so much and they wanted to support us. Those were our superfans (the $75 tier sold out in under a day) and they were worth their weight in gold in terms of being great PR, solving problems for other players on forums and generally being awesome. We ended up trying to add much more content to the Special Edition to try and say thanks :)

Pricing is a black art. Different games need different prices - if there's perceived value to players in getting access to your game early and your goal isn't to use them as testers to help you build up a broken product, then yeah, price early access higher that the full game and give them some extra indicator of awesomeness, like in-game badges or something. If you game's value is going to slowly build over time, then start with a lower price and work your way up from there.