The smaller your company is, the more you have to pay.

This of course is not strange in itself, in fact it is often quite normal. In almost every industry I’ve worked in, whether hospitality, manufacturing, wholesale or IT, the more revenue you generate for your suppliers, the less you’ll typically pay per unit. Our customers who buy 200 laptops at a time also pay less than another customer who buys them individually. The same applies to software licenses, if we provide 200 Microsoft licenses for Product X, you also pay less than if you buy 5 licenses.

Although this won’t matter to the little ones here, you would have to have over 200,000 annual turnover and 200,000 total installs before this policy would affect you.

Mountains of edge cases are requested but never answered, and are being rolled out retroactively, so that games that have already been released are covered by the new pricing structure.

This does not appear to be 100% the case, nor does it appear to be retroactive, as it would also apply to installations made before 1-1-2024, which is not the case, but it is true that games that have already been released are included if Released after 1-1-2024 to be installed on a device for the first time or reinstalled on a device that already has it installed. They can of course compensate for this by adjusting their pricing policy accordingly from January 1, 2024.

So, if you make games that you sell at a fixed price, your sales volume is highly uncertain because you have costs per install.

I don’t see this right away, unless your fixed price is so low that the costs are actually higher during the period when the game is somehow relevant, when the user installs it on multiple devices. But you are actually selling your game very cheap. After all, the average user won’t install a game on dozens of devices, but will only do so when he gets a new phone, PC, or something like that.

In my opinion, a good fixed price with a healthy margin would largely prevent this problem. I actually expect more problems for developers who have to rely on a lot of installs and aggressive marketing to catch a few whales (and those are generally the developers I generally don’t have a high opinion of). Whether I mind that, I don’t know yet.) See for example this tweet: https://twitter.com/kurtr…tatus/1701621432894267593

The whole idea that you have to pay per install to finish simply assumes that you’ll continue to generate revenue from your games, and so it comes down to mobile games with strong in app purchases.

This is not necessary, a fixed price game can prevent this as well, provided the margin is next and the game is not sold “too cheap”, unless I missed something in the article. After all, it only applies to the initial installation on the device, not every reinstallation process or anything else.

This will of course be something developers will have to take into account when pricing. I also realize that game developers don’t like this, especially developers whose pricing model revolves around so many installs that they only generate limited turnover per install. But I’m also wondering how exactly the old pricing model worked, I’ve looked into it, but I can only find that the developer paid nothing, +-$2000 per year or +-$4000 per year (depending on support level), this seems very little for me and then I would understand why prices should at least be distributed somewhat differently. Anyone have more insight into this?

[Reactie gewijzigd door Dennism op 13 september 2023 11:51]