Most video games cost $60 and they’ve been at that price for 10 years (Business Insider).

Most average-sized paperback novels price between $13.95 to $17.95.

Most music is $.99 to 1.29 per song and around $9.99 for an album.

Movies at the cinema are a set price, doesn’t matter if it’s a good or crappy movie, or 90 minutes or over 2 hours.

There’s very little variation in the pricing above, there are always some exceptions, but even J. K. Rowling’s book prices follow the industry norm.

Games have some norms but seem to have a larger range than other published media.

Since our mint tin games are born on Kickstarter and are made by us, I’m very sensitive to pricing. I have Excel spreadsheets loaded with formulas that let me put in our component costs, reject rates for each component, shipping costs for the US, Canada, and the world. I even calculate the Kickstarter fee to the penny (it’s not 10%, it’s a bit less) and our income tax hit.

Our next game, if all stays on track, should be Mint Tin LunaSyr.

It will be our biggest game yet—both in playing time and number of components—and in price.

Regardless how I try to put it together, it looks like it’ll be $25 for the US. And its size pushes it to next shipping tier (for example, instead of $13.78 for international, it’s $23.28).

I digress but shipping’s a hot button for me (don’t get me started on Kickstarters that add shipping later – in that case, Mint Tin LunaSyr will only be $1 . . . with $24 shipping later). =p

Back to standardised game pricing . . .

This all came up because I backed a game (Game X for this discussion) that’s the same form factor as ours and is also being assembled by the creator. Since I know pricing well, Game X‘s reward seemed high by my standards. I’ve got nothing against a person making big money—it’s up to us individually to decide what we’ll pay—or is it?

Does the industry set the price, or in the case of games, the expectation of a fair price?

But it hit home that maybe I’m a dork for getting so entrenched in pricing and for lamenting about the $25 for ours—even though it’s a tight margin like our other games, it’s stressing me out.

If games are a bit of the wild west for pricing, surely the actual quality and quantity of components might be a factor (it isn’t for movies of music though).

Since Game X brought this up, I could at least look at it from a purely spreadsheet cost perspective and that’s what helped me chill and accept that “it is what it is“.

Game X

• standard mint tin with sticker label
• folded instructions sheet
• 32 mini cards
• 3 12mm dice
• 20 plastic cubes

Mint Tin LunaSyr

• round threaded tin with magnet label
• rules brochure (no text where on the folds)
• 64 mini cards
• 2 d12 & 1 d4 dice
• 14 wood meeples
• 30 wood tokens
• 1.25″ aluminum coin
• cloth-backed neoprene rondel

I understand that a game with a zillion minis can get $125 but I also see games with the same number of minis for $75.

And minis are very cool, I considered some for Mint Tin LunaSyr. Domestically made ones were over a dollar a piece but offshore were only 12 cents each. I created two in Hero Forge as a way to get quotes for minis of this detail. Since offshore isn’t for us, we’re now looking at resin 3D printers (no need to tell me they’re very slow, so is hand-pressing 7,000 tins!).  =D

So what are your thoughts on standardised game pricing?

Let’s chat* in Facebook and Twitter, I’d love your insight. =)

 

 

* – derr, why don’t you use the comments here on the blog Dave?

Good question, years ago I had a blog with over 4,500 posts on it. Years of work. And the hosting server was hacked and a script was injected into the comments, via the comments, that took it down. The hosting company said I had to fix it by going into the MySQL databases and I had no clue how to do that. So I was unable to remove the script which meant the blog was lost.

So I don’t enable comments for that reason. It’s a huge bummer but so was losing so much work.