Marketing | Tom Kaczmarczyk | How to Price Your Game in 2026 and Beyond | Digital Dragons 2026

Hello everybody. Uh good to see you all. So my name is Tom as mentioned and I will be talking about this uh but not quite because I will I have actually tricked you and that the talk is going to be about everything other than pricing really. Um because um the main point that I will want to to put across uh towards you uh for internalizing is that the question of how do you price your game uh is a uh is a little bit of a trap that you can often find yourself falling into because it feels like something that is very relevant and that you should fix um that you should fixate on very very clearly and then everything else u kind of fades into the background. And what I will want to talk to you about is that everything else that uh you might be overlooking if you're just fixated on your price is also pretty critical. Uh so um

like uh first of all uh what I'll be showing you today and what I'll be talking to you about it's going to be very chart heavy and there's going to be loads of interesting insights and a lot of it can be generalizable like a lot of it can be applicable to what your game is like. But you have to keep in mind that everything that you see here, you need to take with a grain of salt because we're going to be talking about populations and a little bit of statistics and then medias and like what is the average game on Steam look like or on other platforms and uh your game is not going to be the average game definitionally. So uh for for your game a lot of it can be relevant and a lot of it can be somewhat applicable but it's not going to be one to one. So that's what I wanted to make sure that you also understand that this is not going to be easy silver bullets to apply to every game in existence because those just don't exist. You have to take into account everything that makes your game different and unique and how you're positioning it and then you can

translate those generalized sort of distributions and populations. So, uh, with that with that being said, uh, why do I think I've got something to say about the subject of pricing, commercial strategy in general? Uh, why why are we even here for this talk? So, for some of you, you've you you're more or less aware of what INDBI does. Uh, some of you might not have heard about it before, but INDBI is a a couple of things. On the one hand side, it's a data platform that allows developers and publishers to pull all of their commercial information, all of the sales and refunds and like wish list numbers and everything else from all platforms into one uh nice little tidy data set that you can then explore and analyze. Uh and it also is a data set that we can then use to extrapolate big sort of industry-wide patterns and um and best practices. And

then we also have a um a service within INDBI uh where we provide advisory and guidance to developers and publishers about how to price, how to discount their games, basic catalog management stuff. And in that catalog management service, we effectively get to uh see the effect the impact of all of the little pieces of optimization that we do in practice. uh and uh that can be very very meaningful for virtually everybody. Being more mindful about your commercial strategy, about how you price your games, how you discount it, uh what's your what's your regional strategy, trying to find different little pieces of um of opportunities that you might be missing out on otherwise that can account for substantial amounts of additional revenue. And that's what we help our partners uh capture. That's kind of the point of IndieBI is to help developers and publishers sell more games. And we're doing that at scale. Like the catalog that we're managing at this point is about a billion dollars of

revenue a year. So it's thousand plus games. It's a substantial chunk of the entire sort of video game landscape. So I think we've got a fairly good footing to be able to talk about some of those general findings and to at least sort of share the insight that pricing and commercial strategy super important. also very complicated and you just need to work on it. Uh so question that you might be kind of starting out with is you've got a price point in mind and you want to think to figure out if that's a good price point for the game that you're about to release. Uh and uh the um the answer to questions like this is this price point good or bad is as with everything it depends. It's unfortunately going to be a recurring theme in this uh in this talk. Uh so um one thing that you have to be particularly mindful of is that setting your price point, your price anchor in USD is still going to be a good

practice. Like you should still start by figuring out how your game is going to be priced in dollars because that's how you like that's usually where you've got the intuition, right? You've you've been in in this industry for a while. You've you've played games yourself. You bought games yourself. You have an understanding of what is a $20 game versus a $40 game versus a $60 game. So that makes sense, but you have to be mindful that that's going to only really uh uh really relate to often less than half of your of your entire player base. Everybody outside of the US is going to be buying your game in non US dollars. So if you just fixate on your price point in USD, well that's going to be effectively ignoring half of the world, like half of your player base, often more than that in terms of just unit sales. uh and uh you might end up uh inadvertently uh alienating some regions, underpricing some other regions and just generally making mistakes. So make sure that one thing that you keep in mind, you know, there's going to be a list, but uh one

thing that you're going to keep in mind is uh dollars are not the the end of the story. Uh if you uh well we're in Poland and uh a lot of you are Polish so this is probably not news to you but uh Steam's default pricing mat matrices from a while ago and the the recent updates still don't really address this uh very well they tend to overpric games in Poland and that got so so egregious that uh we have actually seen substantial suppression of sales in Poland because of grassroot grassroots campaigns like polish your prices and we've seen the flip side of Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I fantastic. You're also doing you're doing God's work. Absolutely. And uh I um I've got some hot takes I can share uh off camera off the record about my

understanding of Valve's policy here. they are trying their best but they are vent it's a it's a very idiosyncratic organization but uh you're doing God's work and we've seen the impact of it uh in that if you don't fix your prices in Poland which many many publishers and developers still don't they still haven't figured out that they should be doing that you do see a substantial suppression of sales and when you fix it you see a boost in sales like we've seen uh some of our clients when we when we adjusted the pricing in Poland for them uh have their revenues uh in Poland substantially grow like basically leaprog um um many other similar countries to get to a point where they are more comparable in many cases with sales in the UK than smaller regions. Uh and that can for a lot of a lot of games that can amount to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional revenue unlocked by just fixing one input box on the back end of Steam. So that is very very worthwhile to think about uh when you were trying to decide your price point. Your price

is not just your price in USD. All of the other regional currencies matter. Some of it, some of them matter in that respect that you can make a mistake by in inadvertently overpricing your game and suppressing sales in a major region. Some of them matter the other way around. like it's still uh to this day a very very frequent and common thing that uh if you look at some platforms Xbox in particular has never updated their or never forced developers to update their regional pricing in uh countries where they experienced currency collapse. So Argentina and Turkey had hyperinflation for a few years. uh on on other platforms on Steam and Switch there there have been mechanisms that forced developers to update those prices those regional prices so that they would actually not be leaking effectively free units but Xbox never had a situation never had a mechanism like that. So, if you've shipped a game on Xbox a while ago and you've not thought about it, there's a good chance that it's still

being sold at whatever was the original price in Argentina and Turkey, which amounts to like two or three cents a unit. And that applies to everybody. Like, this is this is this is literally still in the store. This is Electronic Arts. Like, that's a big company. They've got the resources to fix it. They just didn't. And uh we've seen the impact of it being substantial leakage of keys. Well, not keys of units that you end up seeing uh for Xbox for some games we've seen 40% units being sold in uh Argentina uh which generates no revenue whatsoever. It's just region surfing and then reselling of accounts. So uh it is a fairly substantial thing that again you can fix with just one one little button. Now, if you don't fix it, uh, and if you do end up with substantial pricing disparities, um, because your price floor on Steam or other platforms is very, very low. It's it's much much lower than you would like like it to be, then what is going to happen is that you will, if you actually crunch the data and you do a lot of research, you will find that there is a substantial gray

market economy for your game. If it's popular, popular games have a substantial gray market gray market economy. And the gray market economy basically works in a way where there's going to be um huge operations, resellers buying up a stock of your game when it's on discount in the cheapest possible currency. If it's not region locked, and it usually isn't, they're going to then be able to take those those those units of your game and resell them on gray marketplaces for a substantial market. Potentially, those are the most profitable companies in our industry. It's the entire gray market arbitrage uh economy. Um, now what we've seen is that even if you don't have key reselling, even if you don't have retail keys and your game is online only, so it's got no piracy, uh, you can still have a substantial number of your units being resold on the gray market. This was one of our clients, which is an online only game and and we were able to to demonstrate that they had almost a quarter of all of their global units sold being purchased as botted accounts

in in this case, Philippines. and then resold in Europe and in the US for for substantial amounts of uh of leakage. And that's something that is borderline unavoidable like you will have it in this case even if you don't have retail keys. It's something that you can however address or utilize if you know about it and if you care. So like the price floor that you're setting in any region, you also should think about it as your the price that you're setting for gray market resellers. So, it's not it's not just going to be people in the Philippines buying your game for $2. It's also going to be all of the gray market people. So, if you don't expect there to be a huge population of actual players in the Philippines, you might want to bring the price floor up so that you're taking $4 instead of two from your gray market resellers. And at least you've doubled your take. They're still going to resell and they're still going to make profit. Just going to you're just going to not give them as much profit for nothing. So, uh, regional pricing important in terms of not

overpricing, important in terms of not underpricing and then adjusting to taste or to, you know, optimizing specific regions. There's a lot of interesting things you can do with regional pricing to uh to make it so that it fits your game, your commercial strategy, your community. Very important, much more complicated than just figuring out if it's $20 or $40. Now the other thing is that uh on most platforms most of your revenue will not even ever be in your base price because people keep buying games on discounts and that's uh universally true across all platforms and across all games. More expensive games tend to end up being even more um pronounced in how much of their revenue is uh coming from discounts instead of base price. So there's a an interesting argument that you can kind of build internally in that your base price uh matters much less than your discounting strategy is going to end up uh mattering after you've released. It is it is important. It is it's an important

signal for the u the the value perception of the game for the expected quality and it it does anchor your um your the expectations of your community. But at the end of the day, like you do also need to think about what is that price going to look like when the game is starting to get discounted. How are you going to be discounting it? Like what's it going to look like in bundles? What is going to be the actual effective price that your customers are going to be paying for for the game? Because it's often or usually not going to be your full price. So, another interesting uh dimension that you should be taking into account when you're thinking about pricing that's not just your base price. Uh and uh um yeah, it's it's universally across all platforms, but uh Steam and Switch in particular are the most um discount driven platforms that you have uh that you have available. PlayStation, Xbox a little bit less so, but it's still it's still universally universally important.

Um the difference in actual revenue outcomes just when you're looking at just when you're addressing discounting alone. So when you're you you uh you account for pricing discrepancies, review score discrepancies, launch time, and everything else when you're just comparing um discounting um not even discounting depth, just discount intensity in the in the form of how often a game is discounted on Steam and the Switch version of this chart is very very similar. the um the difference between games which are discounted irregularly that aren't utilizing the um the the opportunity to put their put the game on on promotion as often as possible versus games that are utilizing every single opportunity is universally substantial. And again, as I mentioned initially, take it with a grain of salt. Your game might be different. There's no one-sizefits-all discounting strategy that is the optimal way of running things. But our general usual advice kind of rule of thumb is that you should be starting with as dense of a

discounting schedule as possible on platforms that allow it and then work it back to make it so that makes sense for your own strategy, content releases, marketing beats and everything else. Uh and that uh for many games, especially games that have already released when you don't really get that many uh that much in terms of opportunity for changing your base price having an impact uh for for those games. So you got a back catalog. That discounting strategy is something that you can start changing right now and that can have a substantial amount of uh of influence over your actual actual future revenues. Um then uh your base price or like the the way that we're thinking about pricing, you do end up with regional pricing as one dimension. You've got your discounted price as another dimension. But then also ideally like if you're thinking about it, you would like to make it so that you can capture a little bit of additional revenue from the customers that want to spend additional money on your game because not everybody

has the same price sensitivity. Some people are much less price sensitive than others and would rather pay a little bit extra to feel like they're getting a premium experience that they're they've got a little bit of status symbols. They've got the DLC bolted on top of the of the original game. They feel like they're they're getting the bigger game. Uh or if it's not uh if it's not a uh a piece of content or additions to the base game, maybe you can sell them the other game in your catalog or uh cross-promote with a different with a different developer, publisher, and then uh and then add uh some additional value for the for the customer, but effectively give them an opportunity to spend more money. So then your price becomes even more fuzzy because it's not just discounting and regional pricing. is also maybe there are going to be different packages. Maybe there's going to be a different way of uh monetizing customers that have a little bit more money that that they want to give you and then your your price is not just a point. It's a it's becoming more of a spectrum. This to be also uh clear is not just for lounge

bundles like bundling in general is something that you should definitely look into on Steam in particular. It's very very easy to put together bundles and for cross promotion good bundles for cross promotion uh with different games and publishers can be a substantial revenue driver. This this u on this chart the u game a is a game that's been out for that point probably like four years or something like that. Uh and uh we we helped them set up a bundle with a comparably successful this is a very successful game already but comparably successful uh game both with a good audience overlap and uh that was the the equivalent impact of an additional 20% in u in revenue growth with no cannibalization. There was no no downside to that. Uh if you and if you miss if you set up a bundle that doesn't work, we've never seen a bad bundle actually have a negative impact. it's just not it's just not doing anything. So there's no risk no downside to experimenting trying things trying to find ways that you can um have your

existing games once you once you ship ship them find their you know different aspects of cross promotion different bundles so that you can also try and find the additional 20% revenue improvement and then again your customers will not be buying the game at full price. they're going to be looking at the bundle and considering whether they want to buy the game in a bundle. Uh if you got DLC that you're looking to ship for your game, uh then that's another way of uh effectively making it so that your customers are not just your customers for the base game for whatever price you're setting for the base game, they're also potentially your customers for the DLCs that you're going to be shipping in the future. If you can, you can make uh seasons passes or effectively make it so that there's there's some way of capturing revenue and capturing customers for those DLCs even before they launch. You got a solid road map and you can can make sure and guarantee that those DLCs will were will release. But even if you take a while to build up a DLC catalog, it is a hugely

hugely successful revenue driver. If the DLC's are good and meaningful, they not just make it so that you're making more money because you're selling DLCs, they also significantly boost the value and the longevity of your um of your main game of the of the base title. That's um not something that happens when you're just porting the game. Like if you're porting the game to different platforms, that chart just tracks the u the trend. Um but with DLC, you're actively making it so that people will be more inclined. they will have more of a of a reason, more appeal to buy the base game and then add DLC's on top of that. So, that's another way that uh your base price is going to be even more blurry. There's not just the aspect of of of all of the things that we've talked about so far, but also over time there's going to be effectively the value of the package and the the price for the entire package is going to change and evolve. And it's a whole thing. It's a whole long-term strategy, not just a single question of how do you price a game.

Uh so all of this like that we've talked about uh that was already a lot and uh usually when I talk about it is uh at this point people's eyes glaze over and they just want to go and do something else with their lives instead and this is still just you know pieces of the puzzle. It's not we it's still tip of the iceberg at the end of the day. uh what we're doing here um in sort of PC and console video games is uh by any other industry's understanding it's making digital products and we've had some understanding in other industries of of uh what it takes to make a a product and what to do in terms of commercial strategy or marketing mix for uh much longer than I think all of us here have been alive. Uh but uh for cons for PC and consoles like for premium games a lot of time a lot of the time you we're still stuck with the understanding that was kind of valid maybe like five to 10 years ago but for as long as you make a good game you ship it on Steam you will be successful. That

is uh that's never been really true and it's it's very very obviously abundantly clear now. Uh so if you want to try and run a business and not just a sort of an art collective then it starts becoming or it is already it has already become table stakes that you should have functions at your company thinking about all of the different aspects of marketing. So not just pricing but also all of your promotion all of your all of your placement all of your community like who's actually going to be buying your game like all of that all of that needs to be handled. Uh that is something where if you're working on the game uh with an entire team for years and you only have like one guy part-time doing all of this, then I think there's a very solid argument that that's not necessarily the best composition. That's the best allocation of your of your effort that you should shift things around a little bit to have a better chance of making the game be commercially successful. So there's stuff that you can look at and again

this is going to be overwhelming but we're going to just rush through it and then I'll try to leave some time for uh for questions at the end. Uh if you don't find your audience, if you don't find customer appeal, you will it's also unless you're looking at it, it's easy to overlook. You might end up uh having a game that is not really performing well whatsoever. If you're not looking at data and having somebody trying to quantify you if there is customer appeal and fiddle with it, then your game might be dead before it's even shipped. It's just well, you will not realize that nobody cares about it to a point where when you ship it, people won't want to spend time thinking about your game or playing it, let alone money. uh you can fix it and there's things that you can do but you have to work on it like just changing assets on the store screenshots trailers capsules that is very obviously uh a working a workable strategy it's timeconuming and annoying especially uh in PC and console no storefronts really

have a way to do methodic AB testing so this this uh screenshot here like this bit is taken from a case study by meta they had a an AB testing a bunch of AB testing case studies on the the Quest store which is not the same as the PC store but it's it's I think transferable and they were able to demonstrate that just in this case uh but they had many cases like this you can look it up on on the just Google meta AB testing case study uh this is basically just making the uh capsule image brighter and more visible and that can improve uh clickthrough rates by a substantial percentage. this was 30%. So you can imagine how much actual impact this can have on selfro with just one JPEG. Uh so working on that is something that is again something you should be thinking about. It's not just your price. If you uh if you do kind of work on it and uh find ways or

like like uh experiment, you might eventually find things that actually work. Not every time. it it's going to take some experimentation and it's annoying and it takes effort but uh this uh was a uh was a client of ours who effectively just cut a new trailer. They they they had a major update in their development. They were still significantly away from release uh but they ended up deciding that they have so much new content that they want to replace the trailer on on the store. And um uh when they did it coupled with an announcement of play test, they did a little bit of marketing, they saw a substantial increase uh in their wish list conversion rate or like wish list engagement rate. So how many people actually go and add the game to their wish list when they end up seeing the the store page. Uh so uh once you do it and you find something that works, it can have a tremendous amount of impact even if your game is not released yet. Uh at the same time, wish lists not the you know be all end all and that's something that you all should also keep

in mind that it is a useful proxy for the popularity of your game and some some indication of traction how it's going to release. But the longer you wait from a um from the time when a wish list is added and the less engaged it is the the less likely it is it's going to convert. So there's also an angle that if you have a game in development for a long long period of time, the people the people that have wish listed it a year plus ago, not necessarily going to have um the uh the highest conversion rates as a as a cohort for you. So keeping this in mind then allows you to also be more mindful about how to actually um uh how to build an intuition about the likelihood of your release being successful and if you should try and re-engage some of those wish listers or like your community in some other ways. You should you should start building uh a new and fresher cohort of wish list by running new play tests or doing new sort of pre announcements and around that. So, uh,

just to recap and just to also bring it all back, does the base price even matter? Of course it does. Like, it's still going to be an interesting and important anchoring point for your games. Very, very important to get it right. Uh, but potentially not the most important thing in the world. It's just a piece of the puzzle. It is the whole thing. There's just so many other things that you should be fixing. Uh and uh we we've seen many many cases of developers thinking that this question over the base price is the only one that they need to answer and then they can get get back to work on the game and just ship it and that is just not true. Uh it is true that the the base price matters uh and there are some interesting u correlations uh but it is very very confounded right so the the the quality of the game and the budget behind the game often tightly coupled with the price of the game so there's I think definitely many many grains of salt that you should take with some of those charts in this section but in general

kind of as a rule of thumb that we also often often um uh give to to to clients and prospective developers is that more expensive games tend to make more money overall. So if you're if you're uh uncertain between two different price points, then defaulting to the more expensive price point is potentially going to be the better option. It is not a tidy correlation, not a very very clean one, but it exists. more expensive games seem to be making more money. Um, there we go. Um, uh, at the same time, more expensive games, uh, if they, uh, end up on discount, especially on, uh, major, uh, on Steam on major store-wide sales when they're competing with everything else being on discount at the same time. If you have a game which is which has an expensive base price then shallow [snorts] discounting levels will not necessarily work as well because if

the game is too expensive like basically if if the if the effective price is too high when the customer has many other options for spending their money on cheaper games discounted games then they will be much more likely to just just wishlist your game if they're interested and consider buying it later in the future than buying it outright which is good. it's still not as good as if they actually bought it in the first place. So, if you do end up with a with an expensive game, you should also be prepared or consider having a steeper um sort of discount depth evolution because it will be more impactful uh and it will make it so that you can keep um generating uh substantial revenue bumps early on in the life cycle of your game when it's still relevant and people still want to play it. Uh, so you should also like with all of that considered, you should also still do the usual intuitive exercise, the

homework of looking at comparables. So like you've got a game and you've got an intuition for how the game should be priced. Ideally, you should still do the homework of looking at um at comparable games, games that you believe your game is similar to, so that you have some sense of the competitive outlook. It's not really competitive. Like in most situations, it's not going to be um uh to be u kind of a onetoone comparison. Like your prospective customer will not be looking at your game and then deciding between your game and four other games. They will probably more more likely and more often be just looking at your game and deciding on the spot just based on what they see on the store page whether they want to buy it or not. But if it's a niche or if it's a some sort of a concrete community of players, then they are likely to have some intuition that puzzle games only cost $20. And if you if you price it higher, then they might have they might be a little bit confused as to why, like why why is that game more expensive than that? If you're making multiplayer

games, then there's also aspects to consider of um if you want to play it with your friends, then it's not just a one-time purchase, it's a four-time purchase for your entire group. So then you kind of have to make it cheaper. Uh but exercises like this will also make it so that you will uh you will be able to find if there are outliers if there's something that is uh much more expensive or much less expensive that has performed very very well and you can maybe find something uh from that have a nice anchoring point for you to make better decisions. This this chart here I think is puzzle games and the $40 bump is the witness or something like that which is not necessarily a useful comparable for anybody. Uh but it exists and it gives you some anchoring point that if you want to have a $40 puzzle puzzle game it better be as good as the witness or it's going to have some customer confusion around the value proposition there. So where does this leave us? It's basically just that pricing is important for sure. Uh but also it's not the end of the story. It's just the beginning of

the story. The base price is where you start, but then you have to think about and talk about or work with people that can help you about a bunch of stuff. Uh if you want to have the best chance of making your game successful, uh the mistakes that you make early on, but also after releasing your game can uh insidiously in a very very hidden way cost you up to half of your entire game's revenue potential. Like if you're if you're really really bad at discounting and pricing and your game is just shipped into the ether, you're effectively sacrificing half of your uh half of your game's revenue for nothing apart from saving a little bit of time that you would normally spend working on it or asking people to help you figure all of this out. Um and at the same time critically uh still none of this none of this really matters if your game is not fun and doesn't have customer appeal. So that's also a critical thing to not overindex on pricing and commercial strategy. We're still selling video games. We still need to make games

that people actually want to play. There are signals early on with wish list and store page performance and your own reactions with community and play testing and everything else that you should be paying very close attention to. Uh cuz if you can't build confidence that your game is going to be appealing to customers, that they want to they want to spend time, it doesn't matter what it's going to cost, just not going to buy it. Uh so that's uh that's me for uh today. Uh I hope that was informative. I do also know that it was overwhelming. But my point really was that uh if you're thinking about how to price your game, it's more practical or more useful to reframe that question as how do you what is the commercial strategy? What is the marketing strategy for your game? And is your studio properly composed? If it's just development and you're just making a game, then that's there's a there's a good risk a good amount of risk that you're underestimating the amount of effort that you should be putting in as a studio into stuff like this. So,

thinking about the commercial strategy and the publishing strategy for your games and I will be very happy if there are any questions. I'll be happy to answer them.
[applause]
Thank you everyone. That was Tom Kachamatric. And in a moment you can make your way to the microphone as uh was mentioned before. There will be a Q&A section. So if there's any topics brewing in your mind that you want to uh get answers to, you can do that. And in the meantime, you can also scan the QR code and rate how much you enjoyed this uh this talk. And I think I can say for all of us that you sold us on your pricing recommendations. So, uh, please do not be shy. If you have any questions, please come up and I'm sure Tom will be glad to answer.

Hello, great talk. Uh I have a question because it's usually that uh there is this perspective in the industry that with a first release either you hit or die. Uh what do you think about like making even if the game is not a hit at the release, it still can make it up somehow like with the DLCs that you showed or season passes etc etc.
Uh it is very hard and uh there are precious few examples of a game shipping on Steam and flopping basically sinking and then recovering after that. It is not uh entirely unheard of, but it is very very rare and that is structurally rare because it's just the the way that Steam's visibility um mechanics work, all of the algorithmic visibility slots, they are

all basically just downstream from revenue. So, if your game has made a lot of money uh when it launched, if it sold a lot of units at launch, then it's going to be shown to more people over time. Therefore, it's going to make more money, therefore it's going to be shown to more people. If it doesn't make any money when it's launched, then you just basically get no visibility and it's very hard to find ways to to recover from that. It it has happened before like you can find, you know, poster children like uh like Among Us uh but it's definitionally just an exception, but it's not the only one. There are cases like this where a game uh has not been particularly popular but gets picked up by streamers and suddenly gets interestingly interesting amounts of traction in a weird region like China or Korean that then propagates across all of the other regions. But there is no silver bullet to fixing that unfortunately. So if your game has not really performed very well then uh that that uh it there is no guarantee that putting more effort into it will

eventually make it so that it starts lifting up. So follow up question.
Yeah, there is no one who wants okay followup quick question then um let's say my the game flop and uh there is like a lot of feedback that I got I addressed so most of the issue and let's say I'm uh releasing the game but on a different platform. for example, PlayStation or Xbox. Would that also help in a sense that we have a fresh start noted by the Steam but um the game was originally flopped like what about such a case?
Yeah. Yeah. Uh if I can can I get the the slide back for a second? So that's a that's a different slide uh um that I I cut from the presentation just for time. uh uh that slide is basically just to show that in terms of of um crossplatform sort of cross talk there is almost none the the performance you see on Switch or on PlayStation

like it is irrelevant of your performance on Steam. It is um like if a game performs well on Steam then there's there's a good indication it's going to perform well on the other platforms and it's usually kind of a multiplier that you can apply to have a general sense of how well it's going to perform. But there is no actual cross talk. So, if your game flopped on Steam, but you think it's a good game, like you fixed a lot of stuff, you added a lot of stuff, uh you you just want to see if if you're right, if you can afford to, shipping it on other platforms is effectively a fresh start. The the customers on those platforms, if if the game was successful on Steam, they would maybe have heard of it, but most likely not. So, they will evaluate whether they want to buy that game on PlayStation or Switch virtually in a vacuum. Uh so if it's a new version, a new addition of it, then that there's a good chance that it will just perform pretty well on those platforms for sure.
Okay, awesome. Thank you for your answers.
Yep, absolutely.

Um thanks Tom for awesome uh talk as always. Um so one of the key points from from your talk for me is that um what your store page consists of determines um what the sales are going to be for you know in in many cases. So with our release of scriptorum last month we had this discussion publisher should the uh demo version uh stay during the release day or should we just you know take it out from steam page to not hurt the sales. So I was wondering based on your experience uh both in DBI and and in your previous titles um what's your approach to this? Should we just go for like pro player approach and leave the demo and let's say like if the player like the demo they will buy the game or should we just take it out
um entirely because you know as you said the revenue is the most important thing.

Uh yeah good question. Uh uh I don't have a definitive answer. We we've not done research on on on kind of the keep emo versus drop demo models. Like there's there's indication for sure like as you can all imagine into it that uh nowadays using demos to drive early traction before release is basically a necessity for indie releases. Unless you've got a built-in uh player base and a community and it's like a second title to a franchise and you've got kind of a guaranteed uh um guaranteed launch traction, then demos and uh play tests, community play tests are still the most effective way to um to to generate some retraction. uh after release. Uh I think we would you would have the same arguments as we've always had in the industry that uh uh it's either we give people something that they can engage with and then it's going to be easier to convert them to um to full customers because they're going to like the little bit that they play in the demo or uh

they're going to play the little bit of the demo, realize that this is not for them or or feel that they're now satisfied and they scratched the itch. They know what the game is about. They don't need to buy the full game anymore and therefore you will actually suppress your sales. And I think uh this might be one of those where you just need to run an experiment. If you already shipped the game, uh just do the opposite of what you have right now. If you have the demo on your store page, at some point make a point of of carving out a couple of months dropping the demo and seeing if anything changes
that that might be very indicative and uh maybe you'll be able to find that yeah, you've made a good decision and it should have always been on and then you'll just, you know, you sleep easier. uh or you'll find that yeah this is actually a good way where you you did something and it boosted your sales 10% for nothing.
Yes, especially when the you know when the uh the demo has a separate page and the ratings for demo are awesome. So we had like 98% uh reviews of of the demo. So it's uh it's a very tough decision you know especially when you run a

studio that you you know has this uh
image of pro player approach in each case right. So uh it was very very difficult decision to make. Uh we left out
uh and I I think that the it didn't hurt the the sales that much but uh you know at this point it's only thinking the what the actual impact was. So, did you did you say that you dropped the demo from the store page or
No, no, this stayed on on Steam throughout the uh since the next best
until the release and it's it's still there.
Okay.
Many many players like left negative reviews uh on the demo page instead.
So, the full game was like safe from these players that said that this is not my cup of tea basically.
Yeah. Although there is a different conversation, an entire entire separate talk that I could I could give on on uh whether uh it really matters that much

uh if you have negative reviews on your store page or if it matters more that you just has you just have more reviews
that the the social proof uh of having a game which is you know mostly positive instead of overwhelmingly positive but has a thousand reviews instead of 600. I think the thousand is going to perform better and uh uh that might actually be detrimental if you end up diverting some of the people who would review your game. Maybe not at the same rate positively, but they would add additional reviews to the main game and instead they're comp compartmentalized to the to the demo page. Uh and that sort of the the conversion thing where you see uh games with more reviews converting better like it's it's very clear that it's just it's just social proof. People want to play things that other play. Uh so having more reviews seems to be universally more important than having good reviews. Y
we've seen like
not necessarily I mean yes but also like

we've seen the extreme cases of uh review bombing for good reasons like uh like Slate Despire 2 uh and uh the impact on actual sales uh even when you've got uh like Slate Despire 2 had issues where uh the community in China huge community huge player base for um for Slay Despire 2 they didn't like some of the updates some of the changes and they they they they they roast it like the the the review score dropped from the from the floor to a point where in any other case you would say this game is dead is unplayable like it's clearly nobody likes it. Uh sales in China did not fall that much. They they dropped a little bit but not that much.
Thank you.
Yep. Uh I wanted to ask about the discount strategy for different platforms. Um when planning those like say you're on Steam, you're on Nintendo, you're on ps or something else. Uh are you looking at

those as a whole? Are you treating them as completely separate kingdoms? Whereas for example like you try to line up there's a sale on Steam once it's once it ends there's a sale on switch or do you try to line up line them up at the same time or just look at big sales happening on the platforms and use that as a guideline. Uh so normal operating procedure is you should treat them as separate kingdoms that just don't talk to each other uh with key exceptions. If you have a new release, if you've got something basically that is supposed to be a marketing beat, that it's a you're doing a big thing like you're you're launching the you're launching a a sequel to your game, but you're launching it just on Steam because of early access or because this is your release strategy. you ended up just doing Steam first, but you already have the the original game on consoles, then you do want 100% of the time to align your discounting strategy for consoles for that period of time so that the original game is discounted on console for the sequel launch because people will find out about the sequel releasing and it's a cool game and they will look look it up or try to look it up on their

PlayStation. They won't find the sequel, but if they find the original game at a little discount, they are much more likely to go and buy that. So you have much stronger um discount. Yeah. Much stronger sales on those platforms
by this sort of halo effect from having something else happening on on Steam. But it really only applies to things that they would find out about. So things that they will read about on Reddit or see on Twitch or read like an IGN review of for the six people that still read that. Uh uh it doesn't really matter for things that are just a regular sale or just like a small patch or something like that. they they will not notice.
You got any other cool cutout slides there?
I go few uh like China important like also just kind of feeds into the regional pricing thing but uh I got some slides that just didn't fit into the pricing conversations but as you can imagine there's many more things that make sense like and localization uh for uh some regions is critical like it's easy to just um um tunnel vision that oh

no people play games in English. Uh no, people in China don't understand English. They don't read English. They play games in Chinese. Same in uh a bunch of other languages that you don't normally think about. Thai, Vietnamese, and others smaller smaller regions. But also, you will never sell substantial amount of units in Thailand if you don't have Thai. Uh you will never sell a substantial amount of units in China. If you don't have Chinese uh localization, if the Chinese localization is bad, some like they will buy some of that and then they will roast you in reviews and they will they will hate you. So uh making good localization and then in those regions for most cases we recommend work with uh regional partners if you if the game is big enough to afford it if you have the resources for it because you will you probably don't read Chinese you probably don't have a Chinese social media account to be able to talk to the community in China and to work with Chinese influencers. So localizing is kind of table stakes should be easy enough for everybody. Even if you do it poorly it's better than if it's not there at all. Uh but if you really want

to maximize your chances, it's localizing and culturalizing. So that's important. Uh something something Chinese localization uh review uh sorry refund rates uh across regions also very important or like useful to monitor because they can sometimes show structural issues like this. This was a uh a situation where a multiplayer game uh was technically in a genre that should be very popular in China. Uh but the the server setup, the networking uh that they had uh built for the game didn't really work in China. So they had loads of purchases, but then they had like 60% refund rates because people would just buy the game, try to play it, get into a lobby, and it didn't work. So obviously they refunded and they left a a a bad refund um um uh refund label or a a review. And that's something where if you just look at the topline refund rates, it can sort of be um yeah, it doesn't show up. You have to split it by region and then you can see outliers that might actually give you

some information about things that you can actually fix because this this was fixable. This was just once they they found out about it, they were able to go and actually fix their server setup and suddenly the entire region start performing significantly better. Uh yeah, that's it. That's it for for this for this deck. I got many more slides next but this is just
Hi, cool talk. Thank you. Uh Tom, I've got two questions. Uh first one is about releasing like uh you mentioned that um I I've I've heard many times in game industry that is worth releasing on as many platforms as possible at the same time. like yeah he releasing on all platforms like consoles and steam uh at the same time. Uh is it worth it or not? Uh how does it work? Um
because I'm just thinking about is it worth it to uh spend additional few months to port your game on consoles or

if you got already on Steam your product uh release or not? Well,
okay. So, I can go straight to the second question.
Can can can we hide the slide for a second? We'll switch to a different uh thing to answer the uh the question because I do have a chart. I mean, with the with this much uh buildup, it's going to be disappointing, but uh [laughter] I do have it. So, I might as well I might as well show it.
Yeah, sure. Perfect.
Uh, okay. Uh, we can switch back. Uh, so there's there's uh a couple of like two insights from that question.

Uh, SIM shipping uh across all platforms better than delaying. So if you if you ship to Steam first and then ship um the ship ship games like ship ship ports of your of your game later uh statistically it looks like at least it correlates with uh with uh worse performance on console and it tracks with first principal understanding of how people work that if you have a game shipping across all platforms and it's a good game uh then uh if they find out about it through whatever channel Twitch Reddit whatever they will be able to buy it on their platform of choice. If you have Steam only, then some people will look for it on on on PlayStation and they won't find it. So then they will forget that they ever wanted to play it in the first place. Uh so that tracks. However, also um I don't know if I have a chart for this, but another insight is u uh if you do delay, it really doesn't seem to matter if you delay by a few months or by like a year and a half. At that point you get into the realm of

like the previous question where it doesn't seem like uh there's that much cross talk or like that people will see your game ported to PlayStation and feel like oh there's an old game from Steam therefore I won't buy it. It just it has to stand on its own but it doesn't really make it so that uh a year a game that is a year and a half old is going to perform much le much much worse than uh than uh a game that that was just six months old at the time of porting. uh the uh the actual I think most useful simplification this is medians and this is there's big spreads in it so this is also again one of those grains of salt your game is going to behave differently but by median standards like if you sim ship to all consoles uh the kind of rule of thumb general expectation is you're going to make about a steam and a half in additional revenue lifetime for the game that is stream on consoles if you have to delay it's going to drop down quite significantly but you're still going to make another like 60% uh of your of your Steam revenue. Correlation, not causation. So, there's caveats here

in that games that simship also usually have more resources, better produced, higher budgets. Therefore, they might just be they might just be better. Uh but first principle, understanding that there is a halo effect. If you're launching a game, you have marketing, you've got people anticipating the release, talking about it on socials, giving them an opportunity to buy it when they hear about it on consoles is like it feels like a good mechanisms to to make sure that you're selling as many units on consoles as possible.
Okay, thank you.
Y and the second question is about localization. It's just popped uh when you mentioned it
um on Chinese market. here. I've got a game with uh not so many um lines of text and I've got voice over for everything of it. Um is it worth only uh localize the text or should I just jump into uh voice overs also?
I do voice over as well if it's not if it's not too expensive you have the

resources for it because it might
I'm sure but I'm just thought about it. Yeah. Because
so I I don't have I don't have you know data to to show it. We've not we've not like looked into this uh that in that detailed of a way to split it uh with voice over but uh localization for sure people in China are going to play in their own language not in English and uh at the at minimum they're going to appreciate it more if you if you gave them the option to also have uh voice over in their original language. Um the there's there's a risk to it that the voiceover might not be great because you have no way of actually doing QA on it because you don't understand the language.
That's the tricky part.
That's the tricky part. Uh but it shows that you care and that probably amounts to something. Uh so if you can if it's not if if what you're saying is the game doesn't have too much content. Uh it doesn't have too much text to translate. it doesn't seem like it's going to be too uh too resource intensive and you probably already have some pipeline of

localizing it so that you've got your lock kits and you've got your your um uh localization company helping you uh giving them a little bit more money to also give you give you localization for uh like lines that you can then send over to uh voice actors to do to do uh Chinese voice over might not do anything but might actually be be substantially impactful and China is a big market so maybe it makes sense Yeah. Thank you, man.