Tuesday, October 28, 2008

relative pricing

All pricing is relative.

In other words, all prices will be judged by consumers in their relation to other prices. Your customers will compare the price of your product to the prices of other products. The big question is: what will they compare it to?

With expansion content, I always use the original game's price as my primary measure. Expansion content should not cost nearly half the price of the original game if it offers significantly less than half the amount of content.

But I don't assume that the majority of game consumers think like me in this matter. What do you use as your measure of fairness when considering the price of expansion content or full games?

3 comments:

  1. I'm usually happy with 50% of the full-game price, regardless of the amount of actual new content that's added.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm usually happy with 50% of the full-game price, regardless of the amount of actual new content that's added.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Personally, I'm cheap when it comes to single-player games. Usually I wait for a bundle to go on sale before I buy an expansion. My current single-player diversion is Titan Quest, which I purchased the "Gold Edition" for. I rarely buy a game at full price the day of launch, so waiting for a bundle works for me. For Spore, I'd probably just wait for a bundle with lots of the expansions together for a lower price (and maybe EA will get rid of the stupid DRM in the mean time).

    For online games, I know firsthand that people aren't very price savvy. People always compare M59's monthly fee with the monthly fee of other games, ignoring the box costs and expansions costs. So, trying to compete on total price didn't work. Players seem to ignore the costs of expansions for online games in their calculations.

    Some thoughts,

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.