Anti-Sale Mentality Ignites As ‘Because We May’ Discounts Launch

“We believe that developers should have the freedom to price their games how they like” is how the prose begins over on the Because We May website. This is an effort started by Ron Carmel as a means to celebrate the digital stores that grant indie developers the freedom to set their own prices; primarily the App Store, Google Play and Steam but IndieCity, Indievania and Desura are certainly stores that fit the criteria.

Celebration takes the form of encouraging indie game developers to discount their games on the site during the last week of May, and it seems to have proven very popular with about 180 developers signing up to endorse the site’s message (that of freedom of pricing on those stores). The discounts rolled out today with, we imagine, many eager wallets springing open and gobbling up the many quality indie games available at such low prices.

Take a look at that image above just one more time. Do you see it? Sos Sosowski’s Super Office Stress is set at $99.99. Hardly the low price discount that every other developer has sided with for their game in accordance with the encouragement by Carmel and the other organizers. So what’s going on here?

A few developers have taken a different approach to being able to set their prices as they see fit, and as we’ve heard previously it’s one that disagrees with the “race to the bottom” that discounts, bundles and sales arguably encourage.

Earlier today Michael Brough (aka smestorp) wrote up a blog post about indie game pricing in reaction to the Because We May discounts. He recounts that upon first hearing about the organized sale that he thought it irrelevant to himself, saying that he had never had a problem with being able to set his prices as he sees fit and therefore it coming across as a weird thing to celebrate.

“But thinking about it some more, maybe I am indirectly affected”, Michael writes. “I’m affected by expectations of what the costs of games should be, for what a game of a particular cost should look like. I’m not entirely free to set prices how I like, if I need anyone to buy them.”

Michael’s most prominent point is that most indie games are attractive to only a small audience so they aren’t likely to sell in big numbers. Therefore you are going to want to put a high enough price on them if you wish to cover your costs without losing too many sales. He argues that he has to set the price higher per unit than another developer who is pushing many thousands of sales.

“So while I kind of get the point of this sale, I feel like it’s going about things backwards. Dropping prices – well hey, they might be too low already, the thing to celebrate is being able to set them higher. Get out of this race to the bottom.”

Michael has adopted what we’re calling an ‘anti-sale mentality’ by selling Vertex Dispenser at $15.01, “antidiscounted” from $9.99, and Glitch Tank and Zaga-33 have both been priced to $6.99, anti-discounted from $1.99 and $0.99 respectively.

This is what Sos Sosowski has partaken in by setting Super Office Stress at $99.99; as a means to fight against this “race to the bottom” that has been ongoing due to the abundance of bundles and sales that offer indie games at very low prices. The result of this could be that players learn to wait for these regular sales in order to spend their money on indie games, therefore devaluing them and often being called out for being priced too high in places, when in fact they may not be.

We spoke to Sos to find out his reasoning behind putting the price of his game up so high in the Because We May discounts:

“Actually I wanted to set the price this high just for a day for some time. Then I heard about Because We May and thought it was great and wanted to join in! Then I realised I am unable to discount [Super Office Stress] since the price is determined by dice roll anyway, so I thought it was a good opportunity to pull this off. I think that since we celebrate being able to set the price whatever we want, why not put it this high?!”

“I think it proves a valid point. It seems a bit ironic that indie developers, who are probably kind of poor already, celebrate setting the prices even lower and I hope to display that you can actually do what you want and you will never know how it goes unless you try!”

“Thus I think that anti-discounts nail the point of Because We May and provide a fair balance.”

Someone else who has read the post by Michael Brough is Jon Brodsky, who has developed his own games as a solo developer but currently works at Lucky Frame, producing catchy iOS titles. He has set-up more of an experiment with the pricing during these discounts – selling his solo title, Wiresq at the anti-discounted price of $6.99 on the App Store and has revealed his reasoning for doing so:

“With digital goods, the relationship between the price and the production cost is really hard to determine. Wiresq has been out for over a year, and while I think it is an interesting product, it is extremely niche”, he told us.

“I also have the historical perspective to see that I earned well below minimum wage for the time that I worked on it, discounting any intangible gains I made. [Lucky Frame] is participating in the Because We May sale as well, with Pugs Luv Beats, so it will be interesting to see if discounting makes us more money than raising the price.”

Jon’s two price point experiment reflects, at least in part, the efforts of Sophie Houlden’s “pay-when-you-want” sale, which Michael brought up in his seminal blog post. The point being made here by these developers is that the discounts encouraged by the Because We May sales are slightly hypocritical, and that seems to be a valid point.

This could, for some, feed directly into this “race to the bottom” which sees players being taught to buy indie games only when they are on sale or as part of a bundle, which might have the effect of devaluing them too. This causes a problem when indie game developers need to set their prices slightly higher to cover their costs, but players perceive normal pricing as too steep and would prefer to skip the purchase and hope to see the game in a sale at some point.