I have to chime in alongside what others said here. Mind you I haven't seen the demo, but $10-$15 is pretty much what I pay for games. I buy a LOT of stuff at that price; it's the level at which I'm willing to take a risk on something that isn't a critically acclaimed, overwhelmingly popular masterpiece. A demo is very nice, but it doesn't say a darn thing about the overall length that I'll enjoy the game for. Is it exciting for two hours, then quickly boring? Does the final version have less content than expected? For $10-$15, I'll happily take that risk, even without a demo. $25 and up is only for games that have clearly-demonstrated fun value (and a pre-order is right out). The only games I can remember paying more than twenty bucks for in the last several years are the Left 4 Dead games, Civ 4 and 5, and uh...Orange Box. On the other hand, my Steam games list is absolutely full of ten dollar games that I've spent maybe a few hours on, and I keep happily buying them.
$10-15 bucks, I think, is a really key value here: It's the price (per person) of a night out. Maybe it's dinner at a decent Thai place. Maybe it's a trip to a movie theater and a box of Junior Mints. Maybe it's a trip to the zoo. Either way, if you sit there thinking "I want something fun to do for a couple hours", that's the price range. Just about any video game is fun for a couple hours, so that's my price point. It's not that I don't trust your game, it's just that...well, I don't trust your game. I don't have word-of-mouth from RL friends. I haven't sat at someone else's keyboard and fussed around in it for a couple hours. I haven't played the prequel. All I can do is say, "This game looks interesting. I need something interesting. It's within my entertainment budget for tonight. I'm going to buy it now." It doesn't need to be mind-blowingly amazing, and it'll get word-of-mouth just fine as a plain old fun game.
I can see the appeal of marketing to a small, hardcore fanbase--it does let you make a more focused product and gives you reliable customers, and it also lets you cut corners because hardcore fans are more forgiving--but I don't see any reason why this particular game wouldn't appeal to a wider fanbase. Hopefully this would be good for everyone who likes design+simulation games, not just people who are obsessed with cars. Most of the people who bought Railroad Tycoon were fans of simulation games, not railfans or trainspotters. Maybe that could apply here, too?
I'm just worried that you would never find out, because while it's an AAA game within its tiny tiny niche, it's lower in comparison within the larger sim genre... still good enough to draw a large audience, but not at the same price. I mean, I'd rather take the risk of appealing to just 10% of a million sim fans, than to stick with 100% of ten thousand car-sim fans, even if I had to pull a lower asking price. I dunno. I guess it depends on the way you publish it too, and after getting curious on the preorder page, I do have to take vocal issue with that.
Dude, seriously, this is the process to preorder your game:
- Let's click the big text on the front page that says 'preorder'!
- Okay, where do I put my money? Wait, I need to be registered?
- ...on the forums? Okay, let me make a username, a password...
- I have to answer a secret question by finding and going to the 'Team' page? Are you SHITTING me?
- Wait for an email to arrive...
- Click the activation link, back to the front page, back to the preorder page...
- Jesus, activating my account didn't even take me through a login page. I need to log in.
- WHERE IS THE LOGIN BUTTON
- BACK to the forums, log in, BACK to the main page, click to the preorder page...
- And, finally, there's the paypal button.
You know why you only have super hardcore niche market fans buying your game? THIS IS WHY!! The ordering process should be "Click pre-order button. Click paypal button. Receive bacon." Maybe it'll take you some extra time to handle the pre-orders manually through email, but pardon my language, this is fucking ridiculous. Even at thirty bucks, impulse shoppers are your friend. I had to jump through no fewer than ten hoops to even find a paypal button. Shit, if I wanted to buy a known-good game on Steam and it made me jump through that many hoops, I'd get bored and walk away before I paid any money.
Because at the end of the day, here's another super-serious heads up for you about your price point: The harder it is to own your game, the lower the price it is worth. Think of it as an "inconvenience anti-fee". When I get something on Steam, I find the page, I click buy, and then I know I can download it forever from anywhere. It's easy and it's trustworthy. If you have a bad ordering system, your game starts looking like a worse deal as I muddle through the process. If I don't feel like I can safely download your game to any of my computers, anywhere, even if my hard drive dies (like I can with Steam), your game starts looking like a worse deal too.
And... at this point, I'm just coming across as bitching in a really negative way. It's not intended that way. But since I don't think I've seen any previous games from your studio, and I don't see anyone on your team page who's listed as having anything even remotely to do with business, I want to make sure I give you the full reasoning behind my thoughts on pricing. And if you don't think $10 will cover your costs on pricing... well, it will if you sell three times as many!
Go look up Left 4 Dead's price point and sales volume. They halved the price, and sales went up 3000%. (http://www.shacknews.com/article/57308/valve-left-4-dead-half) That's 3000%, as in 30 times, and that's not a typo.
Okay, here's a couple questions for you. And they may be awkward to answer, but here goes anyway:
1) What games should I be comparing this against? Right now I'm imagining it as part Spacechem, part Kerbal Space Program, and part...uh, something with money. How in-depth is it, compared to those? Is that interpretation completely, way off? What would you compare the financial side against?
2) Where does the replay value come from? Okay, I'm designing a car. I'm good at designing things. Compulsive, even. What will keep it challenging...and, more importantly, what will make me play with the engine designer more than a few times? Yeah it's fun, that's the whole point, but I'm (perhaps falsely) thinking of an engine in the vague, rough, inaccurate terms of a single stage of SpaceChem. Okay, so I've designed a few ideal engines for different classes of car, or maybe different stages of the game (based on expense). Now what? SpaceChem's replay value comes from "Shit that's a lot of stages, like a whole lot, and they're really hard to optimize", and Kerbal...well, I don't see where Kerbal is going to have any long-term replay value at all. In Automation, once I've hashed out the game's fundamental design principles, what keeps me from re-using my designs every single game so that replaying it is trivial?
Well, this is a massive necro, but I've been playing the game a lot lately and I made this:
Warning: large image
(http://i.imgur.com/J4zHxOs.png)