[Jason Schreier] Video Games Need to Be Cheaper to Buy | One way to get out of the video-game industry funk is to recognize that players aren’t spending $70 on most games

This year, one of the best-reviewed and best-selling games so far is Mewgenics, a brilliant strategy game that came out Tuesday and has already sold more than 600,000 copies, co-creator Tyler Glaiel told me yesterday. With a launch-month discount, it costs just $27 on Steam. Following the critical acclaim and buzzy word of mouth, that price has made it an easy impulse buy. There was once a day when flexible pricing made a game seem cheap and low-quality, but in the modern era, that is no longer the case. Only the highest-end games (think: Grand Theft Auto VI) can get away with that kind of pricing. Of the 25 games released in 2025 that generated the most revenue on Steam, only nine were sold at $70 or higher. Some of the others, such as Hollow Knight: Silksong ($20) and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II ($60), were widely praised for how much value they offered for their prices, which helped contribute to their word-of-mouth marketing and overall success. Granted, it’s easier to sell your game for cheap when you’re a team of just three full-time staff, like Silksong’s Team Cherry. But more and more game developers are arguing that the sales bump can make up for the price drop and then some. It’s hard to find tangible data on how price impacts sales (it’s not something that can be A/B tested), but in conversations here at DICE, several developers have brought up flexible pricing as a strategy that could make a massive impact on an industry in crisis. It may need to be coupled with other big market shifts — such as figuring out how to shorten development timelines, which companies like Obsidian are trying to do — but even on its own it’s a worthwhile strategy that could ultimately lead to more revenue for all but the biggest games. submitted by /u/ChiefLeef22 [link] [comments]

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