1mo ago

Would "suggest price" be a positive option for steam?

I just looked at a game that is 60€ and said "I dont think its worth that and would buy now for 30, just to check it out". Then I had the idea that some publishers/devs might benefit from knowing that 1-100000 people think that the game is worth X and would buy now for that price right now. In a case like today, the additional revenue would help their financial report etc. They could make short discounts to get especially these customers or even more tailored, you need to press "buy" and confirm at that price to let the publisher know. Like suggest price on ebay.

Let me know your thoughts and if this is a terrible idea. :)

43 comments

This assumes people are rational and that what they say they are willing to pay matches what they are actually willing to pay. And that is just the people not trying to abuse the system.
- Personally I don't think I'd advocate for OP's suggestion, but you could solve the problem by making the suggestion also a commitment for X period of time. If you make the suggestion, and the price drops within 90 days, it automatically purchases it, etc.
  
  And what'd you get? People putting in 0.10. Unfortunately useless, as the poster above said.
- I'm guilty of this. So many times, I'll see something at full price and say I'll wait to buy it on sale. Then it goes on sale and I don't feel like spending the money at all. Granted, I'm not trying to sway the market and screaming my bid, this is just my internal monologue. I have a backlog of games and a busy adult life, so it's not like I'm game-poor. Just regular poor.

I think it's a terrible idea but please don't take that as an insult. It would instantly be filled with $1 "bids" and the data would be useless at best. I also feel like if I was a dev, I'd feel pretty bummed about the catalogue of people who think my game isn't worth buying
- They can set a auto rejection on offers below a certain threshold, ebay does this with its make an offer.
  
  I think that makes sense for items of finite/low quantity like eBay. Then you have to make sure your offer is at least reasonable so it beats other offers. But with an unlimited resource like software you don't have to worry about that.
  
  Someone would setup some third party tracker that identified the auto reject threshold and listed it for everyone, so people could low-ball just above it. Or devs would just set it to auto-reject below the listing prices.
  
  Then it gets filled with the lowest offers. Either way, the data wouldn't be useful enough to warrant it as a standard feature. If the devs want to know, they can put up a poll or something
- You could say the same about steam reviews.

What if it was a "notify me if this game goes to $x" instead. But the devs could still see it.
- That would be neat as well. :) thanks for sharing.
- That would most likely be one of the better solutions.
  I think isthereanydeal works similar to that.

I don't know how well known it is, but this sort of information is visible already on https://isthereanydeal.com.
Click on a game and look for "Waitlist Price Distribution" under the "Stats" tab:
- Thank you, I didn't know this existed!

Have a look at steam reviews then ponder how people would use it

Wishlist vs purchase is already a signal that maybe you'd benefit from a sale. Seems like it's enough. "Suggested prices" from gamers would be way too noisy to mean anything.
- Yeah I suspect the wishlist-discount-purchase nexus is sufficient and more reliable means to determine what the best price would be.

In a perfect world, sure, but in our reality you'd just get tons of people saying they want Elden Ring for a dollar or something.
But even if it worked, it's just games getting on sale faster. Right now, you can either pay a higher price today or wait until the game gets as cheap as you want, but it might take months or years.
As for just the information, how much people would pay for a game, that's what market research if for I guess.

No it'd get flooded with "2 dollars" or "free"

They could add a bid price, so that you automatically buy at a certain price level. Sure, you could bid 0.10, but they'd probably never actually take it. And that way, they could know how much money is laying on the table. If there's a thousand bids for $50, that gives them a pricing signal.
- Exactly my thought. Thank you for pointing that out.
- This sounds like it would just end up speedrunning Steam's refund system. Plus, I don't think it's desirable for the seller. If they feel their game is worth some price, but a bunch of people know they can bully other developers into a race to the bottom, that could easily be a negative feedback loop.

I think that would be abused pretty quickly to get games sold at 60+ down to 1 or less.

Seeing how many devs ignore suggested regional pricing unless steam autofills it for them, nobody would enable this on their own, and you can't make this sort of thing opt out.

Ah yes Gamers™ would never abuse a system like that. There is a reason why many publishers have abandoned regional pricing, the loss in revenue is bigger than any gains they would make. Remember they are in it for profit maximization not customer base maximization. They rather sell 10 copies for 60 than a 1000 copies for 60 cents.
- I think a good alternative would be is have the system, but have the developer provide a Target price listing of what they're expecting and anything that's significantly under that listing gets ignored
  For example many people didn't feel like frostpunk 2 was worth the release pricing and that they thought it was easily more worth around $30 instead of the 45 it released at, so Gamers could suggest that they're not buying it because the price is too high and they could provide that $30 price point, unless that $30 price point is below the Target price that the developer has set as the minimum listing, it would be part of the metric. This would filter out the people who are abusing the system because there's no point in using the system dishonorably because you don't know if your metric is going to actually count where are the people who are you using it genuine and not doing obvious troll responses would not be filtered out because realistically they should be within the developers Target.
  It's not like these people are saying I would pay a dollar for this game when the games worth $40, they're saying that they believe the price is too steep in that $30 is a much better cost point than 45.
  They could even add a little bit of financial advantage onto it, by optionally having it so you can Mark a price point at what you'd be willing to purchase it at and if the developer ends up dropping it to that price point it, it alerts the user much like how eBay does with the suggest a price feature

I believe publishers already have good control over their prices. If they feel a game isn’t selling to the extent they wish, they lower the price. If it’s selling well, then they have no need to lower the price.
It’s market economy.

If I have to price it, I'm going to price it at $1.

The action of not buying something signals the price is too high. Sales numbers vs sales expectations are the only metric that really matter.
- It's a very unclear signal as there's a bunch of other possibilities too. Maybe I already have a similar game I prefer, maybe I don't like the genre, ...

Sounds like camelcamelcamel but for games.
- There actually already is steamdb which does that exact thing. The reason I suggested it is because probably all would benefit from it.
  
  Imo isthereanydeal does the price tracking more useful.

Fuck no.

Buy the game, try it for 2 hours, don't like it at its current price? Refund it. Pretty sure when you refund the game you can leave that feedback, dunno if devs would ever see it though.

Also, if you wait long enough, those games become heavily discounted during seasonal sales.

I'm thinking of a "make offer" option where the customer can choose any price and the dev can manually choose to sell to that customer for that price or not.
- Sounds awful. A million people spamming 1 cent on all games
  
  Lmao
  I guess a minimum order thingy could be set but then the lowest offer would be spammed.
  Then games with the offer option would be seen as bad or cash-grabby.
  So the option should be to get un-broke and pay full price or wait until winter.
- So eBay?

43 comments