Considerations: To Sell or to Free

Is it a commercial game?
There is no doubt that this is probably one of the more common asked questions of those in Indie Games Dev, especially those of my peers using the RPG Maker software. This, in my opinion, is a question that should be able to be answered by a game dev within the initial concept stages of the game. There are a lot of games on the market now days both free and for sale and it should be known from the start of development whether you are creating a free game or a commercial game. The difference between free and commercial is really a measurement of how valuable your development is. People are more lenient on a games design depending on the price. For example, a Call of Duty or Borderlands game that costs $80 can only cost that much because they offer value to their customers, but quite obviously not every FPS would be able to price in that range because they cannot offer the same value that the aforementioned games have.
What is and isn’t value?
Lets list off a few things here that increase and decrease value of a game.
Art: This includes things like HUD, GUI, Environment art, Character art, Animations and individuality of those things. I’m going to address the elephant in the room, using stock assets from Unity or RPG Maker or any other engine that offers stock assets, lowers the value of your game. That doesn’t mean your game isn’t good. But it does lower it’s value. Think of it as an economy, the more supply of something there is, the lower the price becomes to meet the demand. There are countless (Not literally) games both Unity and RPG Maker that use stock assets. When it comes to someone deciding to play your game to begin with, originality is key, you need a unique selling point, something to draw them in. In a sea of stock asset games, visually, it is nothing special. It might have the best story that has every been written but it’s value is still lowered by it’s standard use of assets that everyone else uses. When it come to selling games with stock assets then you lower the value even more. There are people who are willing to play a game with stock assets, but those same people might not be willing to pay for a game with those stock assets. To increase the value of your game, whether commercial or non commercial, while people are willing to make concessions on art for a free game, you add value with original artworks.
Story: This means character development, pacing and story design. Before people buy or download your game, they have most likely read a blog post or watched a trailer. If your story doesn’t hook them from the blog post or trailer then the chance that you convert that lead to a sale or download drops drastically. I’m not going to sit here and tell you how to write a story but what I will say is that a story is not something you can write in one night, one week or even in one month most of the time. The level of refinement in your story and writing will determine whether people will play your game and further more whether they will pay money for your game. Keep this in mind, what ever story you are writing, there is already a dozen of variations of that story out there, you need to make yours stand out, and even if your game has good art, with a bad story, it lowers value.
Now I know in these past explanations I've talked about how certain actions lower the value in your game. While I could go on and talk about how to add value to your game, instead just read over those last two paragraphs again and deduce that if you do the opposite of what lowers the value for your game, then you will add value.
To tie up loose ends
Bringing this all back around in a complete circle. Should you sell your game or free your game. These are questions you need to ask your self in the begging. If you decide to sell your game, then from the beginning you can go about designing in a way that adds as much value as possible to your game. If you decide to make a free game, then you know what concessions you can and can’t make in design.
It’s clear that there are a lot or people who like to make games as a hobby for a pass time and this post isn’t meant to shun that. If you like making games for a hobby and don’t care about it’s value or what other people think about it then completely ignore everything I have written. We all design games for many different reasons. Some of us design as a hobby, some of us design for an day job, some of us design because we love crafting beautiful art and some of us design because there is an epic tale that we wish to tell.
So, is your game a free game or a commercial game?
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