Today is a sad day... Just found out Factorios current rating :(

Originally posted by narrill

For it to be a reasonable argument to me personally one would need to explain why the devs nowadays deserve to be compensated less for the game than they did when it launched in 2018.

100% disagree, and frankly this take is baffling to me. Every game ever released is affected by inflation, but Wube are the only devs I've ever seen react to that by increasing the price of their existing product. Most devs just create and sell new content, which I don't think anyone has a problem with.

Originally posted by narrill

What's baffling to me is the idea that you guys should be exempt from the very predictable blowback from increasing the price of your game for no other reason than to keep with inflation while:

• The game had not had a major update in more than two years
• Your sales figures remained strong, and you'd just launched on a new platform
• You were actively working on an expansion with the same price point as the base game

I'm sorry, but this is something lots of people would see as greedy, and they're welcome to that opinion.

It's also baffling to me that most of the comments are defending you as pro-consumer while you're in here trying to paint "rent goes up every year, we should be able to do that too" as a noble cause, as if people are totally cool with getting gouged by their landlord every year.

I don't even have a problem with the price increase, but come on. In no universe are a few bad reviews because of this unreasonable.

Originally posted by narrill

No, I'm not confused about what inflation is. That's a fairly condescending suggestion.

Increasing game prices to match inflation simply isn't done, not even by reasonably priced, high-quality games with no microtransactions and free ongoing updates, and you're saying you feel you should be entitled to do it despite your studio not having any need to.

I don't know what you call that if not greedy. And Valve already adjusts their regional pricing recommendations every year based on consumer price indices and purchasing power, so you ended up hitting a bunch of regions twice for the same inflation.

I don't see any reason why games should automatically get cheaper with time

I do: you paid for the labor to make the game when inflation was lower, and distributing it to new consumers costs you next to nothing. So why should the price track with inflation?

If you'd waited until Space Age's release, which will actually add content to the base game, no one would have batted an eye.

Regardless, trying to initiate this separation when your own studio admits it has no financial need to adjust for inflation is going to be seen as greedy by some people. I don't get what's hard to grasp about that.

I believe that in some time increase from 35 to 40 dollars will be necesary, again not our fault.

This is a wild thing to announce in some random comment thread with some random redditor, jesus christ.

Originally posted by narrill

I have no idea how you can say "greedy" is a subjective term, acknowledge that you're adopting a less consumer-friendly pricing strategy than everyone else for no other reason than that you feel you can, and then turn around and say people are "generally incorrect" for seeing that pricing strategy as greedy.

Beyond that, a lot of what you're saying is simply wrong.

You have the investment cost, the risk of the investment (the bigger risk the bigger rewards often)

Factorio was crowdfunded, and you sold early access through almost the entire development process. Compared to the vast majority of game projects your investment and risk were both extremely low.

The labor wasn't done, the game is being worked on.

The vast majority of your work since 1.1 (which as I've pointed out was two full years before the price increase) has gone toward Space Age, which is a new product you plan to sell. So no, the only work you were doing on the product whose price you increased was minor bug fixes and optimizations, which is expected for any game of this caliber.

Again, if you'd waited until Space Age was released to increase the price I don't think anyone would have cared.

The main reason of money and the capitalistic system is, that entities which makes product/services which are demanded and regarded good get eventually more resources to be able to provide more of the good stuff. So it doesn't really matter how much labor is put in it or how much actual cost it had.

I don't know why you would think appealing to capitalism is a good rebuttal to people who think what you're doing is greedy. Capitalism is inherently greedy, and is seen that way by the average consumer. Especially now, when the world is hot on the heels of simultaneous periods of record inflation and record corporate profits.

"I'm increasing the price of our product because I think I can get away with it" is exactly the kind of thing people see as greedy.

Since the game industry is very risky, you need to earn several times more the cost of the develpoment to come even with the successful product, because in the long run, it needs to finance the other tries which are not successful until you hit something good again.

Again, this doesn't apply in your case because players were funding Factorio through nearly its entire development. And has your team even worked on any other projects? You can't argue that you need to increase prices to make up for failed projects when your first and only project was wildly successful for nearly a decade before you thought of increasing the price.

Nothing new was announced, we made it pretty clear we want to adjust for inflation.

When you raised the price to $30 you said "This is the final Factorio price update, unless something unforeseen happens," and when you increased the price to $35 you justified that by saying the levels of inflation at the time were "unforeseen." So yes, if the price is going to be regularly updated to match inflation going forward, that is new information.

I hope these points gave you a possibility to see things in a new perspective

Respectfully, I hope you eventually learn that getting in condescending arguments with your players on social media is not a good way to get them to see things in a new perspective. Although I'm sure you already know that.

Originally posted by narrill

Are you trolling? I would say we are more consumer friendly than about 99.9% of other companies.

But your pricing model isn't. The entire rest of the industry allows their games to depreciate with inflation, and you're saying you won't do that. That is a less consumer-friendly pricing strategy.

And you're deluding yourself if you think you're the only consumer friendly studio out there, especially among projects of this caliber. I can think of several other projects off the top of my head that have no microtransactions, have put out years of large, free updates, and have never increased their prices. Two of which are your largest competitors, Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program.

After we put more than year of work working 14 hours a day 7 days a week for free.

It wasn't "for free," it was for the product you were planning to sell, which you did end up selling many years before it was even finished.

Most studios do not work for a year and then sell their unfinished game in early access. They work until the game is done and sell the finished version, which typically takes far longer than a year.

And I don't have a problem with early access, to be clear. I think it's a smart strategy for smaller studios working on more niche projects. But it is still objectively the case that doing this massively reduces your risk compared to most projects.

"The vast majority of your work since 1.1 (which as I've pointed out was two full years before the price increase) has gone toward Space Age"

Wrong.

1.1 was the only major update you released for free before the price increase. That's not arguable. You also did work to port the game to Switch, but this was for a new product and was not given to players for free, and while you did later port the controller support back to the base game, it didn't happen until several months after the price increase.

Outside of that all the updates were bug fixes, optimization, and modding API support, all of which are expected for a game of this caliber and generally not enough to warrant a price increase based on project scope.

Wrong. (Not fault of capitalist, but governments printing money)

This is not correct, and unless you can cite something supporting this belief I have no reason to think it's based on anything but your own desire for it to be true.

Here is an article from the Economic Policy Institute stating that rises in corporate profits, not monetary policy, was disproportionately responsible for the rises in inflation.

Here's a similar article from Fortune.

I can find more, if you want.

"I'm increasing the price of our product because I think I can get away with it"

You literally just argued that demand for your product justifies your decision to increase the price with inflation when no one else in the industry does, because pricing is based on demand and not on the cost of production.

"Again, this doesn't apply in your case because players were funding Factorio through nearly its entire development."

Wrong

You just now said you operated on investment for roughly a year, and for the following year you were just barely able to make back your costs through sales. That means my statement is correct. You were self-funded for a year, player funded and breaking even for a year, and then were making a profit for the following, what, four years of early access?

That means the game was player-funded for nearly its entire development. It was only that first year that you were actually taking on risk.

Wrong, I can, as long as you acknowledge thinking about future is ok.

No. Your project had been a financial success for many years by the time you decided to increase the price to match inflation, there was no longer any risk of failure at that point.

If you're saying you increased the price to put money away for the next project, which might fail, all I can say is that if any other studio on the planet told players they were raising prices on their existing products for the sole purpose of funding future projects, they'd get rightly crucified.

It really looks, like your whole worldview is somehow build on incorrect assumptions.

It looks to me like your worldview is built on wishful thinking and isn't founded in reality at all. It really should not have to be explained to you why pioneering inflationary game pricing might make people upset.

Originally posted by narrill

Except that corporate profit margins surged during the pandemic, not nominal profits. That means profits became larger than they should have been proportional to revenue, which doesn't happen with inflation caused purely by an increase in the supply of money.

The articles I linked, which you clearly didn't read, explain this.

Also, no, that has nothing to do with anything I'm saying. You're the only one with a vested interest in pushing a "capitalists did nothing wrong, it was all the government's fault" narrative. You're the one that brought this up.

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Edit: I can't anymore with this, this is such a waste of time.