If you want to improve the quality of data you are able to build with, reach out. DMs are open!

The expensive nature of these other insights largely came from the lack of a general solution and the overhead to build your own. Ludare is taking that first step to build a comprehensive data suite for the metrics that matter most for making a game and drive confidence from partners.

Part of the reason developers and publishers rely on that one metric is because it's the easiest one to be collected (it's automatic once you release a Steam page) and is the closest to real sales data that can be collected without serious resources and investment.

But the only major metric most studios gather, analyze, and present to publishers is whishlists which don't really indicate the quality of the game as much as the teams ability to market it. Which is an entirely different skill set than that needed to make a game.

Ludare is trying to build that new way through our low cost subscription and playtime based revenue sharing. If you are a developer making something new, or a player wanting to support new ideas, lets talk.

This has resulted in the total funding for video games halving across the same number of projects. Clearly this indicates that there is interest in supporting new ideas but not with the current, high risk methods.

We can't just expect all players to go along with the mantra of "less game, lower quality, higher price" but we can change the dynamics so that players feel they get treated well while increasing indie games' share of the wallet and drive more revenue to developers and do so early in the process.

Not wanting to leave this thread on a down note, I'm sure you're left with the question of "OK, well what do we do about it?" Well, as a startup looking to overcome this weakness in the gaming marketplaces, our answer is to change the formula and use the power of indies coming together.

This means that our current markets are driving us to lower our prices even more than the outside economies and realities of survival are already driving prices to the lowest possible. This impact is even more strongly felt amongst indie games where there is immense pricing pressure and competition.

So, even if we say that back in the 90's I was able to sell my game at $40 and that I was able to keep that up in real value, the raise of sales mean that I would have had to undercut my own price in the recent decades to something like $32 today. (Assuming an average 20% discount)

The thing that it doesn't cover is the increasing downward pressure on prices that comes from the increased price competition within the actual game marketplaces themself. So, we already at a heavily devalued dollar but then we end up taking less of that.

Namely, it was this chart. The one that highlights that games have never been cheaper in terms of real prices pegged to the 2024 $. It also shows an interesting tid bit that any price increases tend to get lost very quickly. (In this case in less than 2.5 years.)