What Will No Man's Sky retail for?

So when I first starting getting wind of No Man's Sky from Hello Games, I was excited. It looked like a super ambitious game, but an interesting one. As time has gone on and it has gotten inevitably closer to release, new info has still been really sparse.

Basically, when games hit XBLA, Steam, or the PSN, they are usually floating between $10 and $20 dollars. No Man's Sky seems so big though, will this be a $30-40 dollar game? How much depth does this game have, and if it retails above $20 dollars, will that be significant? Will it be ushering in a new era of games that are bigger than the big indies, but smaller than the $60 dollar plastic boxes?

$40 should be the max from everything I've seen.

What's the most that a procedurally generated game (like Minecraft) has ever sold for? Given that the game is from unknown developers, has really no story or scripted elements, and minimal multiplayer elements, I don't see how they could charge more than $30 for it. Partially because I think it's still pretty hard to charge much more than that for a digital only game that has to exist on a console digital marketplace, because most of the other indie games on a console marketplace will be in the $15-$25 range.

Despite being an ambitious title, it is still a small indie game. I expect it will be priced the same amount as games like Transistor (which was $20 I think?).

$25, slightly more than the average indie game.

I was under the impression that this was a full priced game.

My guess is $40. The Talos Principle is the same amount.

@dussck: Is it a 'small indie game' though? I haven't been given that impression at all from the material they have released.

Edit: I'd say the game is released for at least $40 minimum.

Probably 40 bones.

@hunter5024: Nothing is really known about the price.

Five Hundred Ninety-Nine US dollars

It's probably the largest gameworld ever build, but the scope of the production is very small. The team is somewhere between 5-10 people.

If they can deliver what is promised then I would gladly pay $60 or more for it. I would also gladly exchange every AAA 'open world' game that has been released the last 3 years for it.

I expect it to be about $20 - $30 at most.

If I can actually go in my ship across a galaxy with meaningful and different ecosystems and fight pirates.... I'd give like 100 bucks.

Elite Dangerous is a full price game, I'd say No Man's Sky will be the same.

I was just speculating, but since its one of the most anticipated titles of the new generation, it's had primo billing in some of the most important industry shows several times, and it's an incredibly large scale game I don't understand why anyone expects budget prices.

I was expecting it to release at full retail price of $60 Brad bucks.

Yeah, the mere existence of this thread is kind of sad.

If we're in a situation now where rehashed AAA games bloated with vapid content get a pass for charging $60, but innovative "indies" get scorned for charging the same, we're just creating a cycle of punishing creativity and rewarding manipulative staleness.

Sure, Hello Games may charge less than $60, and I'd be psyched about that. But there's nothing about what we've seen of this game so far (limited though it has been), that says it's worth less than any other game coming out.

@hunter5024: Because despite all that, we still barely know anything about it and based on what they've shown and how they're visually selling it, it's an indie-elite or a wallpaper generator. It's also an incredibly large randomly generated game. Minecraft is another incredibly large randomly generated game which never sold for more than $20.

I'm guessing between 20-30$. I also imagine Sony pushing the game so much it'll get one of those weird retail releases of a digital game, that Child of Light, Walking Dead, etc. got.

That's not true. When it started getting insanely popular (before the 360 version) it was 35 euros.

...and the PC version currently still costs 26.95 US.

I'm guessing regardless of development costs the buzz around No Man's Sky has them thinking at least 30-40 bucks.

$20 and it will be a 1Gb download becouse there is nothing in that game, PS+ freebie a couple of months after that.

It's probably even smaller than that, because it only contains the art assets and sounds/music. The world will be generated on the fly.

This is going to be full price, and that seems fair to me.

When it comes on pc you'll most likely be able to get it for $40 from GMG day one anyway.

@joshwent said:

Those AAA games get to charge $60 because regardless of the quality or originality of the game, the game has to recoup the money that was spent paying dozens, or maybe even a couple hundred of employees for a year or more. I think No Man's Sky looks alright, but given that I believe the dev team is still well under 15 people, I think it would be excessive to charge more than $30 for it. I mean, if the team size suddenly ramps up in the final bit of production then maybe I could justify it, but still. Game prices are largely a function of the cost of their production, and while obviously the production costs can vary wildly even among $60 games, most of them have crossed a certain threshold of number of employees and so on.

@bisonhero: If that where true then Notch shuld have sold minecraft for $000000000000.1 or is his great candyroom included in the production costs?

@rethla said:

It's not 1:1, but Minecraft certainly started out much cheaper when it was just an alpha that Notch was working on mostly by himself. The cost went up as more content was added and he founded Mojang and more people were working on the game. Also Minecraft is such a one-in-a-million phenomenon that at a certain point he could've started charging whatever he wanted.

I'm thinking the folks saying $30-40 are probably correct, but I'm almost wondering if they wouldn't have more luck at $20. As amazing as the game seems, it is kind of niche.

Wouldn't surprise me, Evochron Mercenary was only 150MB, of which the music and intro cutscene was like 70 MB. The game world was generated from a seed just like in No Man's Sky and most of these space exploration games.

Huh, I'm kind of surprised that a lot of people expecting the game to be $20-30. I wouldn't be surprised if it sold for $60.

I think I read or heard Sean Murray in an interview say that it's going to be around 4GB.

Whatever the price, I'm sure a lot of people will complain it is too expensive.

Wow, how did you get to play the game early? You seem pretty confident about there being nothing in the game.

I think $20 is the most they can release it...

If it were on a disk, I could see them charging $40 to $60...

Discussions like this really bum me out because I think they're symptomatic of some really big pricing issues in video games. I really hope that one day we might be able to price games based on their actual value proposition and production cost rather than it being purely motivated by this idea of the "standard" price range for a game of a particular type in a particular market (i.e. $0-$2 for mobile, $10-$20 for downloadable, $60 for retail).

In other words, given how relatively little is known about this game, I don't think it's fair to speculate on the pricing.

Whatever I would pay £60 for this game

I am basing it on production cost. This game is made by all of 4 people and they've received significant funding from Sony for console exclusivity.

The real question we should be asking is how many Dongs will it cost.

I was never under the impression this was anything other than a full $60 retail release. If it shows up cheaper, great, but compared to other full price releases this looks like a good deal at that price point.

I'd drop $60 on it if it came for $60 because it won't have a huge DLC packed store when you open the game and a billion pre-order pre-purchase DLC bullshit solutions. It's already treating people with respect. Buy that and help the industry future. Stop buying games that treat gamers like sheep who after the first $60 purchase of an incomplete low-content game will happily hand over another $40.

This whole post is ironic because the game isn't even finished yet, and we barely even know what the game part will be.

This thread makes me cry.

You people don't deserve games!!

Edit:

After some thought it occurred to me that most of you don't know how anything in this world is priced. Here are some reminders of factors that figure into the price of everything that has ever been sold on this earth.

• What was the cost of production?
• How many units do we expect to sell, and over what time?
• What is the perceived value of our product to the consumer?
• How will our price affect the perceived value?

So, for example...

Games like Clash of Clans are made by what is now hundreds of people, and yet are dirt cheap because of a) in app purchases and b) they expect a massive ass volume of small purchases.

Guacamelee! was made by ~15 people, and retailed for 15 bucks.

Now let's rewind the clock.

How many people did it take to make Final Fantasy IV? And what did it cost?

14 people. That's how many. The game cost 60 bucks as I remember it.

TLDR: the logic which equals the price of a game is nigh indecipherable. End of the day all that matters is what they think you will pay for it, not what it is "worth".

@chaser324: I know what you mean but isn't that impossible by definition? The value proposition to you can never be the same to me. Imagine you and I both buy Skyrim. What is the value proposition? If I hate the main quest, get bored, and quit, how does that compare to someone who loved it? And then the person who hated the main quest but loved the sidequests? And then the person who hated all of that but modded the game? How can you measure Value Proposition when it is impossible to know how much fun anyone will have with any 1 minute of your game. And again if you look at what I wrote about Production Costs, there are so many ways to cover it:

Say I make a game by myself. It costs me 10,000 to make.

There are so many ways I can recoup that, it all just depends on what I think people will pay for it, and how many people, at that price.

So in order to make back my 10 Gs I either need to

A) sell 100 copies at $100 bucks each
B) sell 1000 copies at $10 bucks each
C) sell 10000 copies at $1 buck each

Is there really, from these 3 options, an objectively right one? Does it matter at all what content is in the game? Especially since content to fun ratio is literally impossible to measure, who can tell me what to price the game at?

@brandondryrock: I havnt played it and i dont want to but its an educated guess.

What people largly seems to miss in this thread is that the price is in no way related to production cost, amount of content in the game, goodwill or whatnot. Some business dude will figure out the pricepoint at wich they can make the most money out of this game, thats all.

If its a superhyped AAA game that millions will buy without a second thought becouse they are a mindless mass then you go all out $60 and wipe your ass with money, if its an lesser known obscure indiegame well then you sell it at low price and preferably a lot of pr tricks like sales and PS+ freebies and so on.

It's free to play. You pay for each world you want to visit.

@geraltitude: Thank you for putting thought into this and expressing perhaps a bit more thoroughly some of the points I maybe should've made. I suppose when I said "value proposition" I was really really conflating a few separate points. Like you said, a game's pricing should be based based at least in some part on estimates of the perceived value and how pricing affects that perception, but I think that needs to be qualified by noting that people are typically pretty terrible at assessing something's real value: we're manipulated by marketing, swayed by "deals", often don't account enough for some things like opportunity cost and conversely place too much weight on some things that don't matter, etc. What often follows from that is skewed pricing expectations.

I also agree that there's no one "right" pricing scheme, and I hope that we can get to a place where pricing models are more flexible and aren't forced to conform to a market norm.

I would say a 40 to 60 dollar range.

I bet they had originally intended this to be a $20 game, but after the media hype explosion, they've decided they can get away with $60.

Free for PS+ members. All DLC is cosmetic.

Five hundred and ninety-nine US dollars.

I would pay a max of 40 from what I have seen. In reality I think 20 would be good.

Fun fact: A lot of people would happily pay that amount.