“Indie Developer Explains Why Silksong’s Price Increase After 9 Years Is Justified”

Finding the right price for an indie game on Steam and other platforms can feel like a tricky challenge, but one developer behind three popular titles believes it’s actually quite straightforward with just a bit of testing.

Tom Francis, the mind behind Gunpoint, Heat Signature, and Tactical Breach Wizards—all of which enjoy a 94% Positive rating on Steam from thousands of players—recently shared insights from his 15 years in indie game development. His final piece of advice centers on pricing, suggesting that what many consider a complex issue is really “a solved problem.”

Francis acknowledges that attracting players to your Steam page and convincing them to make a purchase can be tough and time-consuming. However, he argues that setting a price is a breeze. According to him, “it’s just a single number you can change in 30 seconds, and you can find out the correct value for it in one round of testing.”

For his games, Francis’s testing method is straightforward: he simply asks people what they think the game should cost. “Every time we’ve gone with the price most people chose, they’ve sold great and received excellent reviews,” he explains.

He defends this seemingly simple approach, especially for developers concerned about undervaluing their hard work, by stating that “the audience is effectively infinite, and pricing is elastic within reasonable bounds.” Adjusting the price, he notes, doesn’t significantly affect revenue—charging $20 for a game that could be priced at $10 might double the revenue per copy, but it could also lead to fewer total sales.

Francis also dismisses concerns about a “race to the bottom” in pricing. After 22 years of observing indie game pricing trends (including time spent as a journalist), he claims he’s never witnessed such a race. The debate over whether $15 is too high or $10 is too much for a three-hour game has persisted for over a decade. Occasionally, a quirky or unconventional game priced at $5 might gain traction, but that doesn’t indicate a shift in the willingness of players to pay $20 for quality indie titles. He cites the example of Peak, whose developers recently defended their $8 price tag for a game-jam project, arguing that $8 is effectively the same as $5.

Francis also points to Hollow Knight: Silksong as a relevant example. If there were a true race to the bottom, he suggests, there would have been complaints about Silksong being priced similarly to Hollow Knight. Instead, Silksong launched at $5 more than its predecessor nine years later, and fans were excited about the price, even before they saw the game’s scale. When discussing the notion of games becoming cheaper over time, Francis poses a critical question: “how bad, how real, and how important a cause would this have to be for you to tank your launch for it?”