I really wish more indies could take on the no-sales policy. It’d give me tons more peace of mind to buy a game when I actually want to play it, rather than always waiting and doing weird backlog hoarding when Valve decide it’s wallet-opening-time.
But as the video shows, the policy was a risk for Wube even back in the day – it’s an even bigger risk now that everyone and their dog expects to wait for the sale, and especially if you happen to have a game that’s not quite as incredibly popular as Factorio.
Factorio is in the minority IMO. My experience has been that indie games will often, say that they probablely wont do sales as a way to engourage purchases during beta and then a bit after release when there are potential financial benefits on the line they do sales anyway. I am totally not speaking from first hand experience /s.
Unless they’ve got an instant breakaway hit (which not even Factorio was), they’ll see a ho-hum launch week in terms of purchases and an almost complete flat-line beyond that. Consumers are trained to wait for the sale. And so if they want to eat and have a roof over their head, there’s only one option left. It’s a vicious cycle, and very few are in a position to try to break it.
They should do an April fools’ sale where they reduce the price by 1 cent
It’s not exactly the same thing, but itch.io allow developers to have a “reverse sale”, where the price goes up for a given period. It was mostly a joke feature, perhaps intended to provoke a little thought about sales culture.
