How to Price Your First Indie Game: Free, Cheap, Regional

First games usually get priced wrong in one of two directions: $4.99 out of modesty, or $29.99 in imitation of studio games from a known franchise. Both lose more often than they win. Among the 50 best-selling new games on Steam each month, the median price fell from $19.50 in early 2023 to $15.64 in late 2025, and the $25 to $55 middle has thinned out. The practical answer for a first premium game: check ten comparable games, charge what the equal ones charge plus 20 percent, skip $5 entirely unless streamers are the whole plan, and take Steam's suggested regional prices as the starting line for the other 36 currencies. A disclosure before we start: this blog belongs to Egmatic, a no-code 2D editor in pre-alpha, and what that has to do with pricing is near the end.

One scope note. If you have not yet decided between premium, free-to-play or ads, that is a model question, and our comparison of first-game business models covers it. This article assumes you have settled on a paid download and asks the narrower question: what number goes on the page.

Quick answer#

Free or paid is a marketing decision first#

Free is a real answer, but only to a different question. If the goal of your first game is a portfolio piece, a jam entry grown large, or proof to yourself that you can finish something, free removes friction and costs you nothing you were counting on. Simon Carless has watched hobby games priced cheaply to see what happens, and some of them take off. itch.io is built for exactly this: every paid item there is pay-what-you-want above your minimum, and 30 percent of all money spent on the platform is buyers paying above the minimum, so a free game with a suggested donation earns real money from a minority of grateful players.

Two traps sit inside that generosity. First, on itch.io someone who downloads for free does not become an owner of the project, so if you later flip the page to Paid, the early audience has nothing; price the project from the start if ownership matters. Second, on Steam free is not a pricing strategy at all; it is the absence of one. Your first game's price is information: it tells you what the market will pay for your kind of work, and game two prices better with that number in hand. Giving it away to an audience you have not yet built trades that information for a download count.

The in-between case is the deliberate super-cheap launch, around $3 to $4, which Chris Zukowski describes for games that are experimental, quick to judge, and fun to watch: viewers see a streamer enjoying it and buy on impulse because the price barely registers. That is a marketing plan with a price attached, not a lack of nerve, and it only works when the game has the loop for it.

None of this changes the pipeline costs: getting onto Steam at all means the Steam Direct route and its $100 recoupable fee, and what the store itself takes out of each sale is a separate question our monetization walkthrough covers in full.

The cheap end is winning, and the middle is thin#

The most useful pricing dataset comes from GameDiscoverCo, who tracked the 50 best-selling new non-free-to-play Steam games released each month and plotted their prices. The averages barely moved: $21.80 in February 2023, $21.41 in October 2025. The medians fell hard.

A falling median with a flat average means more of the winners are cheap, not that everything got cheaper: expensive games stayed expensive while a new wave of inexpensive, highly replayable games, roguelikes and Survivors-likes and social games, started outselling them on units. The shift began in late 2023, and March 2024 remains the stand-out month, with Content Warning, Rusty's Retirement and Buckshot Roulette all in the top ten long-term sellers, each under $10. Necesse launched at $10 and has never exceeded $15, with a median playtime around six hours; players do not read a low price as an insult when the game keeps giving them evenings.

September 2025's top sellers show the shape of the market now: a block at $60 to $70, a block at $5 to $10, a block at $15 to $20, and relatively little in between at $25 to $55. Carless's summary of his own data is the one to keep: for a new intellectual property that is not a deep strategy game and does not come from a pedigreed team, charging above $25 is getting trickier, because players compare your value against the $10 to $15 games that already gave them a hundred hours. Genre exceptions exist; survival crafters still carry $25 to $40 when the depth is real, and The Last Caretaker charged $35 in Early Access and did fine. But a first game from an unknown name is precisely the case the data warns about.

Pick the number with comps, then add 20 percent#

Pricing by how you feel about your work is the method both experts replace. Zukowski's version is mechanical enough to do in an afternoon:

1. Find about ten comparable games: released in the last three years, same genre, similar scale. Include failures and quiet winners, not just the hits everyone names.
2. For each, note the price, whether the game is better, worse or equal to yours, and what reviews say about value for money.
3. Price against the games you judge equal to yours, then add about 20 percent.
4. If genuine excitement exists before launch, a demo with a long waitlist, a festival spike, coverage commitments, add 50 percent instead.

The 20 percent is not greed; it is arithmetic about how the store works. "Nobody on Steam buys games at full price," Zukowski writes, and any discount of 20 percent or more sends an email to everyone who wishlisted the game, one of the most reliable conversion events a small game ever gets. A game whose honest price is $12 should list at $14.99, so the first 20 percent sale lands exactly there. If you are still building the list that email goes to, start with how to get your first 100 Steam wishlists.

Then read your comps' price histories on SteamDB before committing: how deep and how often they discount, what their lowest-ever price was and how soon after launch it arrived, and whether Early Access titles raised the price at 1.0. Peglin is the worked example worth copying. Its developer expected to convert around 10 percent of wishlists, priced the Early Access launch at $19.99 while its main competitors sat at $25, chose the higher number partly to slow the launch down to a pace one full-time developer could survive, and then watched the launch come in at roughly twenty times the expected scale. The price held because the comparable games made it look like a bargain rather than a stretch.

One consolation for the reviews that say "fine game, wait for a sale": that is the buyer telling you how Steam works, not that you mispriced. Zukowski passes on an old marketing axiom worth keeping taped to the monitor: if nobody complains about your price, you priced it too low.

What each price point tells a buyer#

Carless's warning about the in-between price belongs in this table's margins: $14.99 feels safer than $19.99 and is often the worse choice, because a game that belongs at $19.99 arrives at the exact number that signals neither bargain nor event. He watched Dicey Dungeons launch there and succeed on quality anyway, and still called it easily a $19.99 game. On the cheap end, remember the floor is lower than $5 only in the deliberate streamer case; a $5 price does not read as generous, it reads as unsure.

Regional pricing without the guesswork#

A Steam price is 37 numbers, not one: the store displays your game in 37 currencies across 4 region groups, and you are responsible for every one of them. The tooling does most of the work. You set a price in your home currency, and the Propose Pricing tool fills in suggestions for the rest, which you accept or adjust. Steam offers three conversion methods: exchange rate only, purchasing power only, and multi-variable, which weighs local purchasing power, the expected cost of comparable entertainment goods, and the exchange rate together. Valve says its own suggestions draw on purchasing-power parity and consumer price indexes, and it has promised to review them annually.

Take the suggestions seriously, because the alternative has a history. Before October 2022, many developers manually raised prices in Argentina and Turkey above Valve's recommendations to choke off grey-market reselling, and got shouted at by local players for it. Valve then recalibrated almost all suggestions at once, moving the euro up 16 percent, the Turkish lira up 494 percent, the Argentine peso up 522 percent, the Polish zloty up 28 percent and the Japanese yen up 12 percent for a $19.99 game, and promised annual reviews. A solo developer tracking exchange rates in 37 currencies cannot out-research that; overriding a suggestion needs a reason you can name, and Steam's bulk tool will warn you when one of your prices is an outlier against the rest.

Two rules from Valve's documentation end up mattering more than the conversion method. A currency with no price entered makes the game unpurchasable for everyone billed in it, so a blank yen price is not a rounding error; it is Japan gone. And every price you enter should be a price you can defend, because regional expectations are player-facing: the suggestion exists so a buyer in a weaker-currency market still gets a fair local price rather than a straight dollar conversion they cannot afford.

What you can still change after launch#

Pricing is reversible, slowly. Steam asks that prices hold for 30 days after release before any change. After that, cuts and discounts are simple, but any increase, in even one currency, starts a 30-day cooldown on discounts, so a price bump placed badly will freeze the exact seasonal sale you raised the price to catch. Early Access titles normally raise the price at the 1.0 launch, and comps research will show you whether your genre expects it.

The discount plan deserves as much thought as the number. A 15 to 20 percent discount is enough to move fence-sitters early, Carless advises, and a game listed at $24.99 that runs 50 percent off still grosses $12.50 a copy, which after Steam's 30 percent cut is still more than a $9.99 game earns at full price. What you should not do is cut the everyday base price to simulate a sale; discounts are events with emails and store placement behind them, and a permanently lowered price is just a lower price. When the numbers start arriving, our analytics guide covers which dashboards to read, and the wishlist conversion benchmarks turn your list size into a revenue forecast you can sanity-check the price against.

Common mistakes#

• Pricing by playtime alone. Valve's own best-practices list puts playthrough length first, but alongside replayability, multiplayer, Early Access status and comparable games; a four-hour roguelike with 80-hour tails is not a short game.
• Copying the famous games in your genre. The $60 to $70 block in the sales data is franchise pricing; a new name charging into that block is asking to be compared with games it cannot match on content.
• Converting regions at the exchange rate. A straight dollar conversion prices out whole markets; the suggestions exist precisely because purchasing power and entertainment-price levels are not exchange rates.
• Leaving a currency blank. Every blank is a region that cannot buy the game at all.
• Raising a price right before a planned sale. The 30-day discount cooldown after any increase will eat the sale.
• Free on itch.io, paid later. Free downloaders never became owners; the audience you built cannot follow the game into its paid life.
• $4.99 out of modesty. Carless's first reason developers underprice is not feeling the game deserves more; the comps sheet answers that feeling with data, and the market's opinion is the only one that pays you.

How Egmatic fits#

The price is a hypothesis and the launch is the experiment; the number you pick matters less than whether you can run the experiment again quickly. For a solo no-code developer, the slow part after launch is usually not deciding the price, it is the shipping loop around it: cutting a demo, shipping the update that answers the reviews, putting a web build somewhere a stranger can click it. Egmatic is a no-code 2D editor with a ship layer being built around exactly that loop, so those become movements of one tool instead of separate projects, with no code and no backend to maintain. The AI in the editor executes under your direction and every file stays yours. We are pre-alpha, we do not announce dates, and the waitlist at egmatic.com is where the specifics get decided.

Set the number. Ship the test.

Your first price is a hypothesis, and the loop after it decides what you learn. Egmatic is a no-code 2D editor with a ship layer that treats the demo, the update and the web build as one movement. Reply on the waitlist with the store step that slows your loop most; requests sent during pre-alpha are the ones that steer the build.

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Conclusion#

Three decisions, all answerable with public data. Free or paid is a question about what the first game is for. The number comes from ten comparable games plus 20 percent, with the $5 dead zone and the thin $25 to $55 middle marked on the map. The regional 36 currencies start from Steam's suggestions, adjusted only with a reason. After that the price becomes reversible on a 30-day clock, and the thing that is not reversible is the first week, so plan low, hold the line on discounts, and let the launch data set the price of game two. The developers in every example here priced from evidence rather than nerve, and that is the entire method.

Sources#

1. Valve — Pricing, Steamworks Documentation (37 currencies and 4 region groups; the three conversion methods; the Propose Pricing tool's suggestions; playthrough length, replayability, multiplayer, Early Access and comparable games as pricing factors; the 30-day post-release window; the 30-day discount cooldown after any price increase; a missing currency blocking purchase; the regional pricing overview video)
2. Chris Zukowski, How To Market A Game — 4 tips to help you price your indie game, August 23, 2022 (selling happens at a discount, so add 20 to 30 percent; the ten-comps method and the 20 and 50 percent uplifts; SteamDB price-history research; Peglin's $19.99 Early Access launch against $25 competitors, the 10 percent wishlist conversion expectation and the roughly twentyfold outcome; the super-cheap streamer strategy; "if nobody complains about your price, you priced it too low")
3. Simon Carless, GameDiscoverCo — Why you may be underpricing your video game, August 30, 2019 (a $20 floor for decently sized games; regional prices descending to roughly one third for weaker-currency markets; "are you really going to sell twice as many copies at $10 versus $20"; 50 percent off at $24.99 still grossing $12.50; the $14.99 in-between trap; very few $5 games gaining momentum; hobby games priced cheaply to see what happens)
4. Simon Carless, GameDiscoverCo — Are Steam game prices dropping, and should you care?, November 21, 2025 (Top 50 new non-F2P Steam games monthly: median $19.50 to $15.64 and average $21.80 to $21.41 by copies sold, median $23.70 to $20.35 by revenue; the downturn starting late 2023; March 2024's sub-$10 top-ten trio; Necesse at $10 to $15; The Last Caretaker at $35; the thin $25 to $55 band; the survival-crafter exception)
5. Simon Carless, GameDiscoverCo — Steam's regional pricing changes: a big deal?, October 26, 2022 (Valve's October 2022 recalibration of almost all suggestions: euro up 16 percent, Turkish lira up 494 percent, Argentine peso up 522 percent, Polish zloty up 28 percent, yen up 12 percent at a $19.99 reference price; purchasing-power parity and consumer price indexes; promised annual review; developers previously raising Argentine and Turkish prices manually against grey-market reselling; the discount cooldown after any increase)
6. itch.io — Pricing, creator documentation (every price is a minimum with pay-what-you-want above it; the $0 or Donate, Paid and No payments modes; 30 percent of money spent on itch.io paid above the minimum, average purchase about $1.50 above; free downloaders not becoming owners)
7. itch.io — Accepting Payments and Getting Paid, creator documentation (Open Revenue Sharing, seller-chosen from 0 to 100 percent, default 10 percent; the $0.30 plus 2.9 percent processor fee; the recommendation to sell at $2 or more)