Hello everyone!

Me and my friends just released our first game: Kotto and Kokone Ultra Adventures (Appreciate if you checked it out)!

And we were having some hefty discussions regarding the price of the game, specially since there aren't many resources online (most I could find are videos with "How much money my indie game made" an related).

It seems hard to find a general rule of thumb to decide how much gameplay time is proportional to price (specially since a long gameplay time is different than quality gameplay time). Our game takes ~1.5h to complete, this is definitely longer than many free short games, but definitely not longer than other very popular RPGs.  I would say gameplay time is one of the most important factors when factoring price,  but is there a less arbitrary way of deciding these values?

Furthermore, should games aim for high purchasing power individuals rather than average individual sales? Market dynamics usually make so that a cheaper product leads to more sales, which usually lead to more money for the developers and a better price for each individual customer. That said, there are so many quality games for free/with patreon backing that it makes very discouraging for users to pay for individual games as is. We evaluated the idea of making the game free and offer some kind of paid service to subside, but we couldn't really think of any actual service.

I think most game devs want their games to be played first and to make money in second place, but the balancing can be very challenging, how did you do it in your game?

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In our game we analyzed different aspects and just settled in for $2.00, but yeah the discussions have been intense regarding that.

Consider your audience and consider your competition and consider your own level of professionalism.

Is this a hobby project or are you a professional company needing to pay salary to your employees.

Are you a known entity? Do you have many followers and previously released successfull games?

How much budget will your marketing have?

My two cents are, if you are unknown, releasing a game with a minimum price tag on itch and not even a demo version is extra hard difficutly. Marketing might come to the rescue, but if you are asking these type of questions, I assume you are amateurs and have zero marketing budget.

Or how many unknown small indie rpg games did you guys buy? Or did you already know them somehow? Or where they on a platform with gated publishing, where a certain level of professionalism and quality is to be expected?

Regarding the actual amount of money to ask for a game, that is super flexible. Fairness does not really come into this. A small price might of course help sell the game to some players. While others might not care if is is 2 or 5 or 10 bucks. Even others might pay a donation, and others would not touch your game for lack of testing ability. Also, lot of people would not buy games in general, since they allow no budget for this - but those  would not give you money either way.

tl;dr Consider a demo version.