14 DAY TRIAL // Max Schaefer, the CEO of Runic Games, believes that his studio’s previous game, Torchlight, as well as its upcoming sequel, Torchlight II, proves that high quality, lower priced games can be quite successful in the current games market.
Nowadays, the gaming industry is split between triple-A games that have prices around $50-$60 (around €50-€60) and independent projects that are priced much lower.
Such a practice is being trumped by some companies that try to deliver triple-A experiences with indie-level pricing, like the older Torchlight I or its upcoming sequel, Torchlight II, which are both priced at $20/€20.
According to the CEO of Torchlight developer Runic Games, these titles prove that you can still be very profitable when putting out a great game that has a lower price.
“We felt like Torchlight I’s price point was a magic price point for that kind of game and we sold more than we anticipated. So there’s a market for a $20 AAA game. Our idea was: let’s just make games that feel like an AAA game and play like an AAA game, but strip away all the extraneous stuff and the expensive marketing campaigns and all that,” he told VentureBeat.
“Just offer the game for a $20 price point and then we think people will flock to that. They did it for Torchlight I and Torchlight II is so much bigger and so much better that I can’t imagine that people will be disappointed when they pay 20 bucks for it. And what we want most of all are happy customers that tell their friends about the game.”
This worked like a charm for the first Torchlight, which sold more than 1 million units since its 2009 release. Schaefer hopes that the sequel to the dungeon crawling role playing game will overtake this performance when it is eventually released, sometime in the first half of this year, on the PC.