I just looked at a game that is 60€ and said “I dont think its worth that and would buy now for 30, just to check it out”. Then I had the idea that some publishers/devs might benefit from knowing that 1-100000 people think that the game is worth X and would buy now for that price right now. In a case like today, the additional revenue would help their financial report etc. They could make short discounts to get especially these customers or even more tailored, you need to press “buy” and confirm at that price to let the publisher know. Like suggest price on ebay.
Let me know your thoughts and if this is a terrible idea. :)
Ah yes Gamers™ would never abuse a system like that. There is a reason why many publishers have abandoned regional pricing, the loss in revenue is bigger than any gains they would make. Remember they are in it for profit maximization not customer base maximization. They rather sell 10 copies for 60 than a 1000 copies for 60 cents.
I think a good alternative would be is have the system, but have the developer provide a Target price listing of what they’re expecting and anything that’s significantly under that listing gets ignored
For example many people didn’t feel like frostpunk 2 was worth the release pricing and that they thought it was easily more worth around $30 instead of the 45 it released at, so Gamers could suggest that they’re not buying it because the price is too high and they could provide that $30 price point, unless that $30 price point is below the Target price that the developer has set as the minimum listing, it would be part of the metric. This would filter out the people who are abusing the system because there’s no point in using the system dishonorably because you don’t know if your metric is going to actually count where are the people who are you using it genuine and not doing obvious troll responses would not be filtered out because realistically they should be within the developers Target.
It’s not like these people are saying I would pay a dollar for this game when the games worth $40, they’re saying that they believe the price is too steep in that $30 is a much better cost point than 45.
They could even add a little bit of financial advantage onto it, by optionally having it so you can Mark a price point at what you’d be willing to purchase it at and if the developer ends up dropping it to that price point it, it alerts the user much like how eBay does with the suggest a price feature