The places I frequent say that about games all the time. For instance, though the game I mentioned gets highly praised there, almost everyone trashed the author’s previous RTS game. Some places might give every game universal acclaim, but plenty of places have people who will openly call a game garbage.
That the dev spent tens of thousands of hours on a very niche genre, and that it was better to sell to 10k fans @$45 than to risk selling 25k copies @ $20 (random sales numbers).
It's a common strategy in Japanese game development. Some games are just very niche, so lowering the price doesn't necessarily increase sales proportionately. It just means less money from financially inflexble fans. So keep the price AAA level and target those fans.
Compare Etrian Odyssey (SEGA) with Disgaea (NIS). Both games are a fairly comparable genre, with fairly comparable production values, targeting the same demographic, and both were also PC ports/remakes of older classics. Disgaea is less than half the cost and has is pushing an order of magnitude greater sales. Also I think the concept of "niche" is somewhat obsolete.. kind of circling back to the point that none of us a snowflake. The market is so huge and diverse. Even for the most niche titles, there tends to be huge market potential, because "niche" markets now a days are larger than the whole market not that long ago. Games like Mount and Blade are just niche Eurojank embodied, yet has sold millions. Siralim is another great niche game. It sells excellently, especially considering the dev keeps releasing pretty much the same game ever couple of years.
Finally, the West is an increasingly small part of the overall market. There are huge numbers of Chinese, Russian, Indian, and so on gamers. Region pricing kind of adapts to this, but not really. In terms of exchange rates it's extremely favorable, but what really matters is PPP - how much a unit of currency is "worth" in domestic prices. So for instance the $45 game is sold for about 1000 rupees. I don't live in India but a quick search turns up a rent-by-day place in the cheaper parts of India can go as low as 100 rupee a day. So even though $45 exchanges for like 4000 rupees, it's worth far less (in terms of how far it goes in America) than even the 1000 rupees that the game is sold for India. So when you set the price of your game high in dollar terms, you're setting it to just LOL terms for most of the world.
The market is larger, yes. I don't think it's gotten that much easier to target your marketed towards those audiences. the privacy changes on IOS/Android are great, but it has an unfortunate consequence that these more intimate styles of ads are now nearly impossible to channel to the right person. So you have to go to the good ol' fashioned social media blitz. Something everyone else is also trying to do. It's never been harder to get a person's attention.
Essentially, those titles you mention relied heavily on word of mouth (except Mount and Blade, but that was from a different era of gaming). I'm not sure I trust WoM enough to stake my entire livelihood on it. Gamers can be fickle, or timing can just take some cruel turns and ruin all that trajectory built up.
>Finally, the West is an increasingly small part of the overall market. There are huge numbers of Chinese, Russian, Indian, and so on gamers.
I don't disagree. But the top factors still apply. Very few are going to risk losing the USD to try and get more rupees/yuan. Russia and China in particular are pretty infamous for their piracy rates.
On top of that, getting a good localization can be too much for a smaller indie, and even those who afford it can never assure quality. Localization is a very hard process for games that need more than simply UI text to be done.
Or you have developers like Iron Tower Studios (Age of Decadence, Colony Ship RPG). The lead developer actually seems to have pretty good business acumen, and is pretty open about the studios finances. But he’s also a perfectionist, and the huge amount of time between games means that the studio requires a lot of sales to stay afloat. The last update from them I saw was that the launch of Colony Ship was good, but it’s still unclear if it’s good enough to support them for several more years while they make another passion project.