What fordford said (good choice, ford man myself 
) £30 would be a decent price, or even a bug free basic version for say £20, with £2-£5 downloadable updates that add a reasonable amount, though then that can cause issues if a new feature is added and people have to start again. Its a tricky one!
Good example is Live For Speed, currently £12 for S1 £24 for S2 to get more content with the same features in both. But people are happy to pay £24 for that and its still not complete, just alpha/beta (depending on who you talk to and when!)
I believe 40$ is a fair price for both gamers and developers of this game. From what I have seen, this game will be one of its kind and while there are so many crappy games around that cost more than 40$ (not to mention the last airline management game that I almost paid 60$ and proved to be so bad), a game like this deserves to be priced around 40$ or even 50. But since we are willing to pay this much, I hope developers will always care what the gamers say.
I agree.
IMO 40$ is a good balance between excellent value for the customer and profit for the Developers. Especially considering the endless hours of gameplay I will get out of the game when finished.
we want you guys to do well enough to make games full time 
Free 
jk, $30-$40 sounds perfect
no free option? what about all us free loaders? 
$40 USD seems a decent price
No free option if you ever want us to finish
Its nice to know people think what we are working on will be worth paying for, we sure hope it is, but its nice to hear 
I agree with the majority on here and say that 40 dollars is a fair price.
Most on the market are above reasonable, unfortunantly. With the looks of it so far I voted with the $30 (US) option.
In my not-so-beautiful country, you can buy most popular games for 120 zł which is 41 $.
I checked the 20$ option, because there wasn’t 25$ option.
This is such a difficult question to answer! It depends on so many different things, which right now are impossible to know.
Generally, as a game maker I prefer a lower price tag coupled with easy distribution, basically cutting the “need” for piracy
and copy protection down to a minimum from the start. Examples like the humble bundle, Minecraft and Mount & Blade have
shown what success can come from such a fair-price policy. I voted for 10€ for now Offer an easy-to-use donation
function on top of a low price and off you go on a super-customer friendly pricing.
Cheers!
/Killrob
i think the main problem is with the quality of most games.
why should i pay full price for a game that only evolves at a pace a snail outruns?
EA football manager eg. most of the time its just a bit of finetuning and the actual clothing…
and always full price
that being said many ppl just say i wanna play 4 free.
We’d like to price as low as possible, but it all depends how many people are likely to be interested - as we are fairly niche, the minecraft strategy might not work for us
IMO a higher price than minecraft wouldn’t be such a bad thing. With the average price of retail games where I live being between 50-70$(USD, or CAD, ours is worth more now) It wouldn’t bother me to pay as much for this; I know im going to get something good quality, and in the unlikely case that it isn’t I will already know from testing it 
. But prices vary, and in some countries games are cheaper than others.
Maybe it would be good to make a poll on the cost of games? Or maybe just make a thread for a list of countries game prices and have users post. Pick a few big releases like Starcraft II, or CoD 9 or whatever ridiculous number they are at now 
and get people to see the average price in their country.
Since it is a Niche game, and there is no competition to speak of, so I think that the people who love cars will pay whatever price its given. But with people on the fence, a high price tag might scare them off…
Maybe we need a poll on the demographics of what kinda people like this game. Are we all car nuts? or are there people who like it for other reasons?
Insightful post as usual drake
Yes, there does seem to be BIG difference in price per market, would be interesting to find out in detail, however I’d hate to actually price Automation per market, always drives me nuts seeing games on steam that are cheaper in the US than here…
Oh I definately agree with that.
Personally it makes me feel like Im being ripped off when I see different prices by region. It would be nice to have a price that is reasonable everywhere.
What it really boils down to is, the bigger our community is by the time we release the game, the lower we can price it whilst still being sure of making back our investment (which is quite substantial, even though indie development is low cost, it will still have cost tens of thousands by the time we are done)
I think that having a good demo could help with a higher pricing, although itd need a time limit so as you dont end up with an LFS style demo community! But if people are impressed with a demo they are more likely to fork out a few more ££ for the game as they feel it is of quality. But then again, creating a demo will take time to adjust things etc. Maybe something to do straight after release, get the followers of the game to purchase it straight out then add a demo for “newcomers” at a later date with a change in price depending on how the initial selling phase went.
hm a demo here seems to be easy, or not so easy, depending on the security against “unlocking” it you want.
the easy way is just to mark some parts of the real executed code as comments, which get ignored while running the program; in html (iirc, can sort the different languages ive “programmed” in out) thats just the following two things: “/ before and /” after the part you dont want to use.
all one had to do to get the full game out of the demo with this method would be to unmark these parts again.
the not so easy way would be to delete them instead of marking them.
Yeah, A demo is easy stuff - for now we will have the engine and car designer as demos, but when we release the full game we will consider our options for a more complete demo perhaps.
You got a point there, but the answer is: they do it because people buy it! You cannot really blame the company for this, but only the buying customers. On the other hand yes, the reputation suffers from this in the so important hardcore community - which will make up 99+% of the Automation community hehe.
I know that you have to be careful with your expectations, but saying that a car game is niche is like saying soccer games are niche… potentially Automation is not niche at all. Let me give you a lead. Remember the awful Need for Speed Underground and all the bad tuning car games that followed? Remember the huge success of the whole car/tuning movies and games 5-10 years ago? Those kiddies are now grown-ups, and probably there is still at least a hidden spark of interest in them, probably for something a bit more serious. Enter Automation! Doing it right (and you have till now, in my opinion), this game can potentially get huge. The potential audience for your game is really large if my above example holds true to some extent. The Minecraft strategy, but also the Mount & Blade strategy (a game that is REALLY niche as compared to Automation), works because people don’t have to think twice before shelling out 10$, but they DO think twice if they have to cross the barrier that is 20+$.
If you indeed make a high quality game, which we all hope for, and achieve good initial sales by a low entry barrier, make a good demo and get some kind of exposure in the media, word will spread rapidly and do the rest for you. I see the low price tag as an essential piece in this puzzle. With a higher price tag the threshold of general interest cannot be broken as easily.