'There's a lot of psychological hurdles': Why Mossmouth charged $25 for 50 games

When Mossmouth announced the price for UFO 50 it came as a pleasant surprise. The game famously contains 50 games—hence the name—so it's reasonable to expect a higher price than average for a new release indie game, especially one that's been in development for eight years. But no: it's priced at $25. 

I noticed a lot of people in forums and on social media were pleased and surprised about this, so I figured I'd ask the team during a recent interview what the thinking behind the price was. There had clearly been a lot of thinking behind it, ranging from the potential difficulty of selling it for more, through to the team's desire to surprise the player with unexpected depth—in the same way Hollow Knight perhaps did back in 2017, or Elden Ring in 2022.

Noting that deciding on the right price was tricky, Mossmouth's Derek Yu pointed to the potential misunderstanding of what was under offer: were these mini-games or fully-fledged 8-bit videogames? 

"I think there are people that would pay a lot more for it," Yu said, "but then I also think there are a lot of people that are fairly sceptical of the concept of 50 games. What does that mean, exactly? Are they minigames? I think there's a lot of psychological hurdles to get over when it comes to what 50 games actually means for me as a consumer. Ultimately, I think we thought about it as one indie game, and then we looked at the landscape, and at other indie games that we felt were comparable, which is challenging because not many people are making collections of 50 games in one."

Jon Perry also notes that the concept itself needed the game to be priced fairly generously. "The fantasy that we're presenting here is of these freeware discs, these pirate carts, your friend from school's collection that you get your hands on for an hour. Those are not situations where you have paid a large entry fee: it's a situation where you have this embarrassment of riches all of the sudden. if we had charged $250, it would be like buying a fancy box set of something. It would change the whole framing in a way." 

(Note that I had already, sort of as a joke, and sort of sincerely, suggested the game might reasonably be priced at $250.)

Yu also brought up a more obvious problem: the team's desire to make it affordable to people that want to play it. Mossmouth's Tyriq Plummer agreed. "At a certain point you'd start just pricing out the people that you actually want to play the game and at that point what's the point? What are you doing?"

Eirik Suhrke (who, among other things, can be blamed / praised for Barbuta) added his thoughts: "At least for me there was always this certain mission statement in the back of my mind of wanting to blow minds, right? Of wanting to go above and beyond just a surprise. I wanted it to just keep surprising on level after level after level. And you can see that in the games: What? This game has an intro cutscene? And what: This has a different two-player mode? The price point is setting you up for getting more than you were expecting and being surprised in a good way."

UFO 50 is out now. You can also read my feature interview with the Mossmouth team, where we discuss the making of this treasure trove.