Meet Jack. Jack will buy anything. This is the boring, sourced math Jack is ignoring — and why it decides more than whether ten bucks feels fair.
Jack pre-ordered EverQuest Legends before I finished saying the price. Box, sub, cash shop, all of it. Jack will buy anything.
Ask Jack why and he’s got an answer for every number you throw at him. Twenty bucks for the box? That’s two coffees. Ten a month? Less than a pizza. The cash shop is cosmetic, so it doesn’t count. The devs gotta eat, man. You’d blow that on a Steam sale you never even install. By the time Jack’s done talking, the game’s basically free.
And Jack’s not wrong. Twenty bucks really is two coffees. Ten a month really is less than a pizza. Every line checks out.
That’s the problem.
Fair was never the question
Everybody in my comments is arguing whether ten dollars is fair. Ten dollars is fine. I’m not here to tell you it’s a ripoff. Fair was never the question.
The real one is whether twenty up front and ten a month makes Game Jawn the most money — and keeps the most people standing in Norrath at the same time. Those can be two completely different numbers. The gap between them decides whether this game’s still got a population next spring.
I’m not pulling this out of nowhere. From 2007 to 2012 I sold over three million dollars of digital gaming product, nine bucks up to ninety-nine a pop, which is a lot of individual sales. Ran one of the bigger WoW sites of the day, profession guides pulling sixty thousand visitors a day back when the web was a thousand little sites instead of five big ones. You run that many price tests and you stop guessing where the number should be. You feel it.
There’s a most-profitable price, and it isn’t the highest one
Most people picture price and players as a straight line. Charge double, lose half, same money in the till. It’s not a line. It’s a hump.
Free gets you a packed server and zero dollars. Crank the price to the moon and you get a fat margin in a dead, empty world — huge profit per player, and three players. Somewhere in the middle sits the peak: the price that pulls in the most total money. Push past it and every extra dollar on the sticker chases out more than a dollar’s worth of players. You raised the price and made less.
This isn’t a hot take, it’s the most settled idea in pricing. Total revenue is price times how many people actually buy, and that curve tops out at one spot economists call unit elasticity. If you’ve ever heard of the Laffer Curve — set tax rates so high the government collects less than it would at a lower rate — that’s the same hump, just drawn for taxes. A wall that’s too high lets through less than a wall set right.
And real companies don’t eyeball the top of that hump. There’s a whole survey method called Gabor-Granger that does nothing but show people a ladder of prices and map where the money peaks. Another, the Van Westendorp price sensitivity meter, asks four questions and spits out the range people will actually pay. The peak is almost never the highest number the room will tolerate.
Jack would fail both surveys. Jack says yes to everything, and those surveys exist specifically to find the people who say no.
Movie theaters are the warning, not the model
Watch what happened to movie theaters. They kept the ticket high and the popcorn higher, and they emptied the place out. Now hardly anyone goes, and the ones who do skip the snacks because the whole night already runs a small fortune. They priced themselves right out of their own business.
Run it the other way — a five-dollar ticket and three-dollar popcorn — and the room fills up and everybody walks out with a bag. More people through the door, lower prices on everything, and more total money than they’re scraping now. You don’t get rich charging a sold-out price to an empty room.
That same trap is sitting open in front of EverQuest Legends. The box is the ticket; the sub and the cash shop are the popcorn. Pack the room with a cheap door and the months and the shop have a full house to sell to. (The twenty covers your first month, then the ten-a-month meter starts — the point holds either way.) Charge premium at the door and a big chunk of the room never walks in. And it’s worse than that, because it’s a solo game. One more player costs them nothing but a server. There’s no camp to crowd, no loot to fight over. Every person priced out is pure loss for nothing.
The loud yes is lying to you
Here’s the part that should worry anybody setting this price. My last two videos sit over seventy percent thumbs up. The “it’s only ten bucks, the devs deserve it” comments are loud. But loud was never the same as most.
People who love a thing and people who hate a thing both run their mouths. The quiet middle says nothing. And the one person who matters most to the price — the vet who’d have happily played at fifteen total but won’t pull the trigger at thirty — he doesn’t leave a comment. He doesn’t thumbs-down. He just never logs in. He’s silent, he’s invisible, and he is the curve.
Researchers have measured this for decades: the furious and the overjoyed speak up, the satisfied-enough majority stays home (Anderson called it back in 1998 and it’s held up ever since). It’s the whole reason Amazon eats no-questions returns — one loud Jack poisons a rating more than the refund ever costs. Those pre-order signup numbers everybody’s quoting are the same trick. A waitlist is just a pile of Jacks who haven’t opened their wallets yet.
The move was never complicated
Price the door low, fill the world, make your money on the months once everybody’s inside. That’s the whole playbook. This one went the other way.
Jack will tell you it’s basically free. Jack already pre-ordered the cash shop.
You’re not Jack.
If you want the long-form is-it-worth-it breakdown, it’s on the channel. And if you’re playing anyway — most of you are, and I get it — at least make your twenty bucks build something that doesn’t fall over at difficulty four: the combo builder is over at https://www.everquestguides.com/legends.
Where this comes from
- Revenue peaks at unit elasticity (the hump): UVic Principles of Microeconomics — Elasticity and Revenue
- Van Westendorp price sensitivity meter: Wikipedia
- Gabor-Granger vs Van Westendorp (finding the revenue-maximizing price): SurveyMonkey market research
- Dissatisfied and delighted customers are the loudest (vocal-minority / negativity bias): Understanding review bias