Spiderweb Games - Indie Game Pricing

Not specifically RPG related but Jeff Vogel's blog is always a good read - even for those that don't agree.  Jeff returns to the issue of indie game pricing through portals after noting even lower prices:

$6.95 is currently the magic price. Generally, to get that price, you need to buy a subscription. In other words, use the developer's game as a loss leader to win their private route into your credit card.

So let's run some numbers. A typical deal on these portals is that the portal keeps, say, 10% of a sale for expenses and then pays a 40% royalty. (This is pretty close to what I generally get.) Which means each sale of a game on Big Fish would earn you roughly $2.50. You better hope you're earning more per copy elsewhere because otherwise, if you want a pretty meager payout for your work (say, $100K before expenses), you have to sell forty thousand games. You know how hard it is to move that many copies? PRETTY DARN HARD.

This seems to be the indie theme of the day with the Rampant Coyote picking up Jeff's post and Gareth Fouche discussing the somewhat related issue of back-catalogues competing with indies at the Scars of War blog.