I just read that people in Germany are even less willing to spend money than during the start of the pandemic in 2020. I guess it's the same for other countries. Energy in general is expensive, so is food and much more. How am I supposed to sell a game when people don't even know how to get to work because 1 liter of gasoline costs 2 euros ($8 per US gallon)?

I was thinking about making a new trailer for my game because I've changed so much since I've released the previous one about 2 years ago. But what should I do now? Should I wait? Should I try to sell it anyway? I could need some money right now, like everyone else. I was thinking about reducing the price because people can't (or won't) spend that much right now. What do you think? How do you deal with this situation?

I think you should never stop marketing if you are eventually selling something, anything. You should market the game and you should market yourself or the company.

As to whether you should release your game now or later, I think is a different question. It might be true that people are not currently buying games. But you should not just assume that that's the case. Try to find some data to prove/disprove your hypothesis and go from there instead of blindly guessing.

From what I've heard during the pandemic people could not go on vacation, restaurants, shopping etc. so they spent that money on digital products instead. Now that most of the world has opened up again the reverse is happening. But you cannot turn time back so there is no use in worrying about it either way.

I could wait until the war in Ukraine is over and prices start normalizing. But this may take months or even years.

The German “Konsumklimaindex”, which measures consumer's willingness to spend money, is at its lowest value in history, so I guess this also affects games. And it's probably a similar situation in other countries.

I definitely need a new and better trailer for marketing, which is supposed to generate most of its sales when it's released. So I guess timing matters here. I really don't know what to do…

I think you need a community first. Make it a free download and maybe ask for donations for server costs. You could even go for some sort of funding like kickstarter. Once you're up and running you can start thinking about making money, maybe some sort of micro-transactions. or DLC, or subscriptions, etc..

If you don't market it, you won't sell it. If you need to sell it, you need to market it.

I know, it's just so much effort to make a trailer, I don't want to waste my time and have to make another one later just because it's potentially a bad time to release anything right now.

Marketing strategy is complex. There is a tremendous body of research, economics theory, business research, and industry data. The topic keeps many people employed.

When, where, and how you market your game are ultimately up to you. As noted above, if you choose not to market the game you're unlikely to get many customers. If you market your game badly you're also unlikely to get many customers. Marketing a game successfully is difficult.

If you were in the professional world the common number is about 1/3 of the total budget. If you spent 20M on main development another 20M would be spent on marketing. (The other third is on business costs, support costs, pre-production and post-production costs, etc.) For personal hobby projects it often isn't feasible, where people spend 2 years of hobby time building a game and another 2 years of hobby time actively marketing the game, but that's roughly what you're looking at.

As for selling during wartime, historically that's a GREAT time for entertainment and distractions. Similarly during depressions, during the pandemic, and during any other time when people can't easily get all the social needs met. People are still looking for cheap and easy entertainments. Good marketing helps them find you and gives them compelling reasons to play your game. Bad marketing makes them laugh as they ignore it go pick up Halo or Fortnite or whatever they play.

frob said:

As for selling during wartime, historically that's a GREAT time for entertainment and distractions. Similarly during depressions, during the pandemic, and during any other time when people can't easily get all the social needs met. People are still looking for cheap and easy entertainments.

That's a very good point and one that especially applied to Germany during the Weimar republic (and maybe during the Nazi regime as well?). People wanted a distraction from all the poverty and crap so they watched a lot of sci-fi/fantasy/horror movies and we got German expressionism (one of the most well recognized film movements).

Beosar said:
How am I supposed to sell a game when people don't even know how to get to work

You should absolutely stop marketing if you don't want to sell any games.

Here's the thing: A user doesn't choose “do I buy your game, in a vacuum, or do I buy nothing?”

The user generally chooses: “How do I allocate whatever money I have, for the best effect?”
If the price of beef steak goes up, perhaps they'll switch to sausages.
If the cost of travel goes up, more people will try to work from home.
If the price of movie tickets goes up, they might be more willing to pay for a computer game which costs as much, but lasts longer.

Computer games are AMAZING value for money! They last much longer than other entertainment at the same cost, and they have the ability to interact, engage, and scale, like almost nothing else (at least that's legal – I hear heroin is a pretty good attach rate…)

Also, in the US, the average US consumer actually has more money now than before the pandemic started, because of the additional rent assistance, student loan deferrals, and other fiscal stimulus that has poured in for a year or two. I don't know how that translates to other markets – many West European markets have been driven by low student debt and high rent assistance for a very long time aleready.

If you want to sell games, you should probably be marketing more than you currently are. 99% of all indie game developers spend too little time and effort and money on marketing, assuming the product is any good. And the very first part of marketing is finding out who likes your game, and how much!

If you're one of the top mobile games with an in-house staff that spends their entire days optimizing display/click-through/monetization rates, then you need to worry about whether you're perhaps doing too much marketing – the payback rates of those efforts can fluctuate hour to hour. (One of my most interesting data analytics products in a past life was when we built a real-time indicator of the price elasticity of our virtual credit product – figuring out what the optimal discount rate was when to put on a sale, to get the most dollars in. Raw market economics at work!)

hplus0603 said:

The user generally chooses: “How do I allocate whatever money I have, for the best effect?”
If the price of beef steak goes up, perhaps they'll switch to sausages.
If the cost of travel goes up, more people will try to work from home.
If the price of movie tickets goes up, they might be more willing to pay for a computer game which costs as much, but lasts longer.

That assumes people are rational ? I think you rather have to look at it as some of the people will act rationally some of the time. All of us will act irrationally from time to time. And some people seem unable to make a single rational decision during their lifetime.