Is there a price base for code licenses?

Question

Hello everyone, I believe that many of you work or have already worked with game development. Most programmers in this area use some engine to make the process easier and it's what they would like to ask about it.

Let's say you have programmed an individual system to be used in a certain engine, how much, on average, would you charge to allow its use? What points do you consider to stipulate the price?

- Are you based on the value of the codes sold for the same purpose?
- Are you based on the time spent programming and the complexity of the code?
- Both points and a few more?

I believe that starting to sell this type of code is a good way to enter the market because you take advantage of the demand of the engines and can already show the quality of your work. What do you guys think about?

Answer 1

Hey man,
my answer is quite simple. It depends on many things. but here are 3 quite important points to check your pricing against:
1) Are there already other add-ons on the market that do similar things? -> you can check how similar your program is, and get closer or further away from their pricing.
2) What is your Code doing? If you have a very good Entity AI you can sell it pretty high, but if you have rather small programs, I wouldn't go too high, cause your risk not selling it, rises the higher the price goes, because the Devteams decide that they can build it cheaper themselves, and have the support right in their team.
3) How flexible is your system? Is it super static and the ones who buy it cannot do many things with your code, or is it very versitile and flexible in the way people can use and apply it?

ofc there are way more things like demand on the kind of code you made, and something like the costs that were involved producing it, if you had some. and the list goes way on.
But if you don't have a extremely epic and gigantic System, I would experiment around, maybe write some companies, what they consider paying for something like that (and there are many companies that actually reply), or check how long did you code on that, what does someone in the industry get paid an hour, and then go for some rough numbers.

hope this helped you at least a little bit
Greetings
Luca :)

Answer 2

It helped a lot. Thank you very much. o/