Make confident pricing moves that add tens of thousands of dollars in revenue. IndieBI Discount Advisor shows you exactly what to do, when to do it, and why it works.
(enlarge)Why trust IndieBI?
We track real sales and marketing data, not estimates, for 10K+ titles. We work with teams from solo indies to publicly traded publishers, which lets us see what reliably drives revenue across an unusually broad slice of the market.
In our data, a disciplined discounting strategy shows up time and time again as the fastest and most reliable way to grow the revenue you already have.
We built our Discount Advisor to help every studio apply the same playbook.
The IndieBI Discount Advisor is two things in one:
- A recommendations engine for Steam and Nintendo discounts, including per-region cooldown logic, automatic discounting depth and scheduling optimizer, and personalized performance monitoring
- A unified calendar for all major storefront events and your own plans, making sure you’re not missing out on any revenue drivers when charting your own strategy
In short, the Discount Advisor is the easiest way to start adopting real, evidence-based best practices no matter the size and scale of your catalog.
(enlarge)Get started quickly
Before using the Discount Advisor, you just need to set up an IndieBI account and connect your sources to ensure your Steam and Nintendo data is up to date. Once set up, our data collectors handle the heavy lifting automatically and the Discount Advisor can start populating your timeline.
Once your data is finished processing, your timeline will start showing every past and upcoming discount for Steam and Nintendo in one place, providing evidence-based guidance and advice, while allowing you to interactively plan your discounts around key events and your own content and marketing plans.
A digestible to-do list to know where to start
The Discount Advisor makes your basic goal very simple: increase your SCORE by completing the recommended ACTIONS. Think of Actions as a checklist for a healthy discounting strategy. As you complete Actions, your score (and your revenue) goes up.
(enlarge)The score is calculated for each title and platform separately and gives you a rough overview of your performance. It’s a simple measure of how close you are to maximizing your games’ discounting opportunities.
As a rule of thumb you’ll want your Score to be as close to 100% as possible, but if your strategy forces you to skip a discount or shift things around then that’s perfectly fine too. You’re in charge here, and your advisory score can also be seen as a simplified measure of the trade-offs you needed to make to hit your own strategic objectives.
Why these recommendations work
Our advisory system is trained on discount data from 10K+ titles. Almost universally, games with more actively managed and denser discounting calendars see more sales, lower rates of decay, and much higher lifetime revenue outcomes.
(enlarge)The Advisor and its default recommendations will guide you to:
- Maximize days on discount. Visibility is a scarce resource. Discounts boost revenue, secure additional store placements, and help convert wishlists. Store algorithms reward revenue boosts with even more visibility, which means that well-paced discounting does not harm a game’s lifecycle; rather, it sustains it and can actually increase a title’s longevity. It’s a virtuous cycle: more visibility → more purchases → more visibility.
- Favor longer events. Performance decays after a few days, so shorter events sound appealing. But platform cooldown rules make it hard to fit enough extra events to offset the lost exposure of longer ones. Net-net, longer events typically win.
- Adjust discounting depths when needed. Our Discount Advisor looks at multiple features of your games’ historical performance, with strong emphasis on the last five events for each product. If your game’s performance shows signs of decaying at the current depth, it’ll recommend stepping deeper to counteract your game’s appeal waning with age.
- Stay on top of platform constraints. The Discount Advisor calculates cooldowns per store and region and keeps track of any platform rule changes. It allows you to easily spot any gaps in your discounting schedule and visualize the knock-on effects of any of your own plans.
- Make informed exceptions. Our guidance works well for most premium PC and console titles in most situations, but your game won’t always be like “most games”. You’re still fully in control when your strategy needs to deviate from our advice. If your game relies heavily on network effects or in-app purchases, if you want to run more aggressive depth experiments, or need to line up all your titles for a major publisher sale, the Discount Advisor allows you to easily override all of its recommendations, while providing additional data and context to keep you informed.
Interactive timeline to keep you informed
The calendar view shows events and cooldowns for Steam and Nintendo in one place, and lets you manage other storefronts manually from the same view. The list of stores available in the Discount Advisor with full timeline support will continue to grow, and IndieBI’s Discount Management service already covers every platform.
(enlarge)Scroll down to see additional portals. After connecting each source, you’ll be able to see the relevant SKUs and manage events for them all in one place.
(enlarge)Scheduling and depth advisory logic to keep you efficient
Click any event to see details, or add a new opportunity directly from the timeline.
When you adjust dates or discount depth, we’ll highlight the most recommended settings for revenue impact, help you make sense of your local and store timezones, and make sure you’re not running into any inadvertent cooldown issues.
(enlarge)Context, right where you need it
No matter if you’re a part of a larger team or make decisions by yourself, we provide helpful features for making collaboration and decision making easier:
- Notes on every event. Capture approvals, context, and rationale behind each decision directly on the timeline. Make it easy to see when you intentionally cut a discount short because you need to keep a window open for your next content release.
- Past performance at a glance. We bring a summary of prior events and outcomes to inform your next move. You’ll see an at-a-glance digest of your games’ historical promotional performance right beside your timeline, and can jump out for a deeper dive in the IndieBI Dashboards easily when needed.
(enlarge)From zero to revenue quickly
It takes very little effort to start adopting a meaningfully smarter discounting strategy. In a world where most games see over two thirds of their revenue coming from discounts, adopting IndieBI for discount management can be one of the easiest ways to quickly improve your company’s financial health:
- Set up an IndieBI account and connect your Steam and Nintendo data sources
- Open your Discount Advisor once your data is finished processing, review your SCORE and start addressing the recommended ACTIONS
- Set the recommended schedule for your upcoming discount windows
- Apply the recommended discount depths (or experiment)
- Repeat monthly to keep yourself in control and constantly improving
- See your revenue grow
Want to learn more?
Start your free trial to optimize discounts with Discount Advisor, unify your data automatically, and turn insights into measurable revenue.
Prefer a walkthrough? Book a call and we'll be happy to walk you through our full suite of revenue optimization services, including all-platform discount management, regional pricing optimization, back-catalog management, pre-release support, forecasting and more.
Marek Pilczuk
Tom Kaczmarczyk