Right now, Zero Caliber 2 costs $29.99 on Steam. But the makers of the VR shooter say they’re doing a little social experiment that could potentially whittle the price all the way down to $14.99. To get there, XREAL Games is asking fans to put the game on their Steam wishlist. Depending on how many wishlists the game can get on, the price will go down accordingly.
XREAL Games has outlined four different milestones for fans. The game is currently on 20,000 wishlists, but if it reaches 30,000, the price will drop to $26.99. The consecutive milestones are: 40,000 for $24.99 and 50,000 for $19.99. If the game reaches 100,000 saves, Zero Caliber 2 will end up costing half of its starting price, $14.99.
XREAL Games describes itself as a self-funded indie team that’s fighting to keep both VR and its own independent studio alive. The shooter, which touts cinematic firefights and a fully-fledged single-player campaign, is slated to come out sometime before the end of the year. “We’ve been giving it everything we’ve got to deliver the kind of VR shooter the PCVR community actually deserves – no lazy ports, no shortcuts,” reads the game’s Steam page.
Why go through the trouble? Well, the more wishlists a game is on, the better chance the game in question reaches wider visibility. Valve insists the number of wishlists does not influence what the platform shows its users, with one exception: what appears on Steam’s Popular Upcoming section. And placement on Popular Upcoming can have a domino effect on tabs like New and Trending, which reportedly can also influence whether the game appears in users’ discovery queue or if Steam suggests the game under its “more like this” feature.
Basically, more wishlists could mean more sales. The call to action definitely functions as great marketing for a game that people may otherwise have not heard about, especially since the ask is so easy to fulfill. One click, that’s it. The combination of free PR and potentially higher sales could, in theory, offset a potential price drop. And even if a user doesn’t spend money on release, being on a wishlist means the fan will get notified whenever the game goes on sale. I don’t know about you, but I don’t do a great job of cleaning up my Steam wishlist. I’ve definitely purchased games based on email notifications if it seems like a good enough deal though, even if I had completely forgotten about that title up until that point.
It’s a clever and resourceful move by a small studio, albeit perhaps a controversial one. On the Virtual Reality subreddit, for example, some users say they’re getting sick of hearing about Zero Caliber 2‘s pricing campaign after the developers kept posting about it on the forum. Some onlookers see this as a ploy, and assume the intended launch price has always been $14.99. The first Zero Caliber cost $24.99, but it’s currently on sale for $9.99 on Steam. Some users are also cautioning others about Zero Caliber 2‘s prospects based on the trajectory of the previous game, which some consider unfinished. The developers dispute this assessment, noting that they released 8 updates for the game on Meta Quest within a single year. Posts complaining about the state of the game on Steam, however, are as recent as a couple of months ago.
“We’re a small team, and can only focus on one thing at the same time,” a developer wrote in response to criticism on Reddit.
“We’re genuinely trying to keep prices low despite raging inflation,” the developer said in a different thread. “We’re still a self-funded team without a publisher juggling things to stay afloat so we can keep developing PCVR titles.”
