A discount and a price change are not the same thing

When something is not selling, the conversation is usually about lowering the price. What rarely gets separated is whether the lower number is a discount — temporary, with the original price still standing behind it — or a price change, where the new number is now the price.

They produce different player behaviour, and picking the wrong one is a common way to lose the ability to use either.

What a discount depends on

A discount works because of the reference price. The player evaluates the offer against what it normally costs, and the gap is the reason to act now.

That machinery requires two things. The reference price has to be credible — players have to believe things actually sell at it. And the discount has to be temporary, or the reference price stops being real.

A permanent discount is a contradiction. If something is always thirty percent off, thirty percent off is the price, and the crossed-out number is decoration that players learn to ignore. Once that happens, the discount mechanism no longer works for that item, and repeated exposure teaches players to distrust it across the catalog.

This is the specific way studios lose discounting as a tool: by using it continuously until it stops signalling anything.

What a price change depends on

A price change has no reference and no urgency. The thing costs what it costs, and the player decides whether that is worth it.

Its advantage is that it is durable. A correctly-priced item converts steadily without needing an event attached, and it does not train anyone to wait.

Its disadvantage is that a price reduction is hard to reverse. Players who saw the lower price treat it as the real one, and raising it back reads as a price increase regardless of history. This makes price changes a one-way door in practice, which is exactly why they warrant more thought than a discount does.

The other thing about a price change is that it is an admission — the previous price was wrong. That is fine and often true, and it is worth being clear internally about which situation you are in, because "we mispriced this" and "we want a sales event" lead to different actions.

Choosing between them

The question that separates the two cases is whether the problem is the price or the moment.

If the item does not sell at any time, to anyone, the price is wrong. A discount produces a temporary bump and the problem returns when it ends. A price change fixes it.

If the item sells fine but you want a burst of activity — an event, a seasonal moment, a re-engagement push — the price is not the problem and a discount is the right instrument. It creates a moment rather than correcting a value.

If the item sold well and stopped, neither is necessarily right. That is usually saturation or obsolescence, and both discounting and repricing are attempts to solve a demand problem with a price lever.

The diagnostic that helps is looking at whether players who see the item engage with it at all. An item that gets opened and examined and not bought has a price or value problem. An item that gets ignored entirely has a relevance or visibility problem, and no price fixes that.

See how we separate pricing and timing decisions →

Keeping discounting usable

If you want discounts to keep working, the discipline is about frequency and consistency.

Discount rarely enough that the reference price stays believable. What counts as rare depends on the game, but the test is whether an engaged player would expect this item to be discounted again soon. If yes, the discount is not creating urgency.

Discount predictably at the level of the calendar and unpredictably at the level of the item. Players can know that sales happen seasonally without knowing which items will be in them. This preserves urgency on the specific item while letting the rhythm be legible.

And never discount the same item repeatedly in a short window. That is the single fastest way to establish the lower number as the real price, and it happens most often when a team is chasing a monthly target with the same lever each time.

The underlying idea is that a discount spends a resource — the credibility of your prices — and a price change does not. Spending that resource occasionally to create a moment is a reasonable trade. Spending it continuously because it produced a result last time leaves you with neither the discount nor the price.

One practical marker separates the two in your own records: whether the original price is still being paid by anyone. If an item is nominally priced at one level and every single sale in the last quarter happened at a reduced level, the reduced level is the price and the higher one is fiction. That is worth checking periodically across the catalog, because it tends to be true of more items than anyone expects, and each one is a discount that has quietly stopped functioning as a discount while still being reported as one.

Talk to us about pricing strategy →