$10 is a steal for this game. A couple friends and I went in blind and were having a riot a few hours in. “Lethal Company but fun.”

I don't understand why you'd ask that. And I struggle to explain why this baffles me so much. Why would you think the devs of a game you like, a game that many people seem to like, might be considering making it free? If it was doing badly, sure. But apparently their business model is working. So why the fuck? Hey Todd Howard, do you plan to make Elder Scrolls 6 free to play? ... okay, horse armour says bad example.

Children whose parents said no to the $10 funny robot game.

>I don't understand why you'd ask that. It's not that far-fetched, to me. $10 is a pretty *weird* price for a game, especially these days. Many games that launch at such a low price point tend to only keep that pricing temporarily; either as an early-access discount before the price goes up for the "final" build of the game, or it'll go the other way and go free-to-play as the devs put the game on life support. It also seems like an especially unusual one-time price for a game that still seems to be actively worked on. It's a very *curious* price.

It is only a curious price because most developers would choose a freemium model for a $10 game.

Funny robot game? I started to watch the trailer and noped out almost immediately lol

If you trust the opinion of a random Lemmy user, REPO is really fun so long as you have a small friend group to play it with. Sure, it's another take on Lethal Company but it leads to some wacky moments and allows for some skill expression (if you kill enemies, they'll drop their souls as loot). Definitely well worth the $10 assuming you have people to play with. If you need to play with randos, ymmv.

It's not "free." It's "have you considered creating a Skinner box that somehow gouges people for more money than any game should cost?"

Since it seems to be the sort of game you play with a group of friends, it seems like it might be easier to actually make that happen with a $0 price point since you can ask someone to play without asking them to spend money.

Now THAT is an honest day's question work that I can respect.

Well, there are a open source games, which are also free to play without microtransactions or other manipulative financing scheme. 0AD, Beyond all reason, Luanti and many more. Free games doesn't necessarily need to implement bad stuff, but some chose to do so.