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Comment by hill613 | Hacker News Reader

$350 for one session?

Just buy one jackbox games for like $30 (has multiple games). One person screen shares the game, and you have a ball.

That's fair feedback about the price and this is not for everyone. We're hoping people will experience value in prizes, a trained host, team-building aspects like ice breakers, and a high-quality game experience.

You might want to make it more obvious on the landing page that this price includes a live host. I thought this was a free, automated thing at first and was blown away when I saw the cost.

To be honest I thought the same thing. Pricing was also a little hidden.

I have been looking for something like this - as patio11 would say, you should always charge more than you think but I’ll be honest, my workplace could not really justify this price for an hour.

Curious, what do you think would be a more reasonable price that would "justify this price for an hour"?

I'm not the person you are replying to, but just wanted to add another data point, even if it's probably not what you want to hear - I think $50-$125 is more realistic.

FWIW, I also just polled my manager about this (without revealing my thoughts above), and he said $100 absolute max. For reference, this is at a megacorp (technically they could of course afford more, but budgets for anything related to employee happiness are squeezed tight).

Thanks GordonS. Really appreciate the data point. Interesting, the few managers we talked to as part of our user research indicated a much higher acceptable price point for employee engagement initiatives and the cost savings during the pandemic. Looks like we need to do more pricing research here.

For further data - are you a high profile-ish engineer?

Or a data analyst etc?

Architect/tech lead

The business I’m in may not be representative of the clients you’re looking for (we’re 15 strong), but we would be interested at around the £100 mark.

ircshotty, thank you for the additional data point. Part of the reason for the higher price is that we provide prizes to the winning team. Perhaps we need to consider a lower price point without prizes. Would that help?

Or, maybe we need make the inclusion of prizes clearer in how the price is positioned.

That last bit sounds like the winner.

Make it toggle-able, and you're fucking champion.

Thanks so much the feedback. We've made the prizes toggle-able so now the price point is a bit lower.

In non-pandemic times, it would not be unusual for a company to blow more than that on a laserquest outing or an escape room or something. Seems in the right ballpark for a teambuilding budget.

Thanks for the feedback. We made some changes that will hopefully make this more obvious.

How do you scale this with a live host? They're literally booked for an entire hour (or more)? Can these games not be designed to stand on their own without additional humans pulling levers?

We're seeing a live host as a main part of our value proposition. The host not only helps ensure an optimal game experience but also supports the team to get to know each better with fun questions and ice-breakers.

Long-term, we're hoping this could be also be a way to employ artists impacted by the pandemic as well.

Many of the companies you are targeting probably already have HR generalists who do such events online now because of the new reality . Perhaps you should consider a pricing package where you provide the games and training for the host and make it self service for the hosts to run these events for their companies. It would be more scalable and doesn't erode any value.

That's a really great point about the role of HR generalists and your suggestion about moving to a more self-service model. We'll definitely consider this. Thanks for the feedback!

Maybe sell shovels: by which I mean offer a course to train HR people to deliver a raft of games?

This doesn't work well in practice, in my experience, due to all the low-latency audio and video streaming requirements (most Jackbox games utilize a timer), locked down corporate machine deployments, and streaming platform delays. Huge mess.

I've played Jackbox games monthly with my family via Zoom. I have a gigabit fiber connection, and they have slower cable connections. The Jackbox timer can be configured to a longer amount, but we've never had an issue with this. Most timer issues have been due to someone being distracted by something else, not the game itself.

Generally, if a group can use any form of videoconferencing, they can use Jackbox. It's no different from one person sharing a presentation. I've only encountered one game that required realtime interaction, and we know to avoid it.

It's pretty easy to get around corporate machine lockdown by using a personal machine to host. Participants are just using the web browser.

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