Pay what you want...

[Tweed]

People who pirate games regularly were never going to give you money anyway, if you find someway to prevent them from accessing something they don't make a purchase, they just get something else.

Which isn't to say I haven't tried the "russian demo" for some games before buying.

 

[oklabsoft]

Keep on whining but there's no denying that the best RPGs of all time came about when people with better business sense (and more drive) than their developers were forcing them to stay on track, to stay in focus, and agreed not to finance horrible games like PoE. In other words, the adults were in charge.

These are what us old timers like to refer to as the "good old days".

There's quite a few great games that came out of "garage developers".

Yes generally, looking at how it worked out, it does seem like having publishers was better than going Kickstarter.

But what worked then will not work now. The publishers of today have a different target audience, so just going back to them won't bring back the "good old days". Likely nothing will. The occasional fluke, maybe from a garage developer, but otherwise? Nope.

Yes, in a sense this is what curated sites like Steam (used to be) did but now they seem to be taking a different business model. I don't think you need to read too far between the lines to see where they are capitalizing. GOG is still curated, and sure some devs (like myself) get pissed when they reject... But in the end I think maybe it's better for gamers to have someone or group of someones decide what is legit and what isn't. Otherwise, you are left with a heap of stuff to sift through... Which is fine too (and a very good thing if you want to sift). Once again though, (not whining) I paid my waiter $20 tonight for delivering my food and asking if everything was cool but 'pay what you want' titles seem to barely get a tip. Hmm.

 

[SecondAmendment]

I've never even considered a "pay what you want" game. Most I've ever done is Humble Bundle back when it started. In effect it is pricing tiers. Pay more to get more and better products. That worked for me. I'm not a high novelty kind of person, more a value and depth kind so I buy very few games and mostly don't care what they cost.

One time I can remember where price influenced me to try a game I otherwise might not have is Stardew Valley for I think $20. That worked out well. I wouldn't have bought it if it was less than $10, because to my mind a game has to be double-digits if recently released to get a serious look. Dollar-store games don't get a look by me, as I don't really feel they will be a good value. Poor production values, badly tested gameplay, bugs, or too niche are my worries.

 

[Swigen]

Just make a good game I guess. I’d consider Path of Exile a successful “pay what you want” in a way right? You make a damn fine game then throw out a cosmetic gimme for consumers and if they like your product they’ll support it. I did with Path on PC then later on PS4 in the form of a $20 town portal skin ‘cause I felt the game was worth the $$$ and I’ll probably end up buying more stash tabs as I play. I’d’ve payed that if there was only a paypal donate button though ‘cause I thought the game was that good.

I mean if REmake 2 was pay what you want it’d probably be pretty successful vs something like Anthem.

 

[DalekFlay]

People who pirate games regularly were never going to give you money anyway, if you find someway to prevent them from accessing something they don't make a purchase, they just get something else.

I agree in a general sense, but if there's something they really want to play and there's no other way to play it, a lot of them will give in. What the percentages are and how much they have to want it I don't know, but there's no way you could convince someone really into, say, immersive sims, would ignore the new Deus Ex or Dishonored for years if it somehow remained uncracked. It's kind of like how most people only pay day one full price for something they're really into, and wait for sales on the rest. There are things you can want badly enough that make you pay up, and I doubt this is different for most pirates. That's why a lot of DRM focuses on delaying the crack rather than preventing it, hoping to get as many impatient fans to pay as possible.

Which relates to the OP's question... anything that's been out long enough to be in a pay what you want bundle that I don't own already I likely don't actually care much about. So there's no real drive to pay anything decent for it.

 

[Haba]

Another interesting thought. I am out to dinner now and just gave the barkeep $2 for pouring my wife and me a drink.

But if a company invites you for a free dinner, do you go? Do you tip the waitress when someone else is paying?

You are handing the barkeep $2 for pouring the drink, no matter how sloppily he does it. Why does that make sense to anyone? Price your product so that alms are not necessary. Give tip only when you receive extraordinary service.

 

[newtmonkey]

Charge what you think your product is worth, or release it for free. Releasing your product on itch.io alone will doom it to obscurity, as when I think of itch.io, I think of a site full of free/pay-what-you-want half-finished games and "my first program'" projects. I know for a fact your games deserve much better than the exposure you are getting on that site, as I've paid for and played the first Lurking game.

I'm not saying putting it on Steam would get you rolling in the dough, but putting a game up on itch.io for free to "build exposure" makes no sense to me at all. If you want exposure, put it on steam for a few bucks and start building up a community outside of the starving artists and poverty row productions that infest itch.io.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I assume most games not on steam are either really old, unfinished personal projects, or epic-tencent malware

 

[J_C]

Another interesting thought. I am out to dinner now and just gave the barkeep $2 for pouring my wife and me a drink.

You must be one rich SOB.

 

[oklabsoft]

J_C, what has been your experience with putting Long Road Home on Steam? ...As far as ease/difficulty of setting everything up, exposure, sales, etc?

 

[thesecret1]

I'm a month behind on rent, man. I can't pay you even if I wanted to.

 

[oklabsoft]

I'm a month behind on rent, man. I can't pay you even if I wanted to.

No worries. My game is free.

I really did a poor job trying to direct this discussion away from my specific circumstances and more into the generalities of marketing, exposure, pricing; and payment habits of game consumers and their rationales. I do appreciate all of the posts so far and I feel like a bunch of stuff I have never considered before has been pointed out so thank you to all.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I'm a month behind on rent, man. I can't pay you even if I wanted to.

No worries. My game is free.

I really did a poor job trying to direct this discussion away from my specific circumstances and more into the generalities of marketing, exposure, pricing; and payment habits of game consumers and their rationales. I do appreciate all of the posts so far and I feel like a bunch of stuff I have never considered before has been pointed out so thank you to all.

worst thing an indie can do is simply list their game on a storefront and assume that's good enough, the market is extremely saturated and you need advertising/marketing
contact streamers, spam Infinitron until he gives you a puff piece, etc.,

 

[thesecret1]

worst thing an indie can do is simply list their game on a storefront and assume that's good enough, the market is extremely saturated and you need advertising/marketing
contact streamers, spam Infinitron until he gives you a puff piece, etc.,

This might work for some AAA studio that spends millions to saturate media space with its marketing (thus making everyone aware it through pure osmosis), but it is not an option for a small indie dev. Indies can't pay off a journo or a streamer to play their game and they aren't going to get any attention by "influencers" until they actually stir up some interest. Instead, they need to rely on word of mouth. Make a great game and people who play it (especially pirates, tbh, as many aren't going to spend money on some new, unknown indie) will talk about it. This attracts the people who hear about it from them and so on, until at some point the game makes enough waves for someone with influence to notice it and amplify it. Indie's main marketing effort should be in making the store page look interesting enough for people to actually give it a try. Make the game look interesting and people will try it (even if they might not pay for it), just make sure you aren't one of those games that never even got tried. Make a good game, present it well on the store page, and then maybe shill it on sites like RPGcodex or others. A streamer important enough to actually net you an audience isn't going to waste his time with your game unless he gets a big fat bribe along with it (after all, he's on a payroll by AAA companies to shill THEIR games) or unless it's too big to ignore.

 

[Aemar]

I wouldn't pay more than 1 cent for a product that asks me to pay whatever I want. ''Pay what you want'' model makes your game look cheap in the eyes of your customers; it doesn't even matter if your game is packed with great content. You must realize exactly what's your game worth and sell it accordingly. Undervaluing your product is a sure way to undermine your own efforts as a developer.

 

[thesecret1]

I wouldn't pay more than 1 cent for a product that asks me to pay whatever I want. ''Pay what you want'' model makes your game look cheap in the eyes of your customers; it doesn't even matter if your game is packed with great content. You must realize exactly what's your game worth and sell it accordingly. Undervaluing your product is a sure way to undermine your own efforts as a developer.

Agreed. Those who don't want to pay anything can just pirate the game, and those who are willing to pay are usually willing to give a reasonable amount of money (unless you overprice the game). If you ask for an unreasonably low amount, you aren't really making your game more accessible, you're making yourself look unconfident in your product, something nobody wants to see when buying said product from you. Consider Cleve - he kept boasting about his game, overexagerrating its qualities and expected success, but while you knew a lot of it was just hot air, he did come off as someone who genuinely believes he's selling a great game. Had he said "Give it a go and maybe throw some spare change my way if you like it " he wouldn't sell squat. He'd get a lot "liked your game, keep it up" bullshit, but he wouldn't get any money. False humility is not a virtue, especially not when trying to sell stuff.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

worst thing an indie can do is simply list their game on a storefront and assume that's good enough, the market is extremely saturated and you need advertising/marketing
contact streamers, spam Infinitron until he gives you a puff piece, etc.,

This might work for some AAA studio that spends millions to saturate media space with its marketing (thus making everyone aware it through pure osmosis), but it is not an option for a small indie dev. Indies can't pay off a journo or a streamer to play their game and they aren't going to get any attention by "influencers" until they actually stir up some interest. Instead, they need to rely on word of mouth. Make a great game and people who play it (especially pirates, tbh, as many aren't going to spend money on some new, unknown indie) will talk about it. This attracts the people who hear about it from them and so on, until at some point the game makes enough waves for someone with influence to notice it and amplify it. Indie's main marketing effort should be in making the store page look interesting enough for people to actually give it a try. Make the game look interesting and people will try it (even if they might not pay for it), just make sure you aren't one of those games that never even got tried. Make a good game, present it well on the store page, and then maybe shill it on sites like RPGcodex or others. A streamer important enough to actually net you an audience isn't going to waste his time with your game unless he gets a big fat bribe along with it (after all, he's on a payroll by AAA companies to shill THEIR games) or unless it's too big to ignore.

Remember: you lose nothing from trying. You don't know that x streamer won't play your game, they might just happen to be bored that day and decide to play a random indie game they got a key for in their inbox.
Additionally, sites like RPGCodex, watch, gamebanshee, etc., are very receptive to indie devs as long as they're showing initiative.

 

[infidel]

If you demand a fee for your game, and don't get many downloads, that could be ascribed to failure of your product... exposure... or failure to properly market. If you use 'pay what you want' and people download your game and don't pay, what is that? Maybe they thought it sucked. Maybe they played it and decided they didn't need to pay. I don't know. I don't want this to be about my product but the climate and marketing plans in general.

If you're so worried about missing downloads then why not put up a playable demo instead of PWYW? It would be pretty much the same thing if the demo is generous enough content-wise. Also itch.io has excellent support for web games. If you can compile your project into Javascript, the potential customer will be able to play it right upon landing on the game page. In fact, if forums would allow curated itch.io embeds, it would be even better but alas.

 

[Valky]

I typically do a thorough enough amount of research beforehand to know whether or not I would want to play a game, so I would pick option B. Grimoire is worth $40 at least.

 

[Elephantman]

Polls like that are like polls that ask if you are a pedophile. All the pedophiles in here telling us how much they like pussy.

 

[blrrmmmff]

This might work with increased transparency about who is involved with the game, and how much revenue they made, and how much they spent on making it.

If I download a game and play and like it all for free, and then I see they spent let's say $2 million, and only have $500k in revenue total (and I know this with a reasonably high certainty), I would probably throw a decent amount of money at them. Because I would want them to make more games. Of course this would limit upside, because someone is more likely to not pay anything if you already made like 4x your investment. So of course trust will be an issue. Payment through a public block chain could solve this, as it would be impossible to lie about revenue. Also some sort of audit would need to take place to verify the amount they spent on it.

Then you could add in an option to give a larger % of what you pay to certain people involved with the game, if you really liked the sound track or the level design or something.

Also a game maker needs to convey if their product is niche or not. For example I think the stealth genre is pretty niche, so I would have no problem paying like a $100 or so for a really solid stealth game that does something new. Like a new good Thief or Splinter cell game. Unless you want to play niche games with a very thin budget, you just gonna have to pay up imo. And currently there is not really a good model for this.

So to conclude, with much added transparency and possibly mechanisms thrown in like a public block chain and audits (to reduce fraud and increase trust) this could work really well. Because when you don't pay and did enjoy, it is really in your face that you are ripping off the people who made it and invested in it.

 

[anvi]

Download for free and return to pay if you like it.

I went with that one. The concept annoys me though, it is such a smug hipsterish thing to do. Also I already have that option and I already do pay what I want. I try to play everything for free and if it is meh, I don't pay. If it is good I will go to Steam and buy it because I am principled person. And the way the pricing works means that if you really love the game/company, you can buy it when the game is new and they will get a big chunk of cash from you. If you just thought it was "ok", then you can buy it on a Steam sale. If you think it wasn't that great but want it anyway, you can get it a few years later and on a sale for $1.

 

[J_C]

J_C, what has been your experience with putting Long Road Home on Steam? ...As far as ease/difficulty of setting everything up, exposure, sales, etc?

Setting everything up is is not hard, but it takes quite some time, because you have to upload a lot of data, description, artwork about your game. Plus achievement rewards, emotes, reward backgrounds etc. But there is a handy checklist which you can follow, so you don't miss out anything. Uploading your build is a but tricky, but I'm sure you can figure it out after reading the documentation.

Exposure and sales. Well...my game is an RPG Maker game, which has a bad reputation, so my sales weren't skyrocketing. I sold 619 copies in 2 years, which is not much, but it's my first game, and as I said, it has an RPG Maker look, so I was okay with the sales. Exposure was pretty good for the first month, then it gradually died down. But it picked up a bit after I figured out that if you use the correct tags for the game, the Steam algorithm picks up your game more efficiently. So that is very important.

 

[Norfleet]

I'm not paying anything unless I can expect some kind of return on investment. What's in it for me?

And frankly, some games are of such negative value that I don't even want them for free. EA was recently giving away a game for free on their Origin thing, I was like "nah, bro, Imma stick with YARR". Even free isn't good enough for me to want to deal with that Origin shit.

 

[Beastro]

People who pirate games regularly were never going to give you money anyway, if you find someway to prevent them from accessing something they don't make a purchase, they just get something else.

I dunno about that. I bought the original Mount and Blade after playing the hell out of it torrenting it. I was simply so impressed by how decently solid it was (and how good natured the trial was effectively giving you the game but putting a ceiling on how high you could level) I felt bad not throwing them some money.

A few other games have stood out like that for me as well, though most escape my mind atm. Rimworld started out that way too IIRC, and while I haven;t played it in years I'm happy to have paid Tyne for what he made.

There's the inverse too, games that aren't so much shit but are so cynically designed you torrent them knowing you'd never thrown the asshole developers or publisher any money. I wonder how much I'd have done that more if I'd been playing games the way I'd been 10 years ago.