Distribution Paid vs name your price

[fxokz]

Whats the better option from your experience/opinion in terms of downloads/money

I am debating on whether i should release a game somewhere between 1-$3 OR just releasing it so that its optional to pay.. im still not sure and was wondering if anyone has any advice on the topic. Fire away.

 

[MishMash]

The more important question is what do you think your game is worth? If you think that it's worth $3, then sell it for $3. If you aren't really fussed about making money off the game, and just want to break into the market, perhaps get more players, name your price may be appropriate.

One thing I would say however, is that when i'm a consumer, I tend to value games I've paid for more. What I mean by this is that I tend to feel more inclined to play games that I've paid for, sometimes even regardless of how objectively fun they are in comparison to a free game.

One thing I've learned more recently, and this is something that applies to a lot of different situations is to not under-sell yourself. I feel from the fact that you are making this topic, you are concerned about whether your game will sell or not. I've had the same concerns in the past, however, I tend to find that when people find your game, if its something they are interested in playing, whether it has a price tag or not wont necessarily make a huge difference on their decision to play the game. More importantly, i'd say if someone has made the decision to buy your game, then a price of $3 wont be much of a disincentive vs a price of $1. (This is all assuming that your game has a reasonable amount of content and polish to justify being sold at all).

 

[Guest User]

as a buyer i find that "name your price" games are never the games i actually need help paying for in the first place. ymmv, of course, but if you're game is under ~$25, it does not need to have a variable, much less optional, price IMO.

also, should you happen to be expecting that half of your buyers will still opt-in and pay top-dollar, do really consider the possibility that no one will.
i say that less out of selling experience but more as a greedy miser who won't give you a cent if you give me the option. i doubt i'm an rare occurrence, so if you can't truly afford to give your game away for the grand total of $0, or just don't want to deep down, then...don't.

 

[fxokz]

The more important question is what do you think your game is worth?

I dont know.. And i dont think one can easily calculate how much their game is worth either.. I mean think of i dont know.. Maldita Castilla for example.. a good 2+ hours of great content and its totally free, my question is would anybody go out of their way to spend $3 on a game when there are millions of other "free" options.. I mean instead of spending $3 on my game, why not spend an extra 17 and buy a game you can play for hundreds of hours..

Basically what im trying to figure out is, do people even go out of their way to spend $3 on a game? Its hard to word it the right way but its something along the lines..

Also if i put my game on there for $3 or whatever, i dont see any of my friends willing to spend money just to play a game i made.. You see i dont know if im underestimating myself or just speaking the bottom line truth. Maybe i should just throw it out there for "Name your price" or just completely free and hope that it atleast gets a small amount of attention.. After all the game im working on is a 3 month project.

 

[Fern]

Generally you want to set the price to something you think your product is worth (as @MishMash has already said). Imagine you want a pair of shoes. Those shoes are either $5 at the indie shoe store, or $60 on the official brand store. You are going to buy the shoes at the $5 price tag the majority of the time (unless you are wealthy and like to donate to companies you support). That is why you see games like Dishonored 2 or Watch_Dogs 2 release with a $60 price tag. It doesn't matter if the game is a buggy mess or if you enjoy it. If you want the game, you'll drop the money necessary to acquire it.

Allowing someone to choose their price is allowing someone to short-hand you on a product you may have worked very hard on.

From experience, my current game is priced at $9.99. That seemed over-priced to me for the game but I've had loads of people tell me to raise the price as they would have easily paid upwards of $15. It is up to you to make that decision. Customers will pay what they feel is reasonable.

 

[SnoutUp]

Simple.
Better in terms of downloads: pay what you want model.
Better in terms of money: paid game.

With both options there's a risk of earning nothing.

 

[Shariku Onikage]

I've found in my experience of playing games that have been released for free/PWYW model i never tend to throw money at them, even if i think they deserve it. This isn't out of harshness on my behalf but more i just forget and move on. Even with a free game like Iji, which i absolutely love, it never really led to me sending any money down Remar's way (though maybe i should rectify this) nor did it lead to me buying any of his other games.

I suppose my point is that if you put the effort into making a game and then decide that the worth of the game is worth charging something, you should charge. If the game has mostly been about fun and learning how to make games (which i know from your other posts has been the case) then it may be best that it goes on a PWYW model and release it for free on places like Itch.io (PWYW is included by default there). Putting a set price on a game that may not reach certain standards may affect your reputation on later games in the long term (read up on Digital Homicide for a classic example).

If you're really not sure, start advertising on social media. Post screenshots of your game on twitter and upload gameplay videos on youtube and start judging the response people give you. If there's strong interest, then charging may be an option for you.

 

[dj_midknight]

I believe that itch.io also has a suggested price option. So you can let them pay what they want, but first it shows you the suggested price. So if you feel like it should be $2, but don't want to limit your downloads do it as free with a suggested price of $2.

 

[JackTurbo]

Heard some interesting figures about donations/pay what you want a while pack, during the whole paid mods fiasco...

SkyUI is widely heralded as one the most essential skyrim mods, it generally tops pretty much every 'best skyrim mods' list around and has had nearly 6 million downloads on the nexus alone and yet the creators received less than $500 in donations.

Statistically that is less than 0.00833% of users actually donating just $1...

Indicating that people - when given the option - just don't bother.

Obviously that is a mod rather than a full game, so there may well be a difference in sentiment towards it, but still I find those figures pretty compelling.

 

[Shariku Onikage]

Heard some interesting figures about donations/pay what you want a while pack, during the whole paid mods fiasco...

SkyUI is widely heralded as one the most essential skyrim mods, it generally tops pretty much every 'best skyrim mods' list around and has had nearly 6 million downloads on the nexus alone and yet the creators received less than $500 in donations.

Statistically that is less than 0.00833% of users actually donating just $1...

Indicating that people - when given the option - just don't bother.

Obviously that is a mod rather than a full game, so there may well be a difference in sentiment towards it, but still I find those figures pretty compelling.

I guess one of the key problems is that there's no decent time to donate or request donations when it comes to games. If you give the option to donate before the person downloads they won't want to because they've yet to try it out (and so don't know if it's worth it). If you do it during (e.g. a popup shows up during the game) it feels annoying to be interrupted and heckled mid-game. After that it requires the person who downloaded it to return to the original location and donate, which, even if a person thought the game was life-changing may not necessarily be something they think of to do.

Beyond that the only real method would be for the developer to send a reminder email ('You enjoyed my game, why not donate?') which, again, sounds like heckling and can put people off.

On the contrary i understand that more successful webcomics find a Donate button to be very effective, presumably because the site is regularly visited and the Donate/Patreon button is within easy reach. A site selling your game only needs to be visited once.

 

[MishMash]

I guess one of the key problems is that there's no decent time to donate or request donations when it comes to games.

I actually had an interesting thought about this when I was first thinking about models of monetisation. When I wasn't all that confident in my game having commercial value, I had this idea of releasing it for free, but having donation incentives. For example, in order to release the next awesome update, you set a donation target, say $5000 or something. Then, once you have matched that number of donations, you start powering towards releasing that new content, perhaps giving earlier access to the people who donated.

The important thing here is that the content still remains entirely free, but you are more likely to get donations as players who want certain features, or just want more from you (as they are impressed with your work) will be more inclined to support you.

I have no idea how a system like this would actually work out, I guess its the sort of thing where you would need a critical mass of frequent players anyway in order to have it serve as a worthwhile model. So I guess it would only really work for certain types of games/content. In a way, its a little bit like the patreon system, except I guess the donations would more clearly line-up with specific content.

 

[Rusty]

@MishMash asking authors to evaluation how much they feel their game is worth is truly terrible advice.

The truth is, nobody cares how much you think your game is worth and very few people have the money or the compassion to give extra money to an anonymous online game developer when they can afford it. You need to sum up your budget, access your market and figure out how many sales, and at what price, you need to make in order to turn a profit from the project. That's it really. Research similar games from similar authors and how many downloads they got to get a rough estimate of how many sales you can expect at different pricing ranges and plan your market strategy accordingly.

Again, nobody cares what you value your work as, if it doesn't match up with what the customers are willing to pay for it then you're going to shoot yourself in the foot with the starting gun on what is essentially an endurance run of marketing.

 

[MishMash]

@MishMash asking authors to evaluation how much they feel their game is worth is truly terrible advice.

The truth is, nobody cares how much you think your game is worth and very few people have the money or the compassion to give extra money to an anonymous online game developer when they can afford it. You need to sum up your budget, access your market and figure out how many sales, and at what price, you need to make in order to turn a profit from the project. That's it really. Research similar games from similar authors and how many downloads they got to get a rough estimate of how many sales you can expect at different pricing ranges and plan your market strategy accordingly.

Again, nobody cares what you value your work as, if it doesn't match up with what the customers are willing to pay for it then you're going to shoot yourself in the foot with the starting gun on what is essentially an endurance run of marketing.

That's a bit of a counter-logical statement. You're saying you shouldn't ask people what they think their game is worth, they should instead go and work out what their game is worth? What do you think I meant by asking someone what they think their game is worth? Obviously, when you break it down, what any creator thinks their game should be worth should always be what they believe consumers will be willing to pay.. That's exactly what "worth" means. Nothing has value unless people are willing to pay, so IMO that's a bit of a pointless observation.

To clarify, what I meant by my original post is that the more important question that the developer should be asking himself is whether he believes the game is worth the amounts he proposes. I can't imagine any developer looking at their game and giving it a horrible mis-estimation of price. I know people do often under/over-sell themselves, this is a fair point, and I know you could interpret my post as not really saying anything. All I was trying to do was to get the OP to look at the situation more objectively, as it's not really about what we think if we don't know what the game is.

This is not to discredit your response though, the budget/expected return is very important and evaluating "worth" is done by exactly the means you describe: Finding similar games. Though my reply here is merely indicating that you can fall into exactly the same trap with that, because his opinion of how good/how much content other games have is just as subjective as when he is evaluating his own game. (So I think it's a little unfair to call my advice truly terrible, when you are essentially saying things along the same line).

 

[Rusty]

That's a bit of a counter-logical statement. You're saying you shouldn't ask people what they think their game is worth, they should instead go and work out what their game is worth? What do you think I meant by asking someone what they think their game is worth? Obviously, when you break it down, what any creator thinks their game should be worth should always be what they believe consumers will be willing to pay.. That's exactly what "worth" means. Nothing has value unless people are willing to pay, so IMO that's a bit of a pointless observation.

What any creator thinks of their own work is not always a reflection of their work's market value. In the same sense, a parent's understanding of their own child's level of intelligence is not always a reflection of their child's actual level of intelligence. Although I admit I worded it rather harshly, what I meant was that valuing the game on the developer's perceived value of their work is terrible advice to give as other people will not give it the same sentimental value that any proud developer would and ultimately, if you love your project and what you do then you're going to have those feelings of pride about it regardless. Objective market research is required to find a suitable value for the game and if this is the advice you were suggesting then I apologize for it is actually very good advice to be giving, if not poorly worded.

I actually had an interesting thought about this when I was first thinking about models of monetisation. When I wasn't all that confident in my game having commercial value, I had this idea of releasing it for free, but having donation incentives. For example, in order to release the next awesome update, you set a donation target, say $5000 or something. Then, once you have matched that number of donations, you start powering towards releasing that new content, perhaps giving earlier access to the people who donated.

This scheme is called valued interest and it is employed (although slightly differently) by most AAA game developing companies. The costs of developing new DLC is pre-paid for by earlier purchases of the main title and also gives the developers a rough estimate of how many people will be purchasing the new update (which in turn helps them plan for the budget of future DLC releases). When the goals for the new DLC are reached, the DLC is developed and then announced, not the other way around and this is for an important reason, especially if you are asking people to donate of their own accord. People who donate or purchase the game will ultimately feel cheated if the goal isn't reached but they have donated with the expectation of reaching the goal and then the extra content for the game. By outwardly telling people that donations count towards new content, what you're essentially doing is building people up, which can lead to disappointment which can lead to general outrage and because they donated when others didn't, your gaming fanbase may demand the production of DLC that you didn't acquire the full funding for.

In simpler terms, imagine that you are asked to chip in to get a pizza. You and two of your three friends all put money in to get the pizza. The person who collects the money says they are sorry but because the third friend did not give money that there is not enough money for pizza, so nobody is getting pizza, but they're going to keep all the money anyway.

 

[MishMash]

Yeah, it was worded quite poorly, I guess I make too many assumptions in my posts Won't do that in the future!

This scheme is called valued interest and it is employed (although slightly differently) by most AAA game developing companies. The costs of developing new DLC is pre-paid for by earlier purchases of the main title and also gives the developers a rough estimate of how many people will be purchasing the new update (which in turn helps them plan for the budget of future DLC releases).

I guess it is similar to an extent, though I guess in the AAA scope, this relies on the whole ecosystem of pre-orders and season passes. To get around the "feeling cheated" part, I imagine a natural evolution of the model would be to have what would essentially be "mini-crowdfunds", where the donors only pay if the entire target amount is reached. Though this wouldn't work if the donation period spanned a larger amount of time. I know there are a lot of flaws with that kind of idea, though I wonder if any project has executed something similar with success.

Generally speaking, regular donation follows a less strict version of the same thing: Developers say "Donations help keep this site up etc;" but the same situation would happen, just without the promise of specific returns on donations.

The only service I have directly donated money towards was a Minecraft server I used to play on a lot. This was just one of the "donate to keep the servers running" spiels, though you never really had any idea what the money contributed towards. The one thing I tend to prefer about the crowdfunding model is that your money often results in something more tangible than just becoming part of the general fund that exists behind the scenes.

Alternatively, you could have a standard donation model, and once you know you have reached a point where you can develop extra content, you could throw out stretch goal donation targets. As at this point, no one should really feel mugged off for having donated, as the game will still be getting an update. The amounts would simply result in how much extra content can get developed for that update.

 

[Rusty]

That's one way to go I suppose, personally I'd go with donator content instead. Content packs that are exclusively given to people who donate over a certain amount to the project. Combine that with pre-developed DLC packages that can be released upon goals so that content is released instantly upon goal completion. The money total from the completed goal can then be used to develop the next goal target in advance. When the project eventually falls due to lack of interest, either on your behalf or the customer's, you can release the final DLC pack, announce the cancellation of any future (publicly unannounced) DLC so nobody can really be that disappointed and keep the donation line open to pay for future projects or entries to the series.

Fanbase happy. Donations received. DLC released. Everything paid for.

Also, donations to keep servers running go to exactly that. They pay for server maintenance.

 

[MishMash]

Also, donations to keep servers running go to exactly that. They pay for server maintenance.

Well yes.. But maintenance is just one aspect of a lot of servers. Some servers employ programmers to work on custom content, some employ event managers etc; All of this can be chocked up as maintenance, but as somebody donating, I don't really know if my donations are actually going towards improving a server/adding new content, or simply paying the server rack bills.

What I was trying to propose an alternative for was a "pay what you want" style of model, where all players get all content. Donor-specific rewards have been around for ages, these are obvious, and yes they work, but they still fragment the community. What I was gunning for was more of a discussion on freeware models that enable everyone to play the same game, or have access to the same content. Also, isn't having pre-developed content packs kind of against the whole need for donations? I mean, if you have the resources to develop content packs pre-emptively, would you even need donations? (Or are you essentially just saying withold content from the original project to use as a donation incentive?).

 

[Rusty]

The key to donoration-specific content is to make sure it is balanced to be something that donators want and something that non-donators can live without. An ingame outfit, some kind of moneybags item, something unimportant that makes them feel rewarded.

What this would be would be initially restricting content. Take a few levels out of the initial game and hold them ransom. Use the money you get through donations to fund the next goal items so that you are developing the items while the goal is being filled. Customers get their DLC goal content immediately (or in a relatively short amount of time) and you get money to fund the next part of your project. It's a bit of a nasty trick to get it started but I can say from experience that it does work.

The idea is that the money that is donated to get Item A is used to fund Item B, the donations for Item B funds Item C. You're getting money in advance to develop future content it's just being announced backwards so that payers can't be upset when you don't release unannounced content due to a lack of donation funding.