The "seeing before paying" model

#1

After all of the great discussion happening in other posts about pricing games, I started thinking about a specific situation.

I only design PDF games. The vast majority of my RPG sessions happen online and I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with the stresses of printing and shipping, so I go full-on digital media on my games. I’m slowly publishing part of my work on itch.io, which allows creators to pick from three paying methods: free, standard, and “download for free and donate the suggested amount (or more) if you’d like”.

I’ve been using the third option since the few games I’ve published are small and I didn’t invest a lot of time on them, but I’m getting ready to publish my first major work and I was ready to switch to the “pay upfront” model when I thought I could just keep using the “look first” method and put a higher suggested price.

I have a couple of reasons behind this line of thought:

  • I have no intention of making a living out of RPG design, so it’s not a big deal for me if my bottom line gets dinged by this approach
  • It promotes accessibility for people who might not be able to afford the game without having to jump through any hurdles

The thing is I definitely don’t want to use an approach that might interfere with other designers’ ability to make a living with their games.

So considering that a designer doesn’t intend to make a living out of RPGs and that the game in question would only be published online, is it ok to not charge upfront for a game, in the sense that it wouldn’t be detrimental to the evolution of the industry (like underpricing games)?

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#2

Something that’s worked well for me is to have a “preview” version marked as a demo on itch (so anyone can download it for free) along with a paid version, all on the same project page.

People get the benefit of a free preview, you get the visibility benefit of those free downloads counting towards your “most popular games” stats, but there’s also built in incentive for buying the full game if you want.

You could also use the same system to put a full copy under “demo” (for free download) and a full copy under “paid”, so people have to choose 1 or the other clearly. You might get interesting analytics out of that with clearer feedback than a PWYW model.

Two months ago I would have said PWYW on itch is sustaining the idea of the platform as a place for cheap, free games. With the increased number of people releasing significant projects on the platform the most honest answer I can give is: we’re all figuring this out as we go, and it seems to be changing rapidly.

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#3

I had no idea this was possible. This sounds better then PWYW at first glance. Thanks.

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#4

As long as you’re charging roughly what someone who DID intend to make a living in the industry would charge for substantially the same product, you’re fine. If you go lower, you’re making it tougher on those folks.

(Which is to say your intention re: making a living shouldn’t have any bearing on the effort to set a fair value on creative work put into RPGs. Consult some folks in the know and try to set your price fairly for a comparable digital product that pays you a return on the time and energy you put into creating it. Making a career ought to be about volume and consistency of output, not charging different rates than folks with income outside of RPG creation…)

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#5

I don’t really know where it would fall in any of the aforementioned categories, but something I really dug about Troika! was that there was a free artless version and a paid with-art version. It meant that I could freely check out the game but then spend money on it getting something even better in the process. (Unfortunately it appears as though this is no longer the case…)

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#6

Sounds like what @Cass describes. Have an artless Demo on the page and the full game for payment.

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