next »

[Chris Koźmik]

Anyone tried it? Does it work? Is it worth it? Any articles about it? Anything.

To avoid confusion with donations, microtransactions, etc, here is the definition of "pay what you want"
Pay what you want - the product has no set price (althrough it always has some minimum price, at least $0.01, so you can't get it for free), you can pay any amount you see fit and then can download it.

[Klaim]

Did you search? It's easy to find people having experimenting and giving feedback about it. Also, there have been tons of discussions and reports in this very forum...

[Chris Koźmik]

I found only these two posts.
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=22080.0 (Pay what you want model : Proun report)
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=12494.0 (Pay what you want : time limit?)

[Xienen]

We released Break Blocks under pay what you want and it wasn't very successful.  I think that has a lot more to do with people not being willing to give the game a try because it doesn't look as difficult/interesting as it actually is.  So, from our little experience, the only useful thing I can share is that you should definitely set a minimum price and even if you set the default to a higher amount, the majority of people will pay the absolute minimum.  Over 80% of our sales were the minimum($1) and only about 2% paid our default/suggested price($5).

[Chris Koźmik]

Hmmm, 80% is not bad, it means 20% payed above minimum (I run freemium MMOs and 95% never pay anything, not that this model is compatible, but still ).

Comparing Xienen's stats and http://joostdevblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/proun-is-big-success-pay-what-you-want.html it seems that $20 is the maximum you can expect from a player (he got 2 players paying $50 while total earnings were $19k, Xienen got also 2 who paid $50 while the earings seems much smaller, it seems like the amount of $50 is fixed and related to friends than normal fans, anyway, in both cases there is no point expecting anything above $20 in any reasonable quantity).

Total revenue breakthrough (Proun):
$2-2.99 price point - $4k
$5-6 price point - $9k (he said the $6 was from added tax, so we could count it as $5 I guess).
$10 price point - $6k
$20 price point - $1k

Surprisingly there were basicly no $1 price point sales... Seem as if for those who actually decided to pay $2 or $3 was the lowest. I wonder if this proves something...


Overall, I would speculate that $1 minimum is bad for 'pay what you want' model. PayPal has around $0.50 fixed fee, so $2 is around 3 times more than $1 for the developer (not relevant if it's sold via portals, but these don't allow this model so it is again irrelevant). Also it might seem that $2 is still seen as a very low price by the player.
On the other hand "just $1" sounds better.

[Xienen]

I think if I could do it all over again, I'd prolly bump it up to a $2 minimum because I bet it wouldn't have driven away very many of the $1 sales in proportion to that added income.  If someone's going to take out their credit card for a dollar, spending $2 instead isn't a very big deal for most people, I don't believe.  The difficult action for a lot of people is actually pulling out the credit card and typing in all the numbers...someone wrote a whole post about that on this forum somewhere, explaining that setting a minimum will make some people pay who would have otherwise just grabbed it for free simply because it's too much hassle to grab their wallet.

[Chris Koźmik]

The difficult action for a lot of people is actually pulling out the credit card and typing in all the numbers...

No one enters CC numbers nowadays, everyone uses PayPal (I have been running MMOs for many years and I never got any request to enable direct payment via CC, PayPal+AlertPay+MoneyBookers combo gives you full worldwide coverage). Of course it might be that downloadable games players have different habits, but personally I doubt.

But as for "hassle to grab their wallet" I think it might be true.


This whole "pay what you want" has 2 problems to me:
- You pay before you play the game. So how can you evaluate how much the game is worth? What if you would want to pay more? Since you don't know how good the game will be you pay the minimum, then you play it, it's great but you already paid so you can't change your mind and even if you had the chance you probably would be too lazy to do so (grabbing the wallet TWICE syndrome).
- I though the pay what you want would remove the upper limit of how much you can pay (rich who are excited can play more than the standard price). But it seems there are basicly no people who payed above $20... So, it would make sense only if the default price (and cost of making the game) was very low.