That's not a good analogy and I'll explain why:
When you go to a restaurant, yes, you are paying up front, but you also have security in the knowledge that the restaurant needs to meet certain standards (such as Sanitization scores). You also know that the vast majority of the time, you can expect a complete meal that is cooked properly. Yes, there are bad restaurants that fail in this area sometimes, but those are usually the restaurants that quickly close down due to bad reviews or audits.
But game development is not the same. The vast majority of indie PC games do not have a formal QA process. Indie developers do not have to meet government standards for quality. All that matters is if the developer thinks "it's good enough", whatever that means. Projects are published all the time that are half-baked (never to be worked on again) or plagued with bugs (some game-breaking and some not).
One of the biggest complaints I've seen about developers is when they promise the world but fail to deliver. A good example is the Steam game Salt and Salt 2. The original Salt came out, promising to be a cool open-world pirate game. And the developers asked money for it, even though it was in a very early stage of development. Then all of a sudden they dropped Salt and started Salt 2. But if you were an original backer of Salt, you didn't automatically get grandfathered into Salt 2, you had to buy it. Understandably, many gamers were frustrated with this and you'll see it in their comments like these:
This is why paying first for indie games is a bad idea.
More successful games are not free games, their success is a complete business operation. Pay and play games. I never heard that they would be free.
Free games will earn only a few hundred dollars (or even less). The author might as well go to a pizza shop to work.
This consumption mode will only allow players to treat the game with a more arrogant attitude, and refuse to pay for various reasons.
I think you misunderstood the original post.
he is not asking for the payment method to be changed. you have games that you must BUY before playing, and this post is not about that.
The post is about games that are FREE, but allow you to donate or tip.
The vast majority of itch games are of this type, they are FREE games, but when you download the game, a dialog opens asking if you want to DONATE an amount of money.
It is difficult to know if you are going to give a tip or of what value, if you have not tried the game yet. The post is about that.
