itch.io

I have not found this to be the case. Bear in mind that when I make a story "Pay What You Want" on Itch, it is because it is being released for free elsewhere, including on my personal website and on platforms that do not permit monetisation (or mentioning that your work is monetised, which is an irritation) where I am much more popular than I am on Itch. I do not depend on or particularly care about discoverability through Itch itself outside sitewide sale events, I just use it as a sales backend because it's one of the few platforms that can and will facilitate the business model and permit the content of my work. A fair few customers per my analytics don't even open the Itch platform at all to buy my work, they do so directly via the widgets on my website. So generally a customer is coming in from a context where they understand well enough that if they pay for a minimum price work of mine, it is to get the opportunity to read it ahead of everybody else, and if they choose to pay for an otherwise free work that has rotated out of the premium window it is to financially support me out of a charitable impulse in a way that indicates support for (and potentially request for more of the kind of) that work specifically.

Generally they do not pay at all for PWYW stories because they're old and can be more easily read elsewhere for free in a preferred context. I only even turn the stories PWYW when they rotate out because it strikes me as silly to have the same product available in two different places alternately for free and for an obligatory price point, but I don't want to deny people the chance to donate to a work they genuinely love, which has happened a couple of times.

I might do this differently if I were interested in building a following on Itch itself, but since what I'm making isn't games I don't care about this at all.

There's definitely some very interesting stuff you can do with individually priced files, and I might try figuring something like that out in the future, but in this case the point of the promotion is to encourage people to buy the initial story while it's initially on sale, instead of waiting out the clock. I need to eventually turn my work free-to-read in order to continue building my portfolio because I don't have the time or energy to maintain two separate streams of output, but this creates an inherent incentive amongst the less dedicated fans to just wait the six weeks no matter what.

People seem more comfortable talking about games here so as a gaming analogy: It's kind of like how a multi-chapter storygame like Life Is Strange etc relies on the timing and capital of people buying the series when it's still unfinished in order to fund and market-justify completing development, and so they often create some kind of incentive or reward for those who bought in early that pertains to the price or availability of subsequent chapters.

Ahh. I think I understand now. That could be an idea if I ever did this again in future, but it won't work in this case because the story is already PWYW and the "qualifying" owners are already mixed in with the "unqualifying" ones.

Sorry, I don't really understand your second idea. Can you explain it more comprehensively?

My business model on itch is that I release stories for a small fee, then on the Monday on or after the day six weeks later I set the story to PWYW.

One of said stories comes in two parts, the second of which is yet to be released. I have promised that paid owners of the first part will receive a discount on the second part when it releases, but have realised since that this is not actually straightforward to implement in itch as the interface does not distinguish between owners who have paid a certain amount and those who haven't on a PWYW item, at least not in a list I am allowed to use for this purpose. 

What I want is to be able to distribute a discount on the second chapter only to people who have paid at least the list price for the first, either before it became PWYW, or afterwards when that became the recommended tip. How might I best do this?

One way I think this could be achieved is that I could send an email to all owners asking that they contact me via their attached itch email for their discount, and then cross-reference the addresses of any replies I get with emails on my payments sheet to determine who should get a reply with the discount. But this is inelegant, and would only even work because of the small number of people who actually own the story and the brief window in which the deal would be available. On a more successful item it would be infeasible. Is there another way?