Hello people!
Late last month, I published an extensive write-up of my experiences with the first 10 months of selling Hive Time under a pay-what-you-want model on Itch and thought it might be useful to share here for other developers to consider and learn from. In it, I touch on budget, finding a default price point, marketing, and revenue.
The whole thing is about 13k words, so I'll link to it rather than posting in full here. You can find a version with interactive charts over on Cheese Talks, and you can also find it cross posted as a dev blog with static images if you'd prefer to read it here on itch.io.
I'm certain that it will all mean different things to different people, but the main takeaways that have been interesting to me are:
- I got significantly more downloads than I was expecting
- I got fewer payments than I was expecting, but in the context of a botched launch, a pandemic, a global recession, etc., I think it has still done pretty well even if that's not been enough to cover the time I spent making it
- Adding a in-game prompt (with a "don't show me this again" option) explaining why the game is pay-what-you-want and reminding players that they can support it had a positive impact on sales
- There's a correlation between press/non-press coverage framing the game as "pay-what-you-want" rather than "free-to-play" and purchases
- itch.io front page placement did have a positive impact on downloads, but did not directly correlate with an increase in sales
Enjoy!