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Money for the Honey: A case study of pay-what-you-want pricing on Itch.io

A topic by Cheeseness created Nov 26, 2020 Views: 1,503 Replies: 6
Viewing posts 1 to 5
(3 edits)

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!

Interesting blog post! You bring up a lot of interesting points I hadn't considered before (making a game Stream-friendly). I also found a lot of similarities with what you have experienced with that of my own game so far.

Two things I would recommend that might make your game page stand out more:

1) Use GIFs instead of / in addition to screenshots.

2) I saw the pie charts that showed that most of your customers played on Windows. But on your game page the Windows downloads are the third and sixth options down because the .zip filenames are listed alphabetically. Might be better to rename the files so that the Windows download is the first option, then your next most popular platform, etc.

(1 edit)

Hmm, I hadn't thought of using GIFs instead of screenshots - I worry about size/quality on that front, but I'll think about it! I have an animated thumbnail/cover image, which I'm told helps.

I sort platforms alphabetically, and if I didn't, I think I'd probably be happy to sacrifice some Windows users (edit: this is a tongue-in-cheek comment - no altars involved, promise!) in order to promote the platform I use :D

Regarding stream-friendliness of the UI, I haven't found any nice solutions on that front, but I have been working on some features that will likely be relevant to streamers as part of an upcoming patch.

Best of luck with your project.

As someone who uses Windows because I am to lazy to get used to one of the Linuxes, reading “sacrifice some Windows users” warmed my heart and I just wanted you to know that. ;)

And (more importantly) Thank You! for sharing your very detailed insights with the community and coming up with such a snazzy title for it.

Super happy to share! Closing doors or pulling up ladders behind you so that others can't tread the paths you've trodden doesn't feel very culturally responsible to me. If all of this helps someone else navigate these things with a little more perspective (whether they're going in the same directions as me or not), then it's worthwhile :)

Your blog is gem and this post in particuar is amazing. I hope more people can read it :(

Thanks! I feel like it's had a decent amount of views so far ^_^