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Idea/Feedback: "Remind me to pay after playing"

A topic by mako created Dec 08, 2022 Views: 627 Replies: 10
Viewing posts 1 to 6
(2 edits) (+14)

There's something frustrating about being asked to "name my price" before I've played the game: I know that I'll have a much better knowledge of how much the game was worth to me after I've played it. I really want to pay the fairest price I can, but it's impossible for me to know what that would be before downloading! Stop asking me to guess! I wont! And there's no need.

Paying nothing and then paying again later isn't a very clean solution, it wont occur to most people, and by the time I get around to finishing a game, I will have often forgotten whether I've paid, I might not get around to it.

Solution: Provide a way to tell the site to remind us after a bit, or keep a list of our "To pay later" purchases that we can check every now and then.

(+7)

Completely agree. It's like those YouTubers who ask you to like and subscribe before the video has even started.

In my game, I have a menu option that takes one back to the game page -- the player can then leave a comment, review, donate, etc. A bit of a band-aid fix, but better than just hoping they remember after playing.

Paying before playing the game is to respect the work of the author, just like eating in a restaurant.

It's a bad idea to decide whether to pay after eating all the food.

Our game producers are not beggars. It's normal to pay for games. I don't think we should complain. If you feel sad about paying, you can choose free games. I've seen many people who support piracy think that the game does not require payment, which is absurd. It will not be affirmed.

(+5)

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.

(+1)

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.

(1 edit) (+8)

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.

(+2)

Well, there's a "Things to Rate" page in the library—maybe, a "Things to Donate to" page could be added as well? 🤔
But, yeah, that's not exactly a reminder.
But, yeah, that's not exactly a reminder.

Actually, it is. But if you do not heed the reminder to rate the game, you would not heed any reminder to pay for the game. Also, if you do heed the reminder to rate the game (or at least click it away), you might remember at this point, ohh, that was a cool game, I wanted to support the creator.

Also, there are collections. You can have more than one collection.

So anyone wanting to be "reminded", just put the game you just downloaded to a collection named "try before buy", and when you remove the game from that collection and put it into your favorite collection, well, that is your reminder.

Collection could indeed be used as a workaround(!), but that's not quite their primary purpose. As I said, there's already a page for one thing, where's the harm in making a page for a not very different thing?

It is not a workaround. The feature can be fully done with the things already there, so I doubt that anything new will be implemented. You already get the game into your recommendation/rating box, where you can even set a dismissal to remind you again in 30 days.

And of course, there are collections. Not quite a workaround, but outside of itch, you could also put the game into an old fashioned bookmark folder.

There is no fixed purpose for collections, but it does tell you to "Add this game to a collection to save it for later." Sounds heftily like a reminder to me ;-)

You can even write a blurb to each item of your collection(s), or just use more than one and name the collection by topic. 

If they implement a new feature it should be to increase donation level instaed of "buying again". There is currently no way to increase donation level. If you donate 5 and later another 5, your donation level is still 5 and not 10. That is important for games that have individually priced files. 

The rating and discussion side of itch seems to be dying.  I've got links on the closing pages of my game, inviting folks to come back and give feedback, ratings, see what else I've got and even a mild suggestion that they pay, but feedback and ratings seem to have dropped over the last year or so... 9000+ download and, maybe, 20 pieces of feedback.  Maybe it's the web app, but it seems to be shifting more towards a download only platform, which is much less valuable to developers.