https://itch.io/t/1820908/feature-request-recurringsubscription-billing#post-511...
So I guess that idea didn't get prioritized, but I was thinking if you can buy a game multiple times you can manage the recurring payment manually?
Would it become a problem if you enabled a user to be able to buy the same game multiple times and we handle the timing from the API?
So apparently the "Buy Now" still appears after you bought the game, which is odd, but allows me to do this.
Now I'm thinking 2 models:
- $10/year as subscription like.
- $10 for 10 days of game time.
That way those that are unsure how they will like the game can get "credits" that don't expire.
It will be odd to try and explain these models as they will be unique to my games.
Hopefully I wont get flagged for wanting recurring payment for a MMO that has recurring costs.
Are subscription based mmo or mmo banned on itch? It is a kind of drm, and drm is not forbidden, just frowned upon by the community and badly supported by itch
I saw one or two. The problem is of course collecting the subscription. I think they had in app purchases.
Is there not a pricing model based on indivdiually priced files? Maybe that might help in some situations. But never seen that one in action, only tiered pricing.
Collecting is easy as you can purchase games more than once and validate purchases through the API.
An MMO with recurring revenue is not a DRM and much better than in-game purchases, but yes I will be validating the account has purchased the game with the API so you wont be able to pirate the game.
indivdiually priced files?
https://itch.io/docs/creators/pricing
Seems the faq is ill worded. They use the term individually priced files, but they are not. It is just a non increaseable payment tier to implement paywalls. And that is quite a problem in itself. As you counterintuitively cannot stack dlc on top of your game to encourage people to come back and increase their payment.
That you can "purchase more than once" on the same account is a problem. It bascially should not be possible. Like, legally.
"Before we talk about pricing, we should mention briefly how ownership works: Whenever someone pays for your project, they become an owner of it. When granted ownership, they are given a unique download key that grants them access to the files uploaded to the page."
Selling you stuff you already own sounds rather illegal.
This is what steam says to you, if you try: "Your account already owns some of the above items, so you can’t purchase them again." (Gifting it to someone else is possible).
Since you can overpay, there should be a method to overpay later. That you can pay again feels like a hack and not working as intended. And if it is intended, someone should think again.
The drm (and any "piracy" prevention) in online games is implicit. You need to log in. No login, no play. And if logged in, you apply the "rights management", as in, only users that have paid can access the content.
My guess is, it would be some kind of tos violation if you require people to purchase the same project several times to be able to play. Itch is optimised for downloadable games, and it shows.
They should at least implement the increase of payment tier. That feature is needed in the existing framework. Some recurring payment options sure would be nice for some projects, but might be not worth the efforts and risks. There is a slight difference in user-initiated payments and collected payments, would be my guess.
Without recurring payments you are relying on eternal growth to fund your project (= population growth, kids being born now have to buy Minecraft in 5-10 years or Mojang WILL fail; and that is neither sustainable nor moral).
I'm not looking forward to the "after one year expiration of playtime" for my MMOs, so that's why I need to give them an option to choose so they can't say they didn't know.
The problem is institutionalized in how all printed money works, only way out is to make the problem obvious across everything in society as soon as possible as the fall will be from much higher if we wait.
The actual pricing I have to go with is only because of Visa/Mastercard fees. But $1/month (non metered) and $1/day (metered) in $10 transactions sounds fine to me at first glance.
Huh? That is some strange ideas with some strange assumptions.
No, you need not eternal growth to fund a project. To fund it, you need a fixed sum. See kickstarter projects for reference. Big companies prefinance that funding. Then release the game and hope their calculations turn out to be correct and the game makes more than funding did cost. Every unit sold afterwards just increases the return of investment. It is a lot like producing a movie. (And on a side note, the recent Unity desaster was in big parts, because the pricing change could topple those calculations after the fact.)
If you have a game that needs maintenance, you need recurring income to cover for that maintenance. Like hosting the servers of an mmo and paying people for supporting the players and whatnot. If the calculation is good, you could even forgo the initial purchase price and only collect recurring payments of whatever kind (subscription, ads, in-app purchases etc).
And I do not understand what you mean, that Mojang would fail, if people would not buy the Minecraft game in 10 years. Minecraft and Mojang is property of Microsoft since 2014. You can be sure that they will market their $ 2.5 Billion investment in years to come. Even if no one bothers to buy it anymore, so what? Software is project based. If they continue to invest maintenance in a game that no ony buys and do not develop new projets, that is blatant mismanagement and has nothing to do with sustainability, but with running a company.
