You have made some decent money there. Lots of people on here have barely made anything and I'm sure they have put many hours in for little or no reward. Dropping your paywall back to donations can help. It's less money in your pocket but expands your audience. I've mentioned this a few times on here . Money is tight at the moment for a lot of people and most of people on this site are younger. They may even come here especially to find free games. I wouldn't go aspiring to be a game Dev on the solo. Pocket money maybe or on the side. Most professional people can make up to $100 an hour on a regular day job. So it's no worth it when it's $136 over 3 years. Less than 50c a day. Get paid more doing online surveys for 15 minutes a day instead.
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The paid games with no demo from ... less known developers on itch always baffle me.
Granted, not all people using itch know certain things about itch and steam. You can give back a game on steam within 2 hours, no questions asked. If you see an interesting game you can try. And all games sold on steam went through a painful process that costs 100 bucks upfront and has some kind of barrier that I do not know the specifics of, but devs asking for their game to be wishlisted on steam speaks volumes. You can't just release your stuff on steam.
On itch any hobby dev that manages to fill out the tax questions can "release" their paid games. That does not say those games are bad, but why release the game without a playable demo? Is the game so bad, that I would not buy, if I played the demo?
Yeah, I know, it is said that pay what you want often gives more money than paid, but the choice is the devloper's how to release the game. But I deem it publishing suicide to not release at least a demo if not a free public version on this platform. Know your audience! There are people (the majority I assume) that will not glance a first or second time at games with no free playable stuff.
Steam method is a shitty method. Never used it probably never will. It's like renting a game. I'll go out of my way for a real physical copy everytime if I want it enough. Support doesn't last long. They are dropping El capitan support in 3 weeks. I Only got around to upgrading to El capitan like 2 weeks ago. So maybe 2months I'd get out of steam if I was lucky. Demos are a must. You are right
I would guess the number of indie games that are available on physical media tends to be near zero. And any updates would have to come via the net anyways. Even physical console games only save you a little download, as the patches come over the net.
And wait a minute. You upgraded to El Capitan? That is mac, is it not? The internet tells me, that el capitan stopped getting security upgrades in 2018. You "upgraded" to a 5 year out of date OS? Seriously?
I agree with you. That is one of the reasons I dont like Patreon very much. I mostly download a free version of the game and play it. If I like it a lot and if I'm interested in following parts I decide to pay for it. What I dont want is a monthly subscription that requests monthly payments until the next update of the game is available. With some games it lasts 6 months or more and you pay for every month waiting.
Uhm. I said, I do not understand why some developers release their games as paid with no demo version.
If there is a good reason to do so, I would be curious to hear it. (And then explain why the reason is not good at all ;-)
You do not need to give away your games or switch to pay what you want, but consider having a demo version. You just cannot try out a game that is paid with no demo. Downloading a demo is a smaller hurdle than paying for an unknown game from an unknown developer. An even smaller hurdle is having a html5 version of the paid game. A rather popular example would be Backpack Hero. You can play it as a webgame, despite the game being paid only. It is an older version, but you still can try out the game concept without payment.