I was charging $1 for my game, but occasionally people would pay $2 so I assumed I was undervaluing my own game, so recently upped the price to $2.
Recently I added a new version with more content & a previous buyer has complained that they now have to pay another $2 to access the new content.
Is this true? Because I thought as this person has already paid $1, the most they would have to pay is another $1 to make it up to £2. Am I right or will all previous buyers now have to pay the full $2?
Did you upload the new content with the “Set a different price for this file” option?
If so, then from my understanding, every user would have to pay $2 regardless if they already own the project or not.
Personally I would suggest against asking current owners of your product to pay more for updates. This gives them the message that your product is not one that they buy once and that’s it, but that they will have to keep investing into it. This is especially troublesome if your project is not in a stable state yet, and customers are buying it anyway, to help fund it to completion.
If you really want to change the price of a project, I’d suggest you change the “Minimum Price” under “Edit Game”. People owning your project won’t have to pay for the updates, but new people will now have to pay the new price to gain access to it.
To me it sounds like some of your users paid $2 (basically donated $1 more) so they can help your project, and suddenly they are being asked to pay $2 more to receive the updates they funded.
ohhh, I see. Yes I selected the “Set a different price for this file” and now I have hidden that file and uploaded a new file.
In that case I might have done a bad thing.
Right now I have the minimum price as 0, because I have a free demo. If I increased the minimum price, how could people download the demo for free?
Setting the minimum price as $0 will signal that the game is free to play, and Itch will promote it as such (it will appear on searches for free to play games etc). I can imagine users won’t be happy if they see a paid game there.
When you upload a file, there is the option “This file is a demo and can be downloaded for free”. This is the right approach to having a paid project with a free demo available.
Ahh, I see. I think I've been doing it wrong this whole time :-/
So I've changed it to a paid project, and set the demo like you said to "This file is a demo and can be downloaded for free" - I wasn't aware that this option exists as it only shows when you select a paid project.
Thanks so much for helping me Dark Dimension, you're like itch.io's official spokesperson to me, helping me right my wrongs!
It’s worth mentioning that users that bought your project when it was set as “Set a higher price for this file” do not own the game, so they won’t have access to new files uploaded to the project. This is at least my understanding of how this option is meant to work.
I think it would be better to find a way to give access to the project to those users, but that’s something I’m not familiar on how to do, and it’s also your call if you want to do it or not.
I feel like I need to point out I’m not part of Itch in any way, I’m just hosting my projects here. I just like helping people when I can :)
Yeah I guessed that, and thanks for your help!
Yeah it's a bit of a shame now that I've done what I've done, because now people will now have to pay for the game again. I'm a little bit unsure about how I feel about this though. It's horrible and capitalist of me to think that maybe that's okay because it's a payment for all the new content I'm adding 😄 Although that's probably cruel 🤔
I'm going to look up the "Exclusive content & Rewards" on itch to see if I can grant access to newer versions to those who've already purchased.
