ozonedOct 23, 2020
Cheeseness
Here's an article I wrote on #HiveTime's finances and shipping a pay-what-you-want game. Read on for a whole bunch of words on a topic I despise: money. It's got numbers, fancy charts, and a brief description of a pair of cursed jorts🐝 #gamedev #indiedev http://cheesetalks.net/hive-time-finances.php
Cheese talks to himself (about Hive Time finances and pay-what-you-want pricing)

Cheese Talks: A website about games and game related topics, featuring interviews, articles and neat visualisations.

Oct 23, 2020 at 9:57pmWeb
Show threadCheesenessOct 23, 2020

Topics that wound up on the cutting room floor include the irrational frustration of name collisions with Minecraft content, Destiny 2 content, Marvel's Avengers content, a YouTube channel that reads stories to kids, a YouTube series promoting kindness, a cryptocurrency, and a questionably worded song lyric.

These made it harder for me to find and identify coverage of my game, and had to have at least a tiny impact on how visible it was to prospective players.

Show threadCheesenessOct 23, 2020
I also didn't touch on, but have been constantly surprised by people's lack of awareness of @itchio being a platform where you can buy and play games without an account (making players less locked in than certain other storefronts)
Show threadCheesenessOct 23, 2020
I was also tempted to talk about the weird comparisons between Hive Time and Factorio that have been given to me when talking about wanting something different and what that suggests about its perceived identity (Hive Time isn't trying to be anything like Factorio, and was made in 7 months, not 7 years, so any scope comparisons are mind boggling)
Show threadCheesenessOct 23, 2020
I also frequently get to see people discussing their skin hives, which is fun.
Show threadCidneyOct 24, 2020

@Cheeseness This is a great read-- thanks for going to the effort of writing it up!

I feel bad now. I played the game early and did not pay anything for it. I thought it was a tip-the-developer model, not a pay-what-you-want-model. By the time you made that clear, I'd already uninstalled it to avoid sinking time into perfecting my fifth hive. :p

Show threadCheesenessOct 24, 2020
@cidney Ha ha, it's OK. I don't want people to feel bad, but yeah, expectation management has definitely been tricky!
Show threadCidneyOct 24, 2020
@Cheeseness I wonder if itch.io would be open to feedback to make that a pay-what-you-want-model more viable with their checkout interface. (So at checkout you could choose to pay the base price, pay extra to support the devs, or pay nothing.)
Show threadCheesenessOct 24, 2020
@cidney I haven't had any in-depth conversations, but Leaf seems to definitely be aware that there are people who don't conform to the more dominant pricing strategies (fixed price or free + tip)
Show threadTim KriefOct 24, 2020
@Cheeseness I really thought that some of the bundle owners would end up buying the game anyways...
Show threadCheesenessOct 24, 2020
@timkrief Some did! There's a graph that shows a tiny spike in sales during the week of the Itch bundle
Show threadTim KriefOct 24, 2020
@Cheeseness ok you're right, but I thought *more* people would end up downloading and buying the game from the bundle. 😅
Show threadCheesenessOct 24, 2020
@timkrief Yeah, it's tricky. I mean they paid for the bundle, so it's easy to come away with a "I already paid for this" feeling. The point of participating in the bundle was to contribute people's perceived value in my game to the cause
Show threadTim KriefOct 24, 2020
@Cheeseness I'm glad you joined it and I'm sure since it's a PWYW model, it didn't collide much with actual sales.
Show threadTim KriefOct 24, 2020
@Cheeseness one could add that the PWYW model has the potential of freeing you from having to deal with piracy altogether, and having copies beign distributed elsewhere by someone else as a potential source of revenue istead of something to fight against costing time and money. 🤔
Show threadCheesenessOct 24, 2020

@timkrief I've been thinking about that too. I have seen some unlicenced distribution of the game though :(

I suppose having 40k+ people who didn't pay for the game is more or less the same as having 40k+ people pirate a game, except I don't need to have a confrontational relationship with them