So, I’m doing a pretty huge project that will take Alot of time
Hopefully it will be a good game
Should I take charge for it (Like 3-5 dollars) or release it for free and have a donate button instead?
What are your experience about this?
games normally don’t make too much sense on the donate end, becuase users don’t make their own money from it and are less interested in “honoring you for their gain”.
But if you aren’t unsure on selling you might sell it with the “pay what you want” approach and offer it for 3-4 different prices for example
That might actually be a good idea!
Now, I still have alot to do before it finished but it’s always good to plan ahead 
Well, if it’s a multiplayer game then without any doubt memberships/ donations would be much better than making people buy the game, so there would be simple free to play version and by donating/ buying membership every month users would gain access to members-only features of the game, e.g. RuneScape.
If it’s not a multiplayer game then IMO you should sell it instead of thinking that a lot of people will be greatful enough to donate (especially kids)
Good luck with it!
Some food for thought on my first released title:
$1 donation requested
120,000+ downloads
$13 received
p.s…some people paid $2…
120,000 downloads
8 people paid up…
You have to give them an incentive to donate. People won’t just donate “for the cause” unless you threaten to kill a puppy or post a big-ass banner with your face on in every single fucking page like Jimmy Wales does.
But also, you can’t over extend. You can’t go giving away BFGs to donators on a multiplayer shooting game, as it will break the balance and make non-donator go away. You may think “fuck’em” but hey, the are your community, what keeps your game alive. Having a BFG an not being able to blast away a horde of greddy bastards ain’t fun either.
So, if you are making a multiplayer game, offer donators something that would make them look “cool”. Better character skins, a special color for donator names, whatever you can think of. If you have advertisementes either on your games webpage on ingame, make it so that donator don’t see them. They’ve already contributed enough.
Anyway, I’m just talking through a players perspective, I haven’t done this (yet) as a developer and I don’t know if it would turn out to be profitable, but that’s the way I’ll be managing the “donation” issue. Free for anyone to play, cool looking shit for supporters who donate.
You could try something like kickstarer, or try for the indie fund
http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/games/popular?ref=more
http://indie-fund.com/
It might be better to get some smaller games to generate some cash flow.
It’s not a multiplayer game or FPS-game
Not sure I can make it so people could buy extra stuff/items/skins to be in game, but that is still a good thought and I will see if I can figure it out somehow
"Some food for thought on my first released title:
$1 donation requested
120,000+ downloads
$13 received
p.s…some people paid $2…
120,000 downloads
8 people paid up… "
I’m sad to hear that so few donated, might be a bad idea about donating then =/
Not terribly surprising on donation-ware stats there, unfortunately… especially in this “me-me-me I’m entitled to it!” market where a 99-cent app is expensive and should come with lifetime support + zillions of features never intended or even related to the app… for free!
That is very well aligned with my expirience. I got 250 000 downloads of my open source project, and got around $90 donations.
With 2 guys donated $25, that covered more then a half of total $90.
And my project is quite nice and “serious” tool. Games will attract more downloads and much less donation rate per download.
And there was another not related project that publicly kept track of donation. IIRC they averaged around $20 per 100 000 downloads… Now they switched to basic and “pro” version, with pro being paid. I could not - my project is GPL by design(and will always stay that way).
Edit: btw, my donation request left blank, person actually need to type number in. $1 is a winner
it’d seem the most popular price for games is between 1 and 2 dollars… and 5 dollars, while less popular, gives about same profit!
imo you should give your game for free, and sell content for your game for 1.99 dollars
You shouldn’t forget that the game had been available for a year already.
I sold a motionblurring tech on these forums on a name-your price basis. The average amount paid was 5-6 euros, minimum 1 cent, maximum 14 euros. Name-your-price is probably a better scheme than donations, because people are just lazy,not necessarily cheap, and don’t bother paying if they can.
As a sidenote - Americans are really cheap, all the 1 cent transactions were from USA and their average came to about 1 euro 
Here is an interesting idea and some results! From the creator of World of Goo:
http://2dboy.com/2009/10/19/birthday-sale-results/
He used a pay what you want model and it seemed to work very well for his marketing and sales tactics.
Perhaps a similar idea could be used but have a higher minimum base than zero, maybe make the base 1-5$ a minimum.
That’s a very interesting test, but how about take it one step further and ask “Is it possible to persuade people’s decision making to get a more favorable result?”. I came across a very interesting talk a few months ago.
Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?
If his tests hold true, then you should be able to persuade people to purchase your game for the price you want by giving them a choice and adding an inferior, irrational option to make the higher price look more appealing.
For example, maybe have a choice like:
- $1.00 = Basic version (includes 10 levels)
- $5.00 = Full version (includes all 20 levels)
- $5.00 = Bonus version (20 levels + 10 extra bonus levels)
This might not be the best example, but adding the irrational option 2 (irrational because it’s the same price as option 3), should make option 3 look more appealing than both option 1 and option 2, thus more people would be inclined to buy the game for $5 by choosing option 3. It appears like Dan Ariely did many tests to prove this strange behavioral quirk. It would be interesting to see the results if applied to selling a game. Theoretically, it should work.