cat

someone showed me a Chirpy Chips-style cover of Rasputin earlier that was so slow and low-energy that it actually made me a little mad. so like any reasonable person in my situation, i dropped everything and spent an hour feverishly making this little thing to prove that that song COULD be arranged in a way that better fits the vibe of a Splatoon turf war. it turns out spite is a surprisingly efficient fuel for me, whoops

maybe i'll polish this up properly and cover the full song eventually? would be cool to find a way to get some actual Splatoon-style vocals in there too, but idk if that's really possible in openMPT, so for now i just kinda rolled with whatever misc instruments i had on hand lol

The broad convention as I understand it is to un-italicize something that would be italicized if it is contained within something that is already italicized.

Fuck that, I say.

Make that text lean in even harder.

as you price lower, payment processors wind up eating a larger percentage of your profit. at one dollar, you will barely see any of it. even the cheap games on steam now, the ones that are playing the algorithm lottery trying to go viral through impulse purchases, are like $3-6. if you are anywhere but steam, you are never going to make it up in volume. i am begging you to charge more.

even ten years ago, the $1 iphone app store price point was ridiculous. inflation means charging a buck today would have been like charging 75 cents back then. if you made a thing you think is worth some money, you are not begging for nickels!!!! if someone is seriously like "I could afford one dollar, but THREE???? highway robbery!!" they live in clowntown and can go fuck themselves or get it in a sale or pirate it, who gives a shit, selling anything for a dollar these days is worse than giving it away for free.

according to itch:

For most PayPal transactions, a fee of $0.30 + 2.9% is applied per transaction.

I believe this is out of date! Paypal currently lists their fee as $0.49 + 2.99%.

So for a $1 game, Paypal takes 52 cents. That's over 50%! For a $3 game, they take about 58 cents, or about 20%. On a $5 game, they take 64 cents, 13%. DO YOU SEE??? If every transaction costs you a base amount, there is a floor to how much you need to charge to even make a transaction worthwhile.

Even if you sold ONE MILLION copies of your game at $1 a pop, you are handing paypal HALF A MILLION DOLLARS.

And please remember, after those fees you are going to pay platform fees and taxes.

The margin on a $3 game is not three times more than a $1 game. It's like 10 or 20 times more. You'd have to sell at least 10x more copies for $1 to be a better price point than $3.

And the reality is that you will not, basically ever. People have a fairly inelastic psychological barrier to spending money, and you have to overcome that whether your game costs $1 or $3. Beyond that point, the marginal difference in sales between that $1 price point and the $3 price point is just not that big.

You will make more money setting your game on Itch to PWYW with a $0 minimum than by selling it for $1.