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I believe this is out of date!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.
I hate how Steam sale culture has devalued video games, especially indies, so much. It's one thing to have to resort to piracy due to lack of an income source but then there's people who have $2k rigs they keep buying accessos for but will wait for a $10 game to go on sale for $1.
All of the above applies to digital works that aren't games as well. If you put a digital comic up for sale and don't believe, due to small page count or perceived quality or whatever, it's worth more than $1, don't price it at $1, price it as PAY WHAT YOU WANT.
PWYW with a $0 minimum creates a situation for your works where a person can purchase the PWYW work for free, read/play/watch/use it, and then if they really enjoyed it and have the funds they can come back later and purchase it again for what it was worth to them. If you make a good impression on them with access to a potentially free work, they will likely look into the works you create that you yourself have deemed to be worth more. In addition, those who lack funds but are interested in what you do can get the PWYW work for free and recommend it to others if they enjoy it. Word of mouth about something you've priced at $0+ will net you more in the end than what you would have gained from something priced at $1.
