Adrian

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I believe this is out of date!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.

if i could scream something at every programming language designer, it would be that syntactical features like parentheses, semicolons, and curly braces are not there to make it easier for the computer to read, they are there to make it easier for the programmer to read, and when you try to show off how "elegant" your language is because function calls, if statements, or whatever don't require braces or parentheses, you sound like an idiot who has never read or written code before

As everyone knows, the current way to recommend vidya games to people is wildly insufficient. Star Ratings don't help if you don't like that style of game, so even if its good do you rate it low? And 'Recommend' doesn't work because sometimes only genre fans will enjoy it and saying you don't recc means you don't want anyone to play it.

So I made a 100% fool-proof ™ method that will guarantee* you will be able to adequately recommend a game to the correct people. (Because we all know 30 Sickos games are the ones that are really the ones worth playing)

A more in-depth explanation:

as a communist, I believe that all members of a class should be public. and that's why I'm constantly using System.Reflection to correct the work of my comrades who have designed their APIs with poor praxis