Downloads versus payments on my Pay What You Want projects

Tags: posts, from dreamwidth, itchio, meta,

I found this article on the finances of Hive Time really interesting, and was curious to compare to my own numbers. tl;dr for most projects about 0.6% of downloads result in a sale. I'm a total hobbyist, with no intention of ever making my money back, which is good because I sure as hell haven't haha. So my numbers are not the same as you'd get for a commercial project with Actual Marketing. I also have never made any real attempt to encourage people to pay me versus downloading things for free. I'm also dealing with very small numbers, which makes any conclusions shaky.

I think the only money I've spent on anything specifically for making these games was like $5 for an icon making program. But the indirect costs (personal labour, computer maintenance, art programs etc) outweigh the money earned by a huge order of magnitude.

All prices are in $US since that's what itchio gave me.

If you're not familiar with my games: Northanger Abbey: The Game is a romantic comedy visual novel. SOON is a scifi comedy visual novel. Ren'py Sprite Creator is a tool for creating custom sprites for using with the Renpy Visual Novel engine. Perpixeled is a puzzle game. Regency VN Backgrounds and Blaise Folly VN Background are painted backgrounds, separated for rights reasons.

I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from this data, if any. Afaict the higher return on SOON is the result of it being my first game, so my parents and friends bought copies to give me moral support.

It looks like people are more reluctant to pay money for VN making tools and backgrounds than for VNs themselves. Which makes sense, especially since my backgrounds and sprite creator are the sort of thing you use as a prototype before you pay an artist to make something unique to your game.

Anyway, I hope this is interesting to someone!

EDIT: Bob Conway of Conway Games had similar numbers.