Monetizing Free Games

[kylesgames]

I spit out some conjecture:

http://blog.homoeoteleuton.com/monetizing-free/

tl;dr: To make a truly free game, you need everyone to have the same potential play experience except you probably can't have a free print version (though you can try to make a very cheap one; one of the things I'm doing with Segira is making it have a strict 32 page limit—a booklet print of Segira should be achievable fairly cheaply at a POD vendor.

Crowdfunding seems most likely to result in finished products with a good budget, but the downside is finding a way to secure those funds without ostracizing your audience or failing to offer anything of value.

Also, I'm self-funding at least part of PROJECT HAMMER and all of Segira. Pity me.

[Onix]

The main way you monetize a free game is to have a free game and then move on to new games. Maybe using the same system, maybe not. The reason the free game is important is because you get several things out of it.

If it's good, you may have a following.
You can say "I've designed games before, I have this many titles to my name."
Potential buyers can use the free games as reference to see if they like your style.
Probably most important, you get practice in designing games.

My first game was tuned over 8 years of play, it worked and it was fun but nowhere near professional. I never published it. My first published game, The Artifact has been getting tweaked for 20 years. It's a huge project that was meant as a quick little thing I'd whip off. Steampunkfitters really never got finished, it's quirky and takes a lot of practice, but it's cool when you get the hang of it I worked on it for a year or two. I can point to it as a point of design diversity though. I've been working on some for sale projects more recently and trying to get my production cycle to be much shorter. Most small publishers do better when they have a larger cluster of titles each bringing in a small bit of revenue.

[Rob Lang]

[Onix]

I am thinking of going to the model Rob mentions (PWYW) for The Artifact if I ever do a fourth edition. I'm playing another setting with the engine to see if my changes work.

[kylesgames]

So I've found another solution to monetizing free games, but it requires a little bit of extra elbow-grease.

Since late March I've been writing on , which is a cryptocurrency powered social media site. Since I've started, I estimate I've made around $200, which is mostly fluke, and it's a PITA to get steem into actual cash money. There's also the whole fluctuating value thing (I've been lucky and it's been going up).

Now, that's something of a generous estimate and does basically come to about $7/hour for my time investment, but it's a lot more than I've been making on DriveThruRPG.

Most of the money I've gotten has come from writing about game design and storytelling rather than games themselves, but there's definitely some to be made by publishing games through the steemit platform. There's something of a lacking gaming community over there, but it may be useful.

I generally consider it a long-form Twitter; it's great for stuff you want to publish to everyone, and I've gotten better engagement there than on any other platform I'm on.