Looking for comments, advice, and experiences (if your or anyone you know has any) with the following payment schemes.

1) PayRating: Given a minimum and maximum price, the user choses a price in that range depending on their satisfaction/value of the product. Do you think this would be an empowering mechanism for players to voice their opinion, and developers to get feedback and establish rapport, or would everyone just pay the minimum? I suppose you could offer more game/benefits to those who bid more, but this may significantly compromise the value of your feedback. Also, would any of the online transaction services support something like this? I suppose you could offer coupons that result in each paygrade, but this would be ackward on alot of systems (typing SKUs for the right coupon).

2) MicroPayments: Just thought I'd throw this in since I recently read Scott McClouds "The Rigth Number" using bitpass.com (which is currently in beta). It seems they support transactions down to 1cent. This seems like a big opportunity... any interesting ideas on how we might take advantage of something like this for indie game distribution?

1) This one seems pretty wimpy to me. If you think $XX is the right price for your game, set the price at $XX. Don't set it to some kind of "range" from $XX-$5 to $XX+$5. It's confusing and wishy-washy. Don't be confusing and wishy-washy.

2) They've been promising us micropayment solutions for nearly a decade now. I'll believe it when I see it. As for applications for indies...not sure. Pay-per-play seems like it might work...though there are infrastructure issues when it comes to tracking use. Subscription models are more likely to get popular and eliminate most of the benefit before the micropayment technology proves itself.

Plus, there is still the "perceived value" angle (how good can it be if it only costs ten cents to play?), and the additional overhead angle (how many games would you download to try out if each download cost you ten cents?).

I think that micropayments will become viable. But I doubt that what they will look like, and what they are used for, when they finally do will be very different from what anyone has thought of so far.

-David

I agree with David - Micropayment isn't there yet, and 'pick your price' probably isn't a wise option. In the latter case, just set up a donation box using Yahoo or similar, and call it a donation to cotinue developing games.

I'm all for pay-for-play systems. That's mainly restricted to online games, IMHO - however, I've been exploring it for some of my puzzle games. I'm reluctant, because I don't personally see a reason to continue to pay for something without more 'value' being added all the time.

My opinion is that getting too creative on the order form is likely to confuse visitors, and confused visitors won't pull out their credit cards.

I've come up with many similar ideas, but in the end I decided to be largely uncreative with pricing and put all my creative energy into product design where I think it counts most.

about the first option it may be confusing and people may say "hey ... what do they want me to do? :rolleyes: .... I will try another thing". but ur idea reminds me of someone who wrote a review on downloads.com about a breakout game called "Richochet" which was so nice that he ordered it twice, he said it deserves more than its price...;)

My friend and I had an idea once about some kind "virtual-haggler" system. It'd really just be a coupon dispenser, but it could be some kind of rudimentary AI where you make an initial "offer" and the AI counters. So you do this haggling business and eventually the customer comes out with a coupon code that's good for some discount that corresponds to how they finally managed to "haggle" with the AI. You could have a floor to how low the AI would go (like, say, a 25% coupon could be your highest discount). I haven't bothered to implement something like that, but I thought it was creative.

I definitely wouldn't make it a mandatory step in the ordering process though. Just an option. Else like Steve said, you'd get alot of confused customers who wouldn't be as ready to buy.