Sleep Is Death: Pay What You Want

By: Derek Yu

On: May 18th, 2010

I just wanted to drop a quick note about Sleep Is Death, Jason Rohrer’s storytelling game: the game is now “pay what you want” (with a minimum of $1.75 for PayPal and bandwidth). SID has been out for about a month now, and in that time, the SID community has created hundreds of stories and resource packs, which are free to download for players to use with the game. One of my favorite stories so far is Shannon Galvin’s Are We Home?, which he created while playing Sleep Is Death with Jason himself. Check it out.

So far I haven’t tried the game – I’ve only read stories outputted by other players, as well as the various previews floating around on gaming websites. As such, I don’t know if I have much to add myself at this point. I will say that I find it interesting how Sleep Is Death is often presented as being a competitive game as well as a cooperative one, like in Brandon Boyer‘s preview (which is subtitled “Brandon Boyer vs. Jason Rohrer”). I’m not sure what to make of that, yet – I guess I’ll have to wait until I co-create my first story!

TIGdb: Entry for Sleep is Death

Posted in Linux, Macintosh, Unique / Bizarre, Windows

chrknudsen

Wow. The art in that playthrough is awesome. And the story was pretty neat too!
DOUGLAS

It's like it's really 5 days ago
Mr. Yapper

Gonna buy this twice for me and my brother. Should be awesome!
Rhododendron

FYI, that'll give you four installs.
http://www.blackgolem.com hermitC

I like “pay what you want”. I won't call myself stingy, incomeless indie fits better ;)
doug

it's like it's really last week
googoogjoob

This seems more than a little bit early for a game that came out a month ago for $14.
http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/ Jason Rohrer

Heard that from a few people.

I was going to do Name Your Price from the very start, but a number of people talked my out of it (including my wife). We were in a rather dire financial position, and I was searching for income sources, and Name Your Price seemed too risky.

After the game sold well at $9 and $14, I had enough money where Name Your Price was no longer a risk. I just wanted to get the game out to more people… and it worked.

But Name Your Price worked so well (people paying $5 on average, and so many more people paying) that I wish I had done it from the start. I probably would have made even more money if I had done that.

Now that I have more financial padding, I won't be afraid to do Name Your Price from the start with my next game.

Also, something that I've been thinking about, and I hope this spurs a discussion here:

If you're a US indie, it also makes a TON of sense to do Name Your Price for tax reasons. I'm not doing it for SID, but what if it's called Name Your Donation? Of course, you have to get people to take out their credit cards (that's the hard part), so it can't be 100% donation (where the game is a free DL with a donation button next to it). So part of the payment has to be a price, and you have to pay income tax on that part. But you don't have to pay income tax on “personal gifts” less than $13K per person per year (amazing but true!). So if your parents want to give you $13K for Christmas, well, they can EACH give you that much, and you don't have to pay income tax on that at all. You don't even have to report it.

So, for all these years that I've been accepting donations through PayPal, I've never reported any of it—legally.

So here's what I'm thinking (for a future game):

The game costs $1.75 to download, PLUS a Name Your Donation box, where you can type any dollar value, and it's all processed as part of the same payment. But through FastSpring, I can list them as separate items on the order, so I could keep all the numbers straight.

The idea is that, since they're getting their CC out anyway (to pay the $1.75), they'd be more likely to give you a bit extra as a donation.

But (if you're in the US), you only have to pay income tax on the $1.75 part, and not on the donation part (unless a particular donation exceeds $13K).

But how much extra will people give? Does “name your price” attract more money than “name your donation”? Maybe “donation” would attract even more? That's the experiment.

Also, it might get a little slippery if it starts looking like a “tip jar”, because tips are taxable. I think wording and clarity are very important here.

But the key insight is that having the baseline “price” in place as a download obstacle causes this to work much better than a standard donation button.

What I'm doing right now with SID is essentially this, but with different wording—and it's certainly working better than my donation buttons!

And what we're ALL doing, if we're selling downloads on PC, is really just optional donations! We really need to wake up about that, I think….

http://www.demonoid.com/files/details/2204053/2…

Yeah….
player2

I just bought the game for me and my girlfriend. I'm wondering if there is a mode, or a planned mode, where players can use more than 30 seconds to make their next moves? We would probably play this slowly throughout our work days, since we both work remotely from home, and getting engaged in rapid play wouldn't be good for us.
http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/ Jason Rohrer

Trying to reply to “player2”, but don't see a Reply button there…?

Sure! Just check out the “settings” folder. You can change all kinds of stuff in there, but check out the “timeLimit” one…. change 30 to whatever you want…. try 3600 for an hour.

I didn't make this a “feature” of the game UI, because the game I wanted to make was based around improv, and time limits are necessary for that. But you can also play the game as not-improv, if you want.
googoogjoob

This makes much more sense. Good luck with the sale.
player2

Excellent, thank you! I think your decision there was sound. Outside my personal context, I think the time limit makes things very interesting, but being able to customize is great.

Has anyone experienced difficulty playing with a PC and a Mac?
rinkuhero

the 'reply' thing only goes 3 comments deep now (to prevent incredibly thin boxes), so that's why you didn't see the reply button

good to hear about the settings changes, i didn't know about that
http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/ Jason Rohrer

Game is identical on all platforms. Cross-platform play works fine!
falsion

That's not the best way to deal with it. It's an okay workaround, but still doesn't fix the problem. Unless you explain that you can only reply 2 times, people are going to be pretty confused.

A better idea would to make it so that all replies are indented equally. It makes sense for the reply to be smaller than the main message. But a reply to the reply? Why make those even smaller?
David

Actually, the way he said it it would give him 8 installs. He said he was going to buy it twice for himself (2*2 installs) and an implicit twice for his brother (2*2 installs) — thus eight installs.

He really should watch his grammar.
Guesto

Can you not play this over the internet?
rinkuhero

you can only play this over the internet
http://www.derekyu.com Derek Yu

You can also play it over a LAN.
zagibu

I'd just go with optional donations only. I actually think you make more money this way, because people that wouldn't buy it might still try it out if it's free, and come back later to donate. At least that's what I've done a few times. Just post a polite request for donations on the download page and place the downloadlink in the text so that you can't just insta-click yourself out without reading the message.
Maybe you could also have a little form that lets people who don't want to donate explain why. Could be interesting.
http://hcsoftware.sf.net/jason-rohrer Jason Rohrer

Hmm… zagibu:

I've been trying this for YEARS, and it doesn't really work. People don't come back later to donate. Even if they want to, they forget, move onto other things, etc.

Passage has been downloaded 257,000 times over the last 2.5 years. Donation button right under the download links the whole time. Plenty of critical acclaim. Hundreds of tear-soaked (!) emails. But… around $300/month in donations, across all of my projects combined, including MUTE, where I try to trick people into donating before downloading:

http://mute-net.sf.net/download.php

MUTE has been downloaded over 1,000,000 times over the past 5 years, still seeing 90 DLs per day, steady. Only a handful of those 90 donate each day.

So… yeah, optional donations! $300/month is great if you're a student, for extra money (it's like a part-time job). But if you're doing this to support a family?

In the case of SID, I actually had to buy extra bandwidth during the peak. So selling downloads does seem perfectly sensible to me. I think that once they have their credit cards out, they will be more likely to give you a bit more.
PHeMoX

““pay what you want” (with a minimum of $1.75 for PayPal and bandwidth).”

Finally someone who's going at it the correct way. Just set a minimum to cover the expenses you'd make when people take advantage of it with the insane 1ct purchases.

Apart from that, I'd like to see more developers go this route.
Guesto

I assumed as much. One of those reviews seemed to think it could only be played over LAN.
anthonyflack

It's quite exciting watching a new business model evolve. It will be interesting to see if pay-what-you-want really is the way forward (ie if it would still produce solid returns if it became more widespread). I don't see why not though; a single developer doesn't need a whole lot of income to survive, and only needs to attract a relatively small, dedicated group of fans from a potential global audience of several billion in order to make the numbers work.

It could be exactly what niche developers need – as Jason says, when you have a family you can't just keep making indie games forever, fueled by nothing but youthful enthusiasm and love for the medium; you need to find a way to generate at least a modest income from it.

Otherwise, indie games are going to become mostly just a hobby for the under-25s.
http://www.eobet.com eobet

It seems really neat and I see it's even out on the Mac.

Makes me even more sorry that it just doesn't interest me.

I don't have any friends who are that involved in games anymore, and my time with them are also limited these days.
Alevice

I have seen this model used before, specifically on Homestuck soundtrack volumes (http://homestuck.bandcamp.com/). I personally think it works like wonders. I know I often give nearly twice the minimum set because i feel it deserves it.
Games are not art

$1.75 is too much for this.
http://www.nuverian.net Gavalakis Vaggelis

I just drank a coffe out and gave 3,50 Euros and it lasted for about 20 minutes.
I believe I made my point clear to above comment.
http://www.blackgolem.com hermitC

What would be the right price then? IMHO there would be people even spending 175$ on it. Like they did for iPhone's “I Am Rich” http://bit.ly/dypoS0