Consumers always want the cheapest price possible and are perfectly fine with free. So yes, that goes without saying, I think. But for creators, there are living expenses to be considered, and time is money. If someone is producing as a hobby activity in their spare time after their day job, then sure, give it away for free. Why not, if you want to.

But other creators actually hope/want/need to make a living from their craft. They work hard at it, spend many hours, and possibly pay up front costs for producing good materials that others enjoy. They hope/want/need to be paid for their efforts. But PWYW is something that puts many of them in a position of feeling that it’s hopeless to put products on the market at a price that would allow them to make a profit. It becomes “a thing”. And once that happens it becomes nigh on impossible to have any other expectation.

I have a couple of friends who put a lot of effort into creating RPGs which they put up on DriveThruRPG as PWYW. The total effort between them came to something like 200 hours of design work, writing, play testing, editing, layout, art and posting on social media to advertise it. At $25 / hour (cheap) for this relatively minor effort it came to about $5000 on their part. The results were predictable. 2 people payed $1 each. 200 hundred people paid nothing. 1 person commented and said’ “cool”. The end.

Was their game cool? Sure it was. Did they ever do that again? Absolutely not.

Note: this is a semi-fictional story, loosely based on actual true stories of friends (who I don’t want to embarrass by saying their names), but fused into a fictional paraphrase to save time and space in this post. The essential facts are, however, true to what happened. I’m sure others have had similar experiences.