Yea, I’m not sure how I would have answered this. I can attest that basing a company on a free product can be successful since my paycheck comes from a Fortune 500 company doing so…

I admit most of the PWYW things I’ve acquired have been for free, though I have paid the “average” for a few. I would probably pay more if I could justify a larger RPG budget, but many of them, it’s like, well, it might be useful and it doesn’t cost anything so why not… I have yet to go back and pay money for any of those. Probably because most were not that useful.

On the other hand, I’m pissed about something similar, but in the software industry. Way back in the early 1990s, I bought a PC with a 1024×768 display, at a time when that was something brand new. The computer came with some 1024×768 images, but no program to display them. I hunted the BBSs (no internet access) and eventually found Paint Shop Pro shareware. After being wowed by a photo of a light house on a cliff, I sent them money, and upgraded over the years. Unfortunately, the last update I purchased won’t run on Windows 8. And it’s now a Corel product, and it’s no longer economical for me to purchase, and the test run I downloaded was not as easy to do the image conversion and re-sizing that I tended to use it for more recently. Sigh…

Honestly these days, looking for RPG product is a lot less fun than back in the late 70s, when I would go to the hobby store every week, hoping something new might be in (or that I had saved up enough to buy something I had passed on before) (which this paragraph is really an answer of sorts to one of the earlier questions…).