Web Monetisation: Just Another Tip Jar
By: Ray Richards
Tags: Scam, Monetization, Make Money Online, Startup Lessons, Silicon Valley

Could your game be improved by a tip jar? Could your game be improved by microtransactions? There is a game jam that was made specifically to have people use and implicate their tip jar and it is just a bee in my bonnet.

I am concerned with getting paid for the work I do and the things I make but the ethnicity of how that money is made is also my concern. Direct payment for a game is the clearest cut. I get money, itch gets a cut, the bank gets fees, and a player gets the game. The same thing happens if you give money through the tip jar on itch. Devs can spend money on advertising and doing it right over years can return a lot on time investment.

Then there is direct crowdfunding on Kickstarter and Patreon. The crowdfunding platform gets a cut, the bank gets fees, and fans get to support a dev, maybe getting gifts or special versions of the game.

There is also advertising. Where the player is the product and their attention is being sold at a pretty bad rate. Across all platforms, no matter how big the creator is, advertising never pays them more than if a user just gave the creator a dollar once.

Then there are microtransactions. Free to play games with six currencies love them. People can pay for customization, boosts, or in-game items.

Personally, I like to have a complete game. Most of the games I play on itch are visual novels. I don’t love stories and characters being sliced off for different levels of monetization or subscriptions. I played on VN where all the chapters were hosted online independent of each other. It made it harder to go back and change routes when every chapter had to be loaded and there was a save editor. And once I stopped subscribing to that Patreon, I no longer had access to the game. There are pluses to this, like the amount of control the dev has to make changes and keeps people from stealing the game but it is fine. A lot of books and movies only really need to be experienced once and dropping twenty dollars on it is fine. It doesn’t make the games worse if you don’t get a side story or a few bonus scenes. It does not make a worse version of a game.

The thing about microtransactions is often the way they are implemented makes the games worse. Genshin Impact packs grind fests in between its story and making characters usable. The newest Halo had people grinding for hundreds of hours to change cosmetics and load-outs. Several of the battlefield games had people grinding for hours to unlock things. Then there are games like the Harry Potter one where everything is run by a currency that may recharge over time and someone could play for free if they are fine experiencing the story for five minutes at a time but that is a terrible pace to experience something. Microtransactions don’t have to make games worse but that tactic isn’t popular because it doesn’t work. There is a profit motive to make a worse game. We can go back and forth on hypothetical people that will drop the game or has lots of time but it won’t change the fact that there is a profit motive to make games worse and there are worse games for it.

There are a lot of things that bother me about the people that started this game jam. They hide what their service is. They try to wave money in your face and I had to figure out where that money came from. The first sign of scummy bad behavior is misinformation and confusion.

Web monetization is a concept that we are familiar with. Web Monetization is a very vague name for a program from people with vague goals.

It took me too long to figure out that it was just a tip jar. There is a tip jar on itch. You can get a link and set up a tip jar through kofi or paypal.

Someone can make a tip jar but they should call it a tip jar. Instead, their promo materials talk about how it isn’t an add and how you can make a revenue split, which I thought was the major advantage from the blogs that had utilized the tip jar.

Along with the red flags or being vague which means that the actual features of being a tip jar can’t be evaluated next to other tip jars, the microtransactions is a little loot box of red flags.

TLDR: I’m making a game and learning from the itchio community. There is a game jam called web monetization that is really pissing me off. This company called coil has an idea to make a tip jar that can accept micropayments (like $.000001) by being a sudo-platform but they never say that it’s a tip jar/sudo-subscription! It’s a scam. They are always explaining “Web Monetization” without ever describing it. The best and only thing they are offering is a tip jar for people who cannot monetize their work. They stress that you don’t need ads but they never say where the money comes from. They are going to take thousands of hundredths of pennies and move them around and in the end, one or two people will get a tank of gas out of it and Coil will be the only ones to profit.

This post was originally made under “Grifting with tipjars” but the SEO sucked.