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So I'm making a short KN with my friend (estimated 10K words at most). It's called Wendigo (tentative title, because let's be honest, it sounds horrible), and it's about a gay teen in a small town who gets pushed down a cave and stays with a wendigo while his leg heals. Here's a little summary so you can understand the game a bit better:

Danny Collins was just trying to keep his head down and get out of the town of Oakville as soon as summer vacation is over and he can go off to college. But that all goes out the window when the main group of teenagers in town find out about his sexuality and push him down a cave. With a broken leg, Danny is stuck with a wendigo who is more than happy to enact revenge for him. And at the end of the day, Danny must make a choice; to either go with his plan, or stay with the only person who has helped him, even if they’re not exactly human.

The KN has an excessive amount of gore (because there's a mythological creature eating humans on six separate occasions), really strong language (and I don't mean the occasional fuck), and there's going to explicit smut. Because obviously not everyone would be comfortable with such themes, I'm making a censored version where there's only minimal amount of blood, language, and only implied smut. This version would be free, because it's much shorter than the uncensored version and there would be no point in having to pay for such a short game.

My question is, if there's a free version of the game (though heavily censored and noticeably shorter because of it) would you buy the the full version without the censors? Mind you it would be a good deal longer (at least 3K longer), and it won't be that expensive (our estimated price right now is $5-$10).

Sorry, even if not taking the theme of your game in consideration, I wouldn't buy a 10k words KN for 5-10$, that's not that little for such a short game. Or do you have some gameplay (puzzles)?
Otherwise if the theme was more to my liking and the game looked like a longer one I think I'd payed for a full version.

Not really.
I'm not so interested in 18+ material that id pay extra just to get it. Assuming your censorship doesn't take too much from the story, which it shouldn't or you're liable to just annoy people rather than convince them to buy lol, then once finished i'm not sure the appeal of some added gore and sex scenes is enough to pay extra money to replay the same game again.

I do like the idea of a 15/18 option though, so people who don't want to be exposed to the more explicit parts can avoid doing so. Seems like a it'd be a good idea if you're expecting that sort of reaction to those scenes.

If the only difference is that there's more blood, gore and language in the 18+ version, I wouldn't see any reason to pay for the more pricey version. I don't care for that kind of violent stuff anyway.

If there are some censored sexy scenes in the 18+ version I still probably wouldn't get it, because it's not like they are pivotal to the story. If they can be censored with no impact, then they are just fanservice and why pay $10 for a few fanservice images?

IMO, any 18+ mode should be a free bonus to boost publicity and sales but not an incentive to buy the whole game. It should just be something you can switch on and off.

I have in fact done so before, so I guess 'yeah'. I agree it would need to be 10x this long before I'd pay $5-$10.

I think you're going to have extreme difficulty selling a small add-on for a tiny game at a $5-10 price.

From the customer's perspective, they're not buying an 18+ game, they're buying a small amount of added content for a free game. So you can't take the length of the full game into account when pricing it. (And even then, the full game is pretty short.) You're likely to get a lot of very angry people badmouthing you and possibly going out of their way to attack and undermine you because they feel cheated by your practices.

Reframing the scenario may help. Consider that you are selling an add-on, and price down to digital-hat level. At $1, the outrage will be substantially lessened. At $1 phrased as a "donation to support development" which receives a "gift" of extra content, again people will feel better about the prospect.

Will this actually return much money? No idea, I've never tried this myself. I'd go for just making longer games and selling them for your $5-10 price. But that's me.

It seems the general consensus is to either make it much longer for the 18 version just make them both free. Thanks for all your advice! I guess I'll just make both versions free and maybe ask for donations instead.

If you are still considering selling something, You might want to make a free demo using the 15+ material from the first part of your KN, and post a link to where the player/reader can buy the 18+ version.

papillon wrote:At $1 phrased as a "donation to support development" which receives a "gift" of extra content, again people will feel better about the prospect.

That kind of dishonest phrasing makes me resent the seller. It is a little matter, so it would be a little resentment, but definitely it would make me feel worse rather than better about the prospect, compared to an honest $1 sale.

I also advise against selling for a price ending with 99￠. Hoping that the buyer won't notice it is 1￠ short of a full $1 also is dishonesty which some shoppers notice.

I like titles of works to be something unique. A test criteria is that you should be able to enter it into a WWW search engine and find that VN and nothing else.

I wouldn't use the 15+ version as a demo since the writing is significantly different from the 18+ version. I haven't thought of the donations being misleading and that it would backfire, which is one of the main reasons why I'm wondering if I should just have the 18+ version for sale and keep the 15+ version free. Also, there seems to be some confusion on the word count. The 15+ version is about 7K long and the 18+ version is 10K long (though it seems to be it's going to be much longer than that).

@merak: Yeah I'm the same way about all my titles; I'd like them to be as original as possible. The problem is that all the titles I come up with are so damn cliché.

Would you buy an 18+ game if there's a free 15+ version?

-- No. I don't see the point in reading the same story twice -- even if it has more pictures.

OokamiKasumi wrote:

Would you buy an 18+ game if there's a free 15+ version?

-- No. I don't see the point in reading the same story twice -- even if it has more pictures.

I feel, in essence, that sums up my dilemma. I guess I really just make both versions free.

Lady-Cynic wrote:

OokamiKasumi wrote:I don't see the point in reading the same story twice -- even if it has more pictures.

I feel, in essence, that sums up my dilemma. I guess I really (should) just make both versions free.

Have you considered making both versions in One game?
-- On the main menu, let them select one or the other to play?

Oh God that grammatical error! How embarrassing.

That has been a possibility that I've been considering, but I'm still very new to the world of coding and I don't think that's in the realm of my possibility just yet.