

World of Goo does a Radiohead. Pay whatever you like. - mapleoin
http://2dboy.com/games.php

======
teej
There is a huge difference between giving away a year-old product and giving
away a brand new, never-been-sold-before one.

Let me explain.

Radiohead took a -huge- risk by releasing an album, out the door, right at the
start, with a "pay what you want" pricing model.

2dboy is taking -no- risk by releasing World of Goo with a "pay what you want"
pricing model. They are already on the tail end of the demand curve at the $20
price point, they are just using this as a chance to capture more of the
market at a smaller price.

Radiohead took a huge swing with their pricing model, 2dboy didn't. It's a
completely different situation.

~~~
mechanical_fish
This is true, but it is also what we call "looking a gift horse in the mouth".

~~~
shabda
Are we also calling end of season sales as "Gift Horse" now? (Ps I like WoG)

~~~
gloob
If the alternative is a end of season not-sale, I would have to say yes. (Same
here).

------
xal
I would have paid more for it then the ask. I had it preordered though. Maybe
I can gift a copy...

I hope they make it an iPhone game. If they would have released it for the
iPhone originally it would probably be the most sold game on the system.

------
snprbob86
Great game. Even if you aren't much of a gamer, give this game a try. Anyone
who ever enjoyed building anything (everyone here?) should enjoy the puzzles
and anyone with even the smallest bit of design taste (most of us?) should
enjoy crazy well polished presentation.

~~~
aw3c2
I downloaded a copy back then and decided it was not my kind of game pretty
soon. Later I found out that I just played as much as the demo would have
gotten me. So I recommend trying the demo instead of blindly warezio0ring if
you just want to check it out. It should be enough.

------
unalone
I got this with the Steam Indie Pack; it was one of my favorite entries. (If
you're looking for games beyond this, let me also recommend Blueberry Garden,
Braid, and Everyday Shooter.) I can't support the design trend of simple
gameplay with elaborate detail enough. Most game design today strikes me as
being ass-backward: Attention is focused on insane playtime and complicated
systems, and not on the small details. The result had been a lot of games that
look ugly and aren't fun to play without dedicating a lot of time to them.

World of Goo and similar indie games are making gaming mainstream. Anybody can
play them and enjoy them. Casual players get the fun distraction, and more
hardcore players can appreciate the finer details and the more difficult
challenges.

~~~
barrkel
Hm. I can't go along with the general love-fest over World of Goo.

I bought World of Goo for $20 in large part because of the hullabaloo around
it, and completed it in an evening. It was basically a bridge-builder
derivative, where it's fun to overcome all the challenges, but once overcome,
the desire to improve on them with economizing / scoring is a lot less. I got
about 6 hours at most play time out of it.

If I valued the games I've enjoyed for replay value with a similar price /
playtime equation, such as Far Cry or Far Cry 2, I'd have to conclude I should
value them in excess of $500 apiece. First person shooters, when executed
well, completely blow away puzzle games in replay value.

I would rather value WoG at about $2 at most. I'm not sure I'm any better off
for having bought it, other than knowing that I don't want to play it again.

~~~
unalone
The desire that's built in is the online tower building. But I don't do it for
that. I do it for the thrill of seeing how efficiently I can make my pieces.

The graphics are beautiful. The soundtrack is incredible. The humor is
perfectly executed. The feel of the controls I hope to one day equal. The
physics engine's to die for.

I don't know you, barrkel, so hopefully you don't take it personally when I
say: You'd value that package at _two dollars_? Pathetic. This is what I hate
about the gaming community. You said you got six hours of play out of it, and
_don't_ think that was worth $20? I pay $10 for a CD with 40-60 minutes of
music on it. I pay $15 for a 3-hour movie. This masterpiece of a puzzle game
you value at two dollars. Unbelievable.

It's worth mentioning that I can't stand most first-person shooters. The
Orange Box ones (Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal) are the only ones I've
played and liked. The level of workmanship on the average FPS saddens me. They
strike me as gimmicky and cheap.

I can't comment on how long it takes to beat World of Goo, because I haven't
beat it yet. I'm on the second world out of, what, six?, and I've played it
for a few hours. I spent an hour alone trying to hit the challenge records on
each level. But the game isn't just about beating levels. It's about the joy
of putting things together, seeing what works and what doesn't.

All that was released by a team of two people. Far Cry was made by a team of
five hundred people, and it's nowhere near as sleek as World of Goo. I think
2D Boy puts Crytek to shame. They're entrepreneurs and artists and I wish them
the best of luck—and it really pisses me off when the tasteless slobs that
call themselves the gaming community decide to shit all over a good thing.

~~~
bendotc
If the idea you're raging against is that there is no 6 hour experience worth
$20, I'm totally behind you.

But you take it a step further and accuse barrkel of being a "tasteless slob"
for not valuing World of Goo more than $2, and that's just ridiculous. It's
precisely as ridiculous as if I called you a "tasteless slob" for what you
were saying about all non-Orange-Box FPSes, 'cause there are a bunch of real
gems out there.

What's my point? My point is that there's a question of taste. We can of
course still talk about craftsmanship and aesthetics in games, but to
criticise someone simply for saying they like games with high replay value and
this isn't it, that's ridiculous. You said you don't like FPSes that aren't
from The Orange Box, which shows to me that there are some damn fine games
that you don't value, but it would be silly of me to criticize you for not
wanting to pay market price for them.

~~~
unalone
I made a point to tell barrkel that I hadn't met him and that I wasn't
intending my remarks personally. I don't feel comfortable judging somebody by
what they write online. The friends I'm most in touch with from my hometown
are gamers. By some standards I'm a gamer, though I'd disagree with the
classification. So obviously I don't mean "everybody that plays games" when I
refer to the "gaming community".

That said: I stand by what I said to begin with. Does replay value matter in a
game? Of course. Is a game without replay value worthless? Certainly not. If a
game takes me six hours to beat and I willingly play through all six hours,
I've spent as much time playing it as I'd spend on a two-hour movie if I'd
watched it three times.

So there's the first thing that I find offense in: The suggestion that
something worth "only" six hours of time hasn't given me enough value. In the
"gaming community" as I define it, having a game take up dozens of hours of
your life isn't an offense. I've always disagreed with that. I remember having
a conversation with a friend over Final Fantasy VII, which I played for an
hour and then put away. "It takes a few hours to get good," was his mindset. I
find that casual disregard for time appalling.

The second thing I found offensive was the suggestion that World of Goo was
worth only two dollars. _Two dollars?_ I pay more than that for a fucking
cheese steak! For five dollars I will pay a man to sizzle some meat for me and
put it in a plastic bag. For _two_ dollars I will pay a fast food chain for a
plastic cup to pour syrup into. When two people spend $10,000 of their own
money and countless months developing a gem of a puzzle game that takes a
quarter of a day to beat—and it's taking _me_ much longer than that,
personally—I think it's worth more than 20 minutes' worth of minimum wage.

Craft and finesse has become so devalued. I blame it on gamers, though
"gamers" here is a category that includes a whole bunch of non-gamers,
including a whole branch of programmers that I occasionally criticize here as
well. It's this attitude that other people's work is meaningless, the attitude
of FAIL and meh., where having twenty hours of gameplay is expected but making
any of those twenty hours magical and beautiful is utterly disregarded. It's
not every gamer, it's a specific _sort_ of gamer, but it's a _prevalent_ sort
of gamer. The kind that argues that Bioshock is as valuable a contribution to
society as the works of Joyce or the movies of Hitchcock. And it bugs me not
just because it's obnoxious and tasteless, but because on the _flip_ side we
have a lot of _tasteful_ people who argue that video games are not art, can
never be art, and I disagree with _them_ as well. I love video games. But it's
hard to argue with those tasteful game-haters when the average gamer works to
hard to convince others of his crippling tastelessness.

~~~
barrkel
After reading you carefully, I believe you have a fundamental problem in your
understanding of the world, and in particular, how economics works.

Things don't have intrinsic value in and of themselves. The fact that
something has had "$10,000 of their own money and countless months" invested
in it does not mean that the end product is valuable. You appear to be
subscribing to the labour theory of value here; it's like something out of
Marx.

My point is that I can choose to do multiple things with my next unit of time.
I get to choose how I spend my time and money. By analysing my preferences, I
can figure out how I value different ways of spending my time. And the fact is
I only chose to spend about 6 hours playing something that cost me $20, while
I spent perhaps $90 for over 1000 hours playing Far Cry / 2. If you work it
out, you'll see $2 is actually pretty generous, as it includes the aspects of
the WoG playing experience that can't be directly substituted by the FPSes,
such as novelty and newsworthiness. Nevertheless, I regretted spending $20 on
WoG. Not hugely, but I regretted it.

Accuse me of tastelessness all you like. Perhaps taste, like value, is in the
eye of the beholder.

(Of course, when you factor in the cost of hardware and the like, the cost for
me for various FPSes is actually pretty substantial; but these are sunk costs,
and almost all of the resources save the graphics card are used in my day job
anyhow.)

~~~
unalone
Reading comments on Hacker News isn't "reading carefully". We're operating on
a pretty shallow level of conversation right now.

What I find funny is that you chide me for assigning things an intrinsic
value, and then go right ahead and try to assign a formula for value based on
time played/money. You're doing exactly what you accused me of. And you're
being _far_ snottier about it than I am, which is also kind of funny, because
I'm the one being the snob here.

See, unlike you, I don't assign _any_ monetary value to time. I don't divide
twenty by six or a thousand by ninety to decide if something's been worth it.
That's stupid, all due respect. I don't divide the hours I wear a shirt by the
money I paid for it either. Instead, I value the _experience_ of that time
spent. I'll take six hours of unique, novel gameplay with gorgeous graphics
and good music to a thousand hours looking at generic FPS, listening to
generic FPS sound, playing what amounts to fairly generic gameplay. What I
liked about Half-Life 2, actually, that made it worth my time, was that it had
so many elements of gameplay merge into a fairly simple control set. Valve's
flawed in a lot of ways, but when I spend time on their stuff they give me an
_experience_.

I mentioned the time and money those developers spent not because I think it
makes their game more valuable, but because I empathize with them and with
what they made. If we want to use another bullshit metric, 6hrs/2ppl = 3,
whereas 1000hrs/550ppl = less than two, not to mention we're talking two games
that cost obscene amounts of time/money to provide. So those two people are
producing more than those 550, with less money spent.

"Less money spent", that's another issue. See, I can't sympathize with your
twenty dollars. It's twenty dollars. If you're cheap enough to regret a twenty
dollar purchase, I think you're being kind of whiny. But what I can't _stand_
are those games that take millions of dollars to make, but don't have any sort
of ingenuity behind them. I think that's a horrible, horrible waste. Can't
stand games that lack ingenuity. So for me, Far Cry is yet another disaster of
a game, and World of Goo, while imperfect, is a small little gem. And that's
why it offends me that the sort of person who would spend a thousand hours
shooting pixels would hate on a title with an inventive physics system,
especially when it was made both with money that _wasn't_ that much on a huge
scale but _was_ a lot to the two people that had to spend it. In the case of
Ubisoft, you have the opposite case: A hell of a lot of money burnt up because
it really didn't matter much to the people who had to spend it.

~~~
barrkel
A few points:

* The worth of something to an individual isn't an intrinsic value; it's either a use value (they'll consume it) or an exchange value (they'll buy it, and perhaps sell it at some other point).

* I don't assign monetary value to my time out of habit, but sometimes quantitative tools are useful for analysing decisions. That's how economics works: it's about analysing choice.

* You persist in talking about generic FPSes. I am specifically not talking about generic FPSes.

* You can empathise with one group of developers all you like, but I can guarantee you there are lots more, and larger, groups of developers elsewhere that you are explicitly choosing not to empathise with. It sounds like you're making a moral argument, but I would posit that the utilitarian balance of your position is unsound.

* I'm cheap enough to regret mistakes, because if you don't regret mistakes, you won't learn from them, and you'll end up losing far more than $20.

------
indranil
I love this game! I got this as part of the MacHeist bundle (I know I know,
but the bundle was too exquisite) and it is seriously one of the most fun
games out there!

Would totally buy it again, and possibly will now, just to pat them in the
back!

------
maximilian
Yay. my sorry grad student salary can't justify $20, but i'll throw down
$10...

I've been wanting to try it our for a while.

------
biohacker42
The cost of filling out my cc or paypal info exceeds my personal cost of
spending $20 dollars. I would literately pay $20 just to avoid the hassle.

On a related subject matter, recently I spotted something a bit off on my
Verizon bill. I get phone/cable/internet from them on one bill, but I noticed
an odd charge. I had to dig through the bill to find the one page that
mentioned a charge from payment one on behalf the internet commerce company.

In short, it was definitely a fraudulent charge and apparently they can bill
you, via Verizon, TimeWarner, At&t, etc. automatically! It has happened to a
lot of people, there is nothing you need to do for them to start billing you.

In fact, you HAVE to preemptively call your ISP to tell them to lock your
account so that 3rd parties can't aoutmagically bill you!

However, why can't we have legitimate charges which are this easily billed?
Why can't I sign up once for an advertising project or something, and then it
divides X amount of dollars every month to websites I visit?

Or something like that. Ideas?

~~~
eli
1) Sure, find a non-paypal way to send me 20 dollars plus your credit card
number and I'll fill it out for you.

2) That's called "cramming" and you should report it to the FCC so that
(hopefully, someday) they can put those guys out of business.

3) That's called "micropayments" and people have been talking about it for
over a decade. There are major technical and political problems to
implementing it and, ultimately, I think most people would prefer to get ads
on their web pages than having to pay a penny to view it.

~~~
biohacker42
_2) That's called "cramming" and you should report it to the FCC so that
(hopefully, someday) they can put those guys out of business._

Already done it, apparently the (scam) company was started by an ex-high level
At&t insider. But yeah they sure did find a way to take 20 dollars from me
without me having to do anything.

And yes it is micropayments, I guess I'm just surprised and angry that the
closest I got to micropayments was a scam.

------
Torn
Quick question -- if I donate a few £ to the guy, can I link it with my Steam
account?

I'm kinda losing patience for games I can't manage through steam. Am guessing
that Steam won't take licence keys for copies not bought through their
services though, which I think is a missed opportunity to get more people
using Steam.

~~~
kevinh
No, you can't link it to your Steam account. Valve maintains a list of games
you can register to your account from a CD key here:

[https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7480-WUS...](https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7480-WUSF-3601)

------
aminuit
I don't understand this. As a consumer buying a video game, I'm trying to
maximize my entertainment per dollar. Why would I ever pay more than the
minimum amount? Maybe the HN crowd will pay a little more out of a sense of
camaraderie, but I don't understand why a typical gamer would.

~~~
gjm11
To encourage the developers to make more games that you like. Because your
inbuilt sense of fairness makes you want to reward them for something whose
value to you is more than the minimum amount. Because some bit of your brain
always acts as if other people might be watching, and you don't want to appear
mean. Because playing the game, or reading the 2dboy blog, or something, has
made you feel like you have some sort of personal connection with the
developers, and you want them to do well. Because you want to trade off giving
them more with keeping more for yourself, and at very low prices too little of
what you pay goes to them rather than Paypal.

(For example.)

------
timinman
My son has been wanting to buy W.O.G. for a long time and brought it up today.
I hadn't looked at HN yet, so we went direct to 2dboy.com and to our delight,
found the sale. We ended up buying to copies for a total of $16. Way to go
guys, I hope you make a bundle.

------
maudineormsby
Thanks for posting this. Glad to pick this up and support the designers and
the model.

------
chanux
I remember they had lot of press (or at least Linux press) releasing their
Linux version. I think they are quite good in marketing or being very lucky
(Now you HN people know what luck means :) ).

------
RevRal
I was curious whether 1 cent would work.

It did.

~~~
mziulu
IIRC, PayPal takes a commission on the transaction, around 30 cents if I am
not mistaken. I think this means that the developers actually _lost_ money in
your case. Correct me if I'm wrong!

------
steve19
Seems like a bad idea to me. Sure, somepeople will pay more than $1 (or
whatever the paypal minimum). But most will pay the minimum.

~~~
trefn
I just bought a copy. I'd considered it before but it wasn't worth $20 to me.

Even $1 from a person who would never have bought it before is a net win -
they probably don't have many expenses associated with sales (support etc) so
it's pure profit, with the additional benefit of marketing.

------
pjhyett
I haven't been able to download a copy of the game from their servers in an
hour, guess the sale is working :)

------
eli
If I hadn't already bought it twice (once on PC, once on the Wii) I'd
certainly buy it now. Great game.

------
Sthorpe
Has anyone been able to download the game?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Am doing now, got a 503 with FF but plugged in address to wget and am getting
about 160kBps, 2 mins to go.

