

World of Goo Pay-What-You-Want Sale Results - mqt
http://2dboy.com/2009/10/19/birthday-sale-results/

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patio11
I'm going to sound like a bitter old man when I say this but, well, get off my
lawn: I would rather turn away a thousand customers with $0.01 ~ $1.99 in hand
than give one user the impression my software was worth only $1.99.

"Pay what you want" is teaching your customers "You know what? Most people
pirate our games anyhow, and why wouldn't they. They're not worth anything. We
can barely bring ourselves to charge for them. You know, its so exceptional to
receive money for these, if you give us a penny, we will award you karma
points."

Offering someone a penny for their labor _is not generous_. Why are we
teaching our customers to frame their purchases like that? Or like the app
store, where software is a disposable commodity item which is overpriced at
$2.99?

~~~
windsurfer
There's a culture in the gaming community that despises what DRM has done to
the industry, myself included. By releasing World of Goo without DRM
purposefully, 2DBoy sought respect from this niche. By selling it at a "pay
what you want" rate, they are saying "I respect what you think, please
compensate what you will. I already know you can get it for free. Maybe you
just can't afford our 20 dollar price point.".

And they have thus earned this niche's respect and attention, and more
importantly, their money. That's quite difficult to earn from an ordinarily
pirating gamer.

~~~
tptacek
Wow. They've earned the respect of pirating gamers. That's totally worth
taking a pricing hit for. I'm sure the pirating gamers will absolutely support
them with their next title.

~~~
shpxnvz
Believe it or not, there are those of us who will not pay for DRM'd crap and
simply do without rather than obtain unauthorized copies.

 _I_ respect the lack of DRM.

~~~
josefresco
I didn't buy a single music track until Amazon had DRM free music available.
Was it a moral stance? No, it was a pain-in-my-ass stance against iTunes and
it's stupid legacy DRM model which forced me into their ecosystem aka iTunes
which blows.

That being said, when you're a poor high school/college student it doesn't
really matter what has DRM or not, you're just plain broke as shit and get
everything you can that is free.

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pjhyett
I'd like the people that paid 1 cent and also said that's all they could
afford at the time on the survey to say that to one of the WoG developers with
a straight face.

It's amazing they can't afford to pay even $5 for the game, but they have
hours and hours of free time to play it.

~~~
Tichy
I did not buy it so far (for 20$), and if they give it away, they give it
away. If they don't want people to pay 0,01 cents, they should put a minimum
price of 5$. "Can't afford it" is just a rephrasing of "it is not worth more
to me" in that context (I don't think anybody really had not spare $ in that
experiment).

Personally I'd prefer them to have an option to give them money after trying
the game.

Actually I ended up not buying it (and I was leaning towards 4$), because the
PayPal form was too much of a hassle/couldn't get it working. Also I felt a
bit like fooling myself - so far I did not buy it, now suddenly I am prepared
to spent money? I felt I was falling into a kind of psychological trap...

I seem to remember that an address alone is already worth > 5$, so paying 0,01
cents is actually paying 5$.

~~~
citizenparker
Many games have incorporated a feature to where you can try the game, and then
have the option to give them money.

This is called a demo.

~~~
Tichy
Sure, but a demo is not very convenient (download, install, test, uninstall,
download full game, install...). I guess they want to get people to buy who
were so far not prepared to buy, so a low barrier to entry might be good.

------
mahmud
I totaled it up to about ~$100k. Not bad for a few days. I wonder how much of
their total revenue this is.

2dboy had a strong viral marketing campaign for this game. It's the only game
I have downloaded over 6 years or so. They have exploited social networks
pretty well, and now they got first dips on the Radiohead scheme in the game
industry. If they made a mil they're doing ok (for 4-5 guys?) but this will be
hard to repeat, imo.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
4-5? "2D Boy is a core team of two guys, Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler. Their
swanky San Francisco office is whichever free wi-fi coffee shop they wander
into on a given day."

~~~
mqt
The core team is two guys, but they hired/contracted additional people to help
with QA/porting:

    
    
        - Allan Blomquist (Wii port)
        - Paul Hubans (QA and Production associate)
        - Maks Verver (Linux port)
    

<http://goofans.com/world-of-goo/about-2d-boy>

<http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/world-of-goo/credits>

------
paraschopra
Interesting graph - [http://2dboy.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2009/10/histogram.p...](http://2dboy.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2009/10/histogram.png)

Observe skews at multiples of $5 - 5, 10, 15, 20

These tell you how people look for easy anchors to decide pricing. When there
is no guidance, easy to think of $5 than $6.21

~~~
gnoupi
Unless, I guess, a few who will take this occasion to put their lucky numbers.

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Tichy
Why are people using odd numbers like 5.99 instead of 6 if they can pick the
price themselves. They want to fool themselves?

~~~
gnoupi
It actually works, when you put 5.99, you see "5" in the confirmation, even
putting the amount yourself, you feel like spending less. (Plus, years of such
prices everywhere)

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RevRal
_PayPal took it all, but they probably ended up losing money on most of those
transactions ($0.01) as well, they’re not the bad guy._

Heh, Paypal... I could say I don't care so much about them losing money....

Anyway, I'm glad this is going on a little longer; I'd like to see if the
average increases, and I get to buy more people the gift [of Goo].

------
rjett
I think it would be interesting to run an experiment with this model where
some buyers were shown what the last buyer of the game paid and another group
of buyers were shown what the average price paid for the game was. My
hypothesis is that the group seeing the average price would pay very close the
average and have a tight distribution of payers. I think the group being shown
what the last buyer paid would have a very wide distribution of payers but I
have a hunch that they would see a higher average price paid due to some
people seeing a high last price paid and saying, well I should at least pay X
(I could comfortably get by with paying this much less) or seeing a low last
price paid and saying I'll at least pay Y (I'm a good person for paying above
that). Regardless, it would be an interesting experiment.

~~~
glhaynes
Agreed! Also interesting would be to see how many people from those two groups
dropped out of the sale after seeing the last/avg price paid. (And the drop-
out % vs. what price was shown relationship, by group.)

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sekizaru
The Firefox add-ons blog just posted some results from their "Contributions
Pilot" where they were testing accepting donations for add-ons.
[http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/10/19/contributions-a-
lo...](http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/10/19/contributions-a-look-at-some-
numbers/) Interestingly, the $5-$10 range seems to be the sweet spot there as
well. In this case though the add-on author suggests an amount to donate which
might skew the results compared to Goo's results.

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icey
So I've been thinking about this as a business model recently.

What do you think would happen if you had a some sort of enterprise software
that you charged whatever the company wanted to pay for, but you made it very
clear that support and feature requests would be prioritized by the amount the
company paid for it?

(For the purpose of this thought experiment, let's say the software was very
well regarded and actually had a viable customer base.)

Do you think that the amount companies paid would near 0, or do you think
you'd be able to find a good pricing level by doing this?

~~~
hernan7
I guess many users would pay $0 just so they can skip going through their
internal procurement process. (Which in some places can be a hassle when
buying software at any non-zero price.)

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prewett
I wonder if part of the success is that World of Goo is relatively well-known.
I'm curious if the pay-what-you-want model would work for an unknown game from
an unknown company.

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shib71
Altruism (i.e. wanting to support the model) is given as the reason for 1 in 5
payments, and comes up as a factor in a lot of the 'other' responses.

~~~
m_eiman
Not for 20% of payments, 20% of those who took part in the survey.

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e40
I paid $5. I have an 8 yr old who likes Wii Sonic and Mario games. I didn't
know if I could interest him. I didn't know if I'd like it. The $5 was what I
was able to gamble. Now that we've both played it (I like it more than my
son), I'm going back right now and adding another $10. I think it's worth $15
given the length of the game. I'd pay more if it were longer.

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hegemonicon
It's worth pointing out that we don't know how much of a success this is
without being able to compare it to how much they would have made in the same
period of time without the promotion - ie: what were the average weekly sales
of the game before this was announced?

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stjarnljuset
yay! I had mentioned in the survey that I wanted to see how their "experiment"
had fared, but it would've been nice to see how well the game sold pre-
birthday sale.

I'm reading the "Other" section for why people chose their amount to donate.

There was a couple that I thought was interesting: "to support Linux games"
"iPhone apps are 99 cents" "it's what was left in my PayPal account" and "I
plan to more later if I like it/runs on my computer"

I wonder how many of those who planned to donate more later actually did.

~~~
gnoupi
It's really pity that people nowadays consider that there are "blockbuster"
games, to pay 50-60 dollars for, and "cheap games", to pay for a cup of coffee
price.

Originally, the term "indie" was just this, independent developers, without a
publisher, and most likely people working on new concepts, interesting ideas
that you can't do on the mainstream game industry.

Unfortunately, marketers are now abusing the "indie" label, for any "little
game". And thanks to that, "indie" is now slipping to "cheap". So if a game is
not the latest "Gears of Halo 2010", most of people will say it's only worth a
few dollars.

That's sad.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Someone noted that there were 2 devs plus a few hires for porting. That versus
the millions of USD spent on blockbuster games ... $20 might be high compared
to the production costs?

Incidentally your $50 games are usually £50 GBP here.

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NathanKP
The server says "I am too stressed out. Try again in a minute or two." I guess
they are getting some pretty good results. ;)

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d0m
I didn't really like that game :( (Which could explain the sale results)

