By John Walker on October 13th, 2009 at 1:26 pm.
How much would you pay for World Of Goo? Is the question 2D BOY are asking to celebrate its first birthday. For the next six days you can choose how much you want to pay for one of our favourite games of last year, whether it’s 1p or a million billion pounds. It’s also a chance, they point out, for those who previously acquired a copy without paying to return and offer something for their entertainment. Head here to get a truly stupendous game for whatever you wish to pay. It will be fascinating to see how this works out.
The next six days? I actually do want to give something back but I’m broke. Is there a reason this couldn’t be permanent? Pissing off Digital Distributors?
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err… maybe because they actually need people to pay for it at close to full price to make a living?
Developers are not living off trust funds and shaking their fists at evil publishers who insist we charge we stuff :D
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Hmm. I held off on buying World of Goo, but with this offer, I have a chance to:
a) Get the game and
b) Support 2dboy.
Only question remaining is how much. € 5 seems too little, € 30 too much. Somewhere between 10 and 20 euros, probably.
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Is this download copy one of those ones you can add to your Steam collection via CD-key entry?
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No. Valve has a list of the games that can do that here:
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?s=d281c35ac4b489e4fc02a395d4c64617&ref=7480-WUSF-3601
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Spoiler Duck & Cedge:
I bought the game directly from 2D Boy and later registered it on Steam. In fact, I finished the game before its Steam release, and once I entered my code into Steam all of my progress came with it. I doubt anything has changed, so the answer is probably yes, you can add it to your Steam collection.
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@Skye Nathaniel :
That was true only for the pre-orders.
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Ah, thank you for the correction; I wouldn’t want to mislead anyone. Sorry about that.
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I remember when this game came out on Steam, BurtonJ was talking about it every day.
When I started looking at the game, I remember playing the old flash version from it, and seeing how excited BurtonJ was, I bought the game the moment it was released.
When I started playing it completely blowed my mind, the game creates a great and unique atmosphere, and with every level I finished I was curious what the next level contained, and how the story progressed. This game has some surprising changes in each chapter, which prevent the game from being linear. My heart was really pumping like never before on the final chapter, it really felt fantastic when I finished the game.
If you like indie games that have a truly unique feeling on them, staying to simple gameplay but have incredible level design, like for example Blueberry Garden, Braid or Gish (or if you’re not looking at indie, Portal also has a great story and level design), this is really a game for you.
I would put down $40 for this game.
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Go on then.
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“if you’re not looking at indie, Portal also has a great story and level design”
Screw indies!, also screw AAA productions!. Good games deserve to be played, even if minor, ginor, mayor, or whatever. Hell.. I buy and play some EA games, because are good.
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@Tei: You are late on the EA are evil bandwagon. Its Activision now.
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I have it on Steam already (paid full price), so I thought I’d buy the Mac version for 1p (so I can play it here at work on lunchbreaks) – it worked great, it works as a PayPal donation, and they send you an email with a link to a special page for you to download the installer file. No DRM or anything, they’re trusting people to keep the file to themselves.
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I did the same (only I wanted the linux version), having bought it on Wiiware and Steam already.
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I also paid 1p for the Mac version, because I already own the Wii version and wanted a copy to play at work at lunchtimes.
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awesome game. I can’t remember how much i paid, it might have been in a steam sale.. but it was definitely worth every penny… and more.
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i don’t imagine very many people who wanted it would’ve held of for reasons of price, i don’t think it was exceptionally pirated either, so i expect not too many people will take them up on this offer, hope someone sends them a million squillions though.
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2DBoy claims up to 90% of users pirated it.
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yes but that doesn’t mean the piracy rate is high, when compared with other games, not to mention the fact that i personally don’t agree that their figures show piracy in that range.
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Revised figure was 82%.
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It was worth every penny. All one of them.
*takes cover from impending internets-rage storm*
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As someone who paid full price for this game, I can only say these are amazing news.
This game is so good it deserves to be widely spread over the internets.
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Paid $20 pre order, nice that pirates will be legitimised in stealing the game… Wait no thats stupid, also bad.
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What can you possibly be talking about? Piracy is legitimised because people are given a chance to pay for what they downloaded? Isn’t that, um, what people who bought it did?
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It means that pirates will feel even less about having pirated it, seeing as paying 1 pence has pretty much the same impact as not paying at all, except for being legal!
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1p ~ 0p
2d boy have announced the game has fundamentally no value. So pirates can say, yes a agree your game is not worth paying for. Yes, its a stupid arguement, but remember who you are dealing with here, people who spend £300 on a graphics card but steal the games.
I’m not trying to criminalise the pirate who can’t afford the game or is in a country where the publishers take the piss. But the pirate who takes what he can, simply because he can, even though he could buy it legitimately. This exalts them.
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Legality has nothing to do with morality, and few people believe this more vehemently than serial pirates. I would feel guilty paying one penny for this game if I genuinely expected to enjoy it, just like with voluntary museum donations, and I can only assume that you would feel the same. Someone who would not feel guilty paying one penny for the game should not feel guilty for pirating it either, and if they do then they probably need to reconsider where they are drawing their morality from.
For you to be annoyed because they choose to give something that they own away is just silly, especially since you received your copy of the game long before anybody was able to “legally pirate” it.
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The user above me seems to have got confused about what piracy is. If someone says ‘Pay me a dollar and you can kick my ass or you can pay me 20 dollars because thats what kicking my ass is really worth’ then the guy kicks his ass and gives him a dollar the assailant is only guilty of GBH, not theft.
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99p
Everything sounded awesome. Great art style, nicely atmospheric music, cute lil dudes and sound effects. I bought it on Steam at full price without first trying it, feeling good about supporting an indie dev who had produced, by all accounts, an incredible game.
But I’ve barely played it. The gameplay is just completely non-engaging to me; I don’t care whether I fail or succeed at a puzzle. It’s mysterious because I know I should like this game and I’ve certainly enjoyed it’s type in the past. Now I just feel like I could’ve put the money to better use.
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Wait, not to start up this old argument again, but I recall the "revised" figure as being about 80% (which is still significant, of course).
How significant that piracy rate is, of course, depends on which studies and sets of figures you believe about pirated copy to lost sale /lost revenue rates – it could represent anything from a loss of less than 1% of their potential revenue to a (full) loss of 80% of it.
Which is why this "experiment" is interesting – both the statistics concerning the distribution of prices selected by contributors, and the change in the amount of downloads (compared to outside this 6 day period) are interesting probes of how "the internet" assigns value to downloadable, non-DRM'd content.
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I think it was revised down to 88%, wasn’t it? Not 80? But it’s obviously a big number in either case.
@Heliocentric: Uh, what? How are you legitimizing piracy by getting pirates to pay for the game? Or rather, if it is, then I fail to see how it’s a bad thing.
Isn’t this what every game developer dreams of? “Legitimizing” pirates by making them pay money for the game they played?
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So basically, no-one was buying it anymore, so he tries to milk the last out of the game by leaving the payment to people’s mercy, in an attempt to get some remorse out of pirates?
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Are you always this cynical?
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There has to be SOME cash-related logic behind it, no?
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Of course there is. By doing this more people will buy the game. A person buying the game for $5 is $5 more than a person not buying the game. They’ve got the sense to realise this. How is it something to deride, or attempt to conspiratorially uncover? People selling games do promotion to sell more games. Shocking.
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I’m pretty sure most people who weren’t interested enough in the game to buy it before will not pay $5 for it now. They’ll perhaps buy it for a cent, meaning 2D BOY gains virtually nothing from it. I’m simply trying to understand whether he expects cash flowing from philantropically inclined individuals or if he wants to gain publicity in order to sell more games later, that’s all.
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“I’m simply trying to understand whether he expects cash flowing from philantropically inclined individuals or if he wants to gain publicity in order to sell more games later, that’s all.”
Both?
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If you look at previous examples of people allowing people to pay as they wish, you’ll be surprised to discover a lot of money can be made.
Hopefully 2D BOY will let us know how it goes. My guess is about 80% will pay 1c, 15% around $5 and 5% more.
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Plus this Radiohead-esque stunt will generate a lot more publicity then a simple markdown.
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A large amout of this will be publicity. Even though World of Goo was very successful for an indie they are still only an indie, and as Zombie Cow pointed out over on some Gamasutra interview selling your game for a really low price is one way to get your name out into the world as a developer. People trying your game for themselves and then enjoying it is the best way to get people interested in your next project.
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Surely there will be tremendous value to 2DBoy in the purchasing statistics themselves, i.e. just how many people are willing to pay how much. It’s not uncommon for companies to pay big pennies for market research on exactly this kind of thing. With an arrangement like this, 2DBoy effectively get that information for free.
Even if their site is overrun by freeloaders and they make nothing in terms of cold hard cash, that info is still going to be worth something to them.
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Last I heard, the two-man 2DBoy had made over 2 million bucks from this game (they seem to like the number 2). That was several months ago. So yeah, I’m inclined to think that there is a cash-related reason why they’re doing this; they have a lot of it, and so they can afford to.
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John sez:
“If you look at previous examples of people allowing people to pay as they wish, you’ll be surprised to discover a lot of money can be made.
Hopefully 2D BOY will let us know how it goes. My guess is about 80% will pay 1c, 15% around $5 and 5% more.”
Here’s an example: the writer/artist of a webcomic I read got a really annoying email from a fan complaining about a typo in one of his comics a couple years back. It rubbed him the wrong way, so he threw the gauntlet down and posted challenging people who bitch about his poor proofreading to donate more money if they were really that bothered by it, offering to quit his day job and do the comic full time if he got at least $20,000 worth of donations within a week. He was just angry and ranting, he didnt’ really expect it to go anywhere; a week later, somewhere over $27,000 was in his Paypal account. He gave his notice that day. That’s a lot of money donated for a webcomic that doesn’t cost a dime. I suspect more people would donate for a game.
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Erm, what? Surely, in a sane world, paying for content in a deal like this retrospectively isn't "legitimising piracy"? It might be considered even as an "amnesty" for pirates to pay for the content they've been enjoying, it might be considered as, reaching a little, legitimising complaints about the over-valuing of games, but it's not "legitimising piracy".
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Easily worth the price I paid for it when I bought it.
Gif them your moneys.
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I’ll take this opportunity to buy it again to send a gift to a friend :)
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website has fallen over :(
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Okay, I wanted to give 2DBoy all the money I have to spare this week, which is 3,72€.
So I entered 5,50$ as the price, but PayPal said it would be a bit more expensive than expected then. So I wanted to revise the figure, but now the homepage of 2DBoy doesn’t load anymore. Well, I have to try again this evening…
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Site too busy right now, hope at least the extra money will pay for the extra bandwidth.
I already bought it when it was at $5 on a sale
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I played the demo, and really enjoyed it. It’s a really cool game to have around when you’ve a few minutes to kill – and the only reason I didn’t buy already is that I’m in Bangkok and can’t pay for stuff online. I’ll be opening a new account next week to get an internationally useable debit card, and I’ll pay them $10 for it.
If it weren’t for Piracy, they could sell it for $5 and make a ton of cash – if everyone had been able to make small online payments ten years ago as easily as they can now, I think that more people would pay much less and get great software.
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I bought it on release for myself and once for my mam.
She doesn’t really understand it but plays it and like the noises that the goo makes.
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I pre-ordered this, so I don’t really feel the need to give them an extra 1p.
This is rather excellent of them, though. I’m surprised CliffyB hasn’t been on here explaining how such a customer-friendly approach to pricing promotes terrorism or something.
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Damn, now I’m tempted to buy the game again. Hrm.
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Would donate for that moon stage that was promised ages ago.
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It says “please enter an amount greater than zero”. So much for making a point about piracy then…
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The whole “pay what you want” scheme is kind of like what Radiohead did with “In Rainbows.” Well, aside from the fact that 2D Boy presumably needs the money, while Radiohead doesn’t. Also, World of Goo is made of electronic joy, with “joy” not being a term I’ve ever applied to Radiohead.
Off to buy a PC copy since I already own WoG on wii.
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“Reckoner” is pretty uplifting.
I think I’ll buy some gift copies at $2.50 each for people who would never just try the game despite my repeated, labored insisting and pleading (because they hate themselves, presumably).
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Well, I would wager you are listening to the wrong Radiohead.
Also – a big difference here is that it is something that has already been for sale at a set price.
Honestly, I see this doing several things:
Getting more people to play World of Goo
Making Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel richer
Giving people that have bought World of Goo on one platform an option to cheaply get it on another (DRM free)
Give people didn’t buy it because of price (whether they pirated it or not) an opportunity to pay exactly what they think is fair.
I don’t think any of these are bad things at all. Honestly, people complaining at this is baffling.
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Heh, hi5 Skye
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“hi5″ received and filed. Thank you for your business, Mr. P.
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Don’t take me wrong, I like Radiohead, but I’ve never really connected them with uplifting or joyous – more paranoia and alienation and the like. Perhaps I’ll give “Rainbows” another listen.
@LewieP: I agree, offering the full price product first is a big difference. 2D Boy, presumably, can’t afford to give their product away on release as an experiment, while Radiohead can. (I really wouldn’t take the 2D Boy = Radiohead argument much further than “Cheap as free? This is novel!”)
As to the outcome on 2D Boy’s side, hopefully they’ll release some data on how their experiment fared, like they did with the (much argued) 90-some percent piracy rate. Don’t know if it’s a testable hypothesis, but I’d like to imagine they could monitize some of the pirates and those who were only marginally interested and didn’t buy the first time around.
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In business terms this will likely be great, it will create a word of mouth storm and people might buy it for $20, or you know, pirate it as it has no intrinsic worth.
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I’m not suggesting you do it, Heliocentric, but I’d like to stress that it’s nonsense to establish a direct proportionality between an object’s price and its worth.
Most things that are necessary tend to be cheap (think of water, food, electricity; of course other things like a house aren’t cheap), but this doesn’t mean they have no value. So I don’t think anyone could really sustain such an argument. At most you could argue that most unnecessary things are expensive.
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Of course it has no intrinsic worth. It’s a data file that can be infinitely duplicated. It isn’t gold – it can’t be weighed and valued by its rarity. Or a chair that has been crafted. It has worth to me – that’s why I paid for it. But there’s no intrinsic worth at all.
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it has serving costs, undoubtedly if everyone bought it for a penny, they’d lose money on the whole deal, but few people would do that as it isn’t hugely different from stealing it in practical terms, i.e. anyone comfortable with paying a penny for this who isn’t comfortable with paying nothing for it is quite strange in my eyes.
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“if everyone bought it for a penny, they’d lose money on the whole deal, but few people would do that as it isn’t hugely different from stealing it in practical terms, i.e. anyone comfortable with paying a penny for this who isn’t comfortable with paying nothing for it is quite strange in my eyes.”
I get where you’re coming from, but I disagree (and not just with the old ‘piracy == theft’ thing).
The difference here is that one would be paying a penny for the game *with the permission of the developer-distributors*. Sure, the practical outcome is effectively identical, and legality != morality, but there’s clearly a difference between being offered a game by its creators for 1c, and taking a copy behind their back for free when they have chosen to charge $20.
(Unless you just meant that buying it for 1c is barely different from pirating it *now*, while this deal is on, in which case the obvious explanation is that people prefer to follow the law when there’s no incentive not to do so.)
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Sky Nathaniel is partly right, but I’m afraid it won’t work for you guys.
Basically anyone who pre-ordered World of Goo got a code to allow them to play the pre-release version. After it was released on Steam, 2D Boy worked out a deal with Steam where people who had this code could enter it into Steam’s “activate a product” feature and have it on Steam from thereon after. This is regardless of the fact that these people didn’t buy it on Steam and Steam didn’t get any money from it, so that was pretty awesome.
Anyone who bought WoG from 2D Boy after release however wouldn’t have gotten a code, and they can’t authorise their product on there. You need to buy it directly from Steam in order to have it downloadable from Steam.
To be honest, I don’t see why you’d want to. Buying direct from 2D Boy, you get the DRM free version, and you can still add it in as a non-Steam game to your Steam list, it just won’t be downloadable from Steam after that. If you delete the executable and want to get the game again, you just need to re-download it from 2D Boy instead of from Steam.
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People’s perceptions of worth are very easy to mess up.
For example I’ve read many people saying they loved the game, but wouldn’t pay more than $10 for it. Somehow, because it isn’t using the latest unreal tech, it’s not worth more than $10 even if it’s more fun than the games using the latest unreal tech… which are worth $40.
And i’ve seen several full priced games with comments like “it looks fun, but it looks like an xbla game, so i wouldn’t pay full price for it.” based mostly on the visuals again.
My slight worry is that we’re developing an “indie/xbla games price point & look”, which once people have it in their heads, will be impossible to escape. No 2d game or cell shaded game will ever be able to sell for more than $10. And my even slighter worry is that all the steam sales and giving games away for almost free are going to reinforce that.
I think it’s a great game, and a very generous move by a great developer. I wonder if it’ll cause problems for their future sales, and other similar games though?
“looks like a great game, but i’m not paying more than 99p because it’s similar to World of Goo”.
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Ironically, hand-drawn 2D art and animation are more expensive to produce than (in general) 3D models or “2.5D” graphics. Hopefully, as indie games continue to become more prevalent and more mixed in with mainstream distribution and promotion, and as “retro” sound and graphic styles fade as a fad and become more recognized by outsiders as legitimate and artistically worthy aesthetics, these incorrect preconceptions will gradually fall away. It may require us to reach the ceiling of technological improvement fueling perceivable eye candy first, however, which will probably take quite awhile yet.
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ehh theres nothing wrong with linking the price you’re willing to pay to the perceived cost of developement, unreal engine 3 costs hundreds of thousands of pounds for the basic sdk, sdl is free.
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That’s an interesting observation.
For example, I feel like Trine is overpriced at $30*, but why do I think that? Is it because it’s an indie title or something that’s on XBLA/PSN? Why do I think $30 is too much for a well-received indie game, when I’ll quite happily buy a mediocre commercial game I think I might be interested in if I see it on sale for the same price?
* I think I’ve seen that it’s £30 in the UK too. That’s outrageous, but why is it outrageous? I can’t figure it out.
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Yet somehow, albums which can cost millions or 500 quid to make all are released at the same price.
KG
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For some people good = high production values.
Yeah, i know, some people are fucking weird.
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trine is overpriced it’s a really polished 2d side scroller, it does cost less to make than MW2, if they wanted to charge a higher price point they should’ve made a more innovative game.
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Yup I agree massively. Devaluing games so that an hour spent playing a fun game is valued at $0.01 is just crazy, and yet that is where we are heading.
I find an hour of gaming is higher quality fun than an hour at the cinema, but if I have to pay $7 an hour for gaming, I’d go mad, yet easily pay that with parking + movie ticket.
I thinkwe need more developers standing up and saying “This game is priced $25 and it is WORTH that amount. The iphone has taught developers to feel bad about charging over 99 cents for a flipping game.
You get what you pay for.
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Yet should production cost influence the price you’d be willing to pay? Or the amount of enjoyment you get out of it?
Transformers2 cost a fortune. Jumo cost very little. Yet i’d rather pay 10gbp for a juno dvd than 5gbp for a transformers2 dvd… cost it’s more enjoyable for me.
World of Goo was the best game i played last year. So i’d rather pay 30gbp for it and 5gbp for halo3.
It appears anything taking place on a 2d plane isn’t worth over $15. Yet on in 3d it’s worth $40. That extra plane sure is expensive!
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@Skye: I think you’ve got the right approach here. Until (unless?) gaming stops being such a tech-driven medium, 2d graphics are going to be perceived as last-gen technology and the gaming market is going to effectively demand a discount.
@Turin: I’d differentiate production values from production costs. I though WoG had fantastic production values, and was all around very polished.
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i’m not saying pay more for shit games that cost a lot to make, by all means don’t buy shit games, but i don’t think theres anything wrong with paying more for a game if you believe the developers put in more effort despite it being slightly less fun, it is after all about showing appreciation.
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I paid $20 (13.50€) for it and still feel it was money WELL spent.
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Am I the only one disappointed that there’s no Josh Freese style expensive purchasing options, like ‘pay $20,000 and get a signed copy of the game and spend a weekend with 2DBoy watching bullfights on acid’?
Not that I can afford such things, but still.
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And yet really cheaply produced movies often aren't released to cinemas at all (and often end up at cut-price value on DVD too).
(And "classics" in every medium are cheaper than more recently released stuff, despite being, by cultural definition, the acme of their time period's expression.)
So, societial constructions of value are odd and contradictory. What's new?
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aoanla: I don’t agree if you’re saying cheaply produced stuff doesn’t get on cinema screens because it’s cheaply produced. It’s because it’s mainly trash designed for video. There’s plenty of micro-budget films that get the cinematic release. Art school circuit, sure. And the other methods you put on are based more on age than on the actual production costs, on average.
KG
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I just bought it for $5, it’s fun, but I’m glad I didn’t spend more on it, as it’s not that fun.
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yes it is! ;-)
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You might disagree, but for me, it’s barely worth the $5 purchase.
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Yes it is!
You just might not know it yet.
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No, and I never will, because I have better things to do than spend time on a game I don’t particularly enjoy ;)
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There’s a restaurant near me which used to do that.
It had to close after chavs repeatedly went in there and decided to pay 1p for a 5 course dinner. :(
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That’s hardly surprising.
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No we can just pirate food.
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I can never find seeds.
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I know the seed statement was just a pun but, there is a breed of mango which never leaves the small number of farms it exists on without the seeds being sterilised (cherries too i think) by microwaves. This stops competitors breeding the fruit, effectively locking down the copyright on a fruit.
Seems oddly reflective to piracy.
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I’ll do you one better: In the US, the uber-companies that make the super-seeds (Monsanto, ConAgra, etc) have been known to sue farmers neighboring one of their customers, because when some seeds blew in the wind and fertilized adjacent fields, that was theft of their intellectual property. And the customer-farmer is not allowed to use the seeds from the grown crops to replant, he has to purchase new seeds, or else violate the licensing agreements.
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bought, i kind of missed the boat with WoG when it first came out.
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Damn – I just paid $12 by PayPal and now the site I get directed to, http://2dboy.com/thankyouiloveyou.php, refuses to load (page load error).
How must I proceed? I have not had the opportunity to dl the game :(
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Just check your email and there should be a link to the file. It should be in the email you registered to paypal.
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This is an ideal opportunity for folks who got it on Steam to get a proper, DRM free, cross-platform copy as well.
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Without the achievements!
But paying twice for my game, no thanks.
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A free Mac copy, a free Linux copy, a copy of the game with no need to run the Steam client to run/install the game, and all for a penny. Yeah, that’s a terrible idea.
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Always found £17 on steam to be a bit much, so with this I handed over the £10 I wanted to pay.
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Well, I just “donated” and recieved an email with no download info or links.
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Same.
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Same for me, but that’s because their server is burning wreckage at the moment. I have the paypal receipt so if I don’t get an email from 2DBoy I’ll just email them in a few days manually.
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So has their website crashed, or…?
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No, the email says “you have donated $10″ and thats it, no download link. Great.
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Pfft, liar.
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Man, all my glib comments keep getting lost in the midst of this useless reply system :(
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Would that I was rich enough to give a bit more than £5. Thanks 2d boy. Thoy.
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Bought it a year ago for €15. Was well worth it, my favorite game of last year together with Fallout 3.
I’m curious to see the statistics, will be interesting.
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I was more trying to think of counterexamples, really. The point of the classics example was to point out that the value of products isn't based on anything about their perceived quality – we're more concerned with recency than anything else (even production costs). What's interesting about games is that this seems not to be so much the case with indie stuff.
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Site’s really getting hammered. Been waiting for an hour and still haven’t received my email. The manualemailbot isn’t working either.
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I guess I’m a lucky one then. I already bought the game on Steam but I wanted to support the devs for doing this so I paid a little bit for another copy. Got my email with download links instantly after the payment went through.
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I’ll say, it still hasn’t arrived for me.
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hey everyone, it’s been very interesting reading your thoughts on this experiment. we’ll definitely share data once it’s over. also, apologies for the server issues, we got more traffic than we expected and we’re working on making sure everyone gets their download links asap.
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Good to know :)
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Thankyou Ron…
1. For a wonderful game (I’ve just got into world 4… the “surprise change” was very cool)
2. For the offer to share data on the $ experiment.
HUGS to 2DBOY.
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I’m having the same problems as thprune, except I can’t even get the email, I’ve tried the manual sender to no avail, and now the site’s crashed.
I’m not surprised TBH, and I’d be even less so if they happened to ‘lose’ my application whilst I still lose my money, there’s always something to conveniently f**k up.
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Theyoys – I may be misinterpreting your comment, but currently you appear to be accusing 2D BOY of deliberately running a scam to steal your money. That’s a fairly enormously libellous thing to write, and I’m fairly sure you can’t actually be suggesting that. Can you clarify so I don’t have to delete your comment?
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OH, hell no. It was more a comment regarding sod’s law. I’ve just had more than my fair share of servers going down whilst trying to order something and having to go through customer services or similar.
In fact I paid above the RRP cos I honestly think they deserve it. I just guess I’m massively unlucky when it comes to online shopping. ;_; Also, feeling tired an ratty so I’m probably coming across as short tempered.
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Re-reading I realise I put quotes around the wrong damn words, they should be around ‘conveniently’ and not around ‘lose’. Don’t ask me how I managed that… checking for mistakes is for wooses.
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That’s why I checked : )
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Great to hear. Your website does seem to be suffering slightly under the traffic :-P
Eagerly anticipating my code once it all calms down a bit and the email actually arrives.
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Donated .50 to start out… will be donating another $4.50 once they get their server working and I actually have my game in hand. I donated via pay-pal and so I have an e-mail receipt from pay-pal as a record of my donation (paypal’s website isn’t having any trouble) so I’m not worried. I’m sure 2D Boy will get things up sooner or later and treat people right as soon as they can.
And kudos to them for doing this. I played the demo and enjoyed it very much… but only have limited cash (and time!) to spend on games… so didn’t shell out full price… but I am glad to pay them $5 both because I’m sure I’ll be getting a great game sooner or later (once they get their server fixed) and also because I want to support the studio and the idea that trusting your customers to pay is a viable business model.
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I wonder if the people who are buying a second copy and don’t want it (as in they’re making a donation) and have the download codes could hook up with the people who are trying to get it for the first time and didn’t receive the download info.
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Broken server is broken.
Hopefully I will remember to try again in a few days.
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Spy’s sappin’ mah server!
….
Server down!
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Picked this up recently in the Direct2Drive sale. I like how I keep thinking I’ve figured it out, and then realising I haven’t. “Aha, so I just… No. Eh? Oh. Aaaahh.”
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Another as comments above, donation confirmed but no download information. Panic
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What gets me is that if you met the 2DBoy guys down the street, regardless of whether they just gave you a free copy of their game, you’d probably want to buy them a drink. Unless you’re socially inept of course. How much is a pint of beer these days? (or for those of you underage, at least a can of Coke). That should be the absolute minimum fee. I’d probably buy them several beers, get them slightly inebriated, and get them to spill the beans on their next project. But that’s me.
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Yay! At last it works! =D
I got World of Goo 6ish months ago on a Steam sale for $5 after playing the demo and *really* liking it. Played it, thought it was WONDERFUL. Easily one of my favorite games of all time. Felt guilty for getting such a beautiful, amazing game for 75% off. So..
$15 donation away!
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What a wonderful approach. I’ll be passing – I already own the game -and- bought a second hard copy not long ago to pass on to someone else who’ll probably enjoy it loads – but I hope it does well for them.
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Rockpapershotgun comments make me sad. How can such a nice website have such nondy bunch whine-o-cunts as a community?
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If only we were all more like you!
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I bought this wonderness for $5. some fun for my Ubuntu installation.
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If you need a download link:
http://worldofgoo.com/manualEmailBot.php
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do vendors still get charged a processing fee per transaction online?
here’s hoping they don’t, and 2D Boy isn’t forking over xx c/pent/ce per 1p transaction.
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I dont think anyone is whining ^ and also I really do support the idea that devs trust their customers but I think the people on this website are a very unrepresentative segment of gamers. most will take the piss.
Havent had my email through yet, not whining just really excited to play it, its been on my list for ages but after all this hype im especially excited!
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Surely the sight crashing is good news for 2DBoy? The offer must have been more popular than expected :) Congrats.
I bought my copy off Steam a while ago – not sure how much I paid, around the $20 mark i believe, but I’m from England so I’m not sure what that was in £ at the time.
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Is their site working now? I tried to buy it yesterday for $0,01 but never got the download link, only paypal confirmation. And I’m too shamed to email them that my 1 cent purchase failed, I’d just rather buy another one :D
Or this might be their devious scheme to get money.
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Yes! Got the email with the download link today. The server issues must be cleared.
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When I saw this yesterday I couldn’t resist buying. Best $8 I’ve ever spent. Or it will be when my download link comes through…
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I made another donation today (for 80 cents) and received my download link immediately… so it seems like the site is working again. I will be sending them a few more dollars (for a total of $5) after my download completes successfully. Hurray for a great game and hurray for being able to support them at least a small amount ($5).
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If I pay, say, 0.50USD for it, will Paypal charge me or 2dboy any extra?
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Yay, it came through a couple of days ago and ive completed it last night, lovely little game. very polished. should be making a mint off it on nintendo ds or iphone etc.
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I’ve already bought it on Steam a year ago, but I wanted to have native Linux version, so I gave them 1 $ now :-)
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Im glad to
know this blog. Two big thumbs up, man!
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