By John Walker on October 20th, 2009 at 12:58 pm.
As expected, 2D BOY have published details of their World Of Goo First Birthday experiment. Offering the game for whatever price people wanted to pay (previously it was $20), this meant people could get a copy for as little as $0.01 or as much as fifty million squillion space dollars. (I believe that’s the upper limit.) Originally this was intended to last for a week, but has now been extended to 25th October. And being a rather open sort they’ve announced how many copies they’ve sold so far, and indeed how much people have been paying, along with much more. It’s an unprecedented amount of detailed sales information. Its significance shouldn’t be underplayed.
In the last week there have been approximately 57,000 sales of the game. Which is a pretty stunning number. So let’s look at what people paid:
Now it’s immediately important to very much hold onto your horses. When Radiohead experimented with this pricing model with In Rainbows it was ludicrously declared a failure by the press because most people paid nothing, despite Radiohead making a whacking great ton of cash for it. It’s that whacking great ton of cash that’s interesting here, rather than how many people nabbed it for free. So clearly, as was always expected, the largest number of people paid 1c for the game – the lowest amount they could. But this is already more complex than only people taking it for the lowest price possible.
There’s people who were getting a second copy. Many bought it on Wii or PC or Mac or Linux and wanted another version. Having already paid full price for it, this was their opportunity to get a version working on another platform without paying all over again. Of course, this isn’t going to account for many of the 16,852 who got it for almost-free. Huge numbers certainly are people taking advantage of getting a free game legitimately. So the question is, how many of these people would have bought it for the full price were this offer not available? I’m going to stick my head out and suggest a fairly small number. Why? Because the game already was available at full price for a year previously, and they didn’t get it. As the Steam sales show (below) there’s the possibility that some of them may well have paid full price if the same volume of advertising had occurred without a price drop, simply because they were reminded of its existence. But I doubt that accounts for many. The question that remains, and it’s one that I don’t think can be answered from the data gathered on this occasion, is how many of the one-centers would have bought it were it reduced to, say, $10, or $5. All we can say for sure is that these were 17,000 (minus those duplicating/replacing copies) who were unlikely to ever pay the $20.
I think it’s fascinating that then more than twice as many people chose to pay between one and two dollars than chose to pay between one cent and one dollar. In fact, almost as many people chose to pay in this third bracket as chose to get it for free. Clearly getting World of Goo for under two bucks is an insane bargain, but it’s still important to note that people are choosing to pay when they don’t have to. Not a significant amount at first glance. Until you multiply 15,797 by 2, and put a dollar sign in front of it, for a year old game. (Clearly minus a significant Paypal commission.)
Other interesting spikes appear at $5 and $10. It’s kind of cute that people default to recognisable round numbers. That twenty-three times more people paid $10 than $9 is, well, possibly useful knowledge for those picking pricing. People seem to prefer to pay a round number. This same pattern repeats at $15 and $20, with again thirty times more people paying $20 than $19.
I think another really significant number is that $20 point. That’s how much the game cost a year ago, and indeed a week ago. 306 people chose to pay that. That’s $6120 minus the Paypal cut, when it could have been absolutely zero. Although let’s not forget that 16,000 people paying between one and two bucks (minus cut) is a hell of a lot more money. (And 7347 at $5 is $36,735 of course – keep doing this maths and you can begin to see why 2D BOY describe it as a “huge success”.)
The other enormously interesting finding that 2D BOY have revealed is the effect the sale had elsewhere. It’s absolutely fascinating that the developers making their game available for all-but-free on their own site saw a 40% increase in Steam sales. They explain that it’s not unusual for a rise or fall in sales on Steam, week by week, of around 25%, but 40% is a significant anomaly, and is unlikely to be coincidental. The sheer volume of promotion their sale received presumably drove people who preferred a Steam-integrated copy to finally get around to buying it. And it’s important to note that 40% increase was following the previous week that had already shown a 25% increase. (Of course we don’t know what that’s an increase from. They may well have sold four copies, then five, then seven. Although perhaps that’s a little unlikely.) The effect even extended to the Wii where sales showed an above-normal increase of 9%
There’s tons more data to pore over, and you can even download all the responses people gave when asked to explain why they paid what they paid. Although as 2D BOY point out, this is skewed information, with the majority of those responding to questions being those who paid in the $5 bracket. Of those people, the most frequent explanation for price was that it was all the person could afford at that time. I do not think a more resounding piece of information can be garnered from all this than that statement. Oh, and 10% of those responding were people who had pirated it and now wanted to pay. Shout that out loud in the street. You can access all the data here.
But I think the punchline to all this is: 2D BOY made around $100,000 in a week. That’s $50,000 each for writing a blog post about a game they finished a year ago. By letting people pay whatever they wanted. That’s damned important information.
Wait, that’s $50,000 per blog post?
You guys are getting ripped off.
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Fantastic. Good on them.
:)
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Pretty interetsing. As said before, I paid beteen 10 and 20 euros. As it happens, it was somewhat less than the retail price, but not by much.
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Looks like to me that you don’t want the buggers paying less than a buck, thanks to paypals skimming.
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Hear hear
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Excuse me, I think I have something in my eye…
Sorry about that, yes, I’d certainly like to give those two gentlemen a firm handshake and a pat on the back.
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Do you get a Steam key if you buy from their site ?
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Afraid not, although there is no DRM on the version from the promotion.
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I love that they release all their statistics. One thing I’d like to know is if they LOST money on those $0.01 sales due to paypal commissions and suchlike. Do they touch on that ?
Didn’t but it this time as i already bought it in one of the steam sales. Can’t remember how much i paid, but it was definitely worth it.
I’ve discovered an interesting thing from frequenting GOG where their prices are only $5.99 and $9.99.
If they release an interesting game at $5.99 I’ll pick it up without thinking. If they release the same game (or a better one) at $9.99 I’ll spend a lot more time thinking about it, searching for reviews, etc.. and probably not end up buying it.
(and i think it’s the number that’s significant, not the currency. I suspect if we were talking 5 quid or 10 quid it’d be the same result. )
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ps/ their server is all stressed out again (aww!!) so i can’t check for myself. not just being lazy…
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Quoted from their blog post:
“For all purchases of around 30 cents and under, we actually saw no money, 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.”
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Absolutely love this business model. I’m still amazed at how much money can be made from miniscule transactions, and how hilariously inept most of The Industry is at seeing that fact.
I suppose it comes down to greed. As a musician I always felt that music is essentially free. When i put up all my tunes in a big whopping list, people actually *asked me* to put up a donation button, and i’ve made a little over a thousand dollars from just people being nice so far. That’s free money.
These are awesome times to be independent.
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They can’t see it because of the gigantic piles of cash blocking their view from $60 console sales from Generic FPS 5 or whatever.
This is a great move by 2d Boy, but not applicable to all businesses. If Modern Warfare 2 used this strategy I don’t think it would work out so well.
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I suppose i was thinking more about the music industry really, which at least attempts to operate within that price range, yet is infuriated when it “loses sales” to piracy (which we know are sales that didn’t exist to begin with).
The 60 dollar mark is ridiculous. Here in Norway that comes down to something like $90, which for all the generic shit we wade through these days is an INCREDIBLE amount of trust to ask of a consumer.
I’m still not entirely sure why games cost more than movies to byt, in terms of cost of production.
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Ya, music pricing is weirder than games. It often costs little in comparison to produce an album than a movie. Movies are longer and include music and video. But, at least in the US, you can usually buy DVDs (in bargain bins) cheaper than CDs or sometimes even mp3 albums.
Of course, none of any of that makes a difference in the price, just like digital distribution does not guarentee a change in price. The price is based on what people are willing to pay. The console kiddies jump at the opportunity to pay $60 for a title, so that’s how much it costs. When the XBOX 720 or whatever is digital distribution only, it will still cost $60 for a title.
For independent musicians this system should work great, especially since they can also earn money by performing. The big labels are essentially selling a different product though. Not music, but a sort of marketing package. I don’t think they are missing out on sales of Lady Gaga by not using the pay what you want method. People are willing to pay $1 for a Lady Gaga track, so that’s what it costs. It is just too bad that many good artists are stuck with big labels.
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Horse Armor would disagree with you.
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Ah… found the info: For all purchases of around 30 cents and under, we actually saw no money, 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.
I gotta wonder what would have happened if they’d made the minimum $1 instead. Do you think they’d have made $16,000 more dollars, or would most of the $0.01 people have skipped it entirely?
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I thought they should have made it $1 minimum for the version on their site and $2 for a Steam version (with achievements), especially if PayPal takes the first 30 cents. I would bet that they’d have made more money in that bottom block than they did.
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A quick mathmatising from the graph says people paid $2.35 on average. Anyone want to correct that?
I’d be interested to see if an indie game, even a fairly substantial one like World of Goo, actually made more money being sold at £2-5 on release than at the £15-20 we might think it’s worth when compared to other games. I think because people don’t know what they’re getting with these games, unlike the next Call of Duty or Half Life, they’re less willing to shell out full game price, even if the game deserves it.
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I know that when I “bought” the mp3s for free from Radiohead it made me want to actually pay for something else by them as soon as possible. I ended up buying the CD when it came out. I think they may be the last real CD I’ve ever bought.
If I hadn’t already bought WoG (thanks to RPS’ coverage), I might have paid $1 or so for it, becasue I’m cheap. But I would probably buy their next game for full price on day one (which I normally never do) because of how highly this makes me think of 2D Boy. Too bad 2D Boy doesn’t have a new game ready to be released…
OTOH, if EA let me download their entire catalogue for free I would do it and would still only buy their games when the price drops considerably. I wouldn’t feel guilty about this at all.
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And conversely, how would it have influenced the number of people getting it for >$1?
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Ha. Reply fail. Was directed to bill :)
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This puts to shame another current industry pricing experiment, where a certain anticipated game is seeing how many people are willing to pay an extra 33% of the industry standard to purchase it's "hype" component.
Perhaps World of Goo should offer a Platinum edition, retailing for $100 but coming with its own jar of tar.
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Day one purchase for certain. :)
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I’d love to know if there’s been any serious economic research on this kind of offer. I mean, the results fly in the face of conventional economic theory (especially the Steam sales spike), but that’s not to say it couldn’t be explained. I’d love to see people grapple with the info.
Also, I’d like to say a huge thanks to 2D Boy. Over and above the great gesture in the offer itself, they’ve done the indie game community, and indeed the world of retail in general, a great service by publishing detailed data like this. If only Steam were anything like as open as this about their absolute numbers.
As for Paypal, I’m pretty sure the standard minimum fee is 20p/30c, which means the 1c purchases will have been pretty costly unless they arranged something with PayPal in advance.
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In terms of website sales, it doesn’t really fly too far in the face of Economic Theory. I, however , have been drinking so my explanation might.
From 2D boy’s point of view, Its probably fair to say that most of the costs of making the game have already been recouped. This is important as it means, effectively their only costs for these units were in hosting, paypal and ads. In other words, comparing WoG to a game running this promotion at launch is somewhat disingenuous.
The most interesting thing about the Steam spike to me, from an economics point of view, is that, if people buying from Steam were aware of the promotion, it potentially lets us look in to the value people place on Steam services, albeit in a roundabout way. A fully constructed experiment working on this basis, possibly in a modular way (with the baseline full game being available for 1c and additional features like steam inclusion and achievement support adding to the baseline minimum price), might come up with some really interesting information on services which have often been free-ish.
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In other words, comparing WoG to a game running this promotion at launch is somewhat disingenuous.
I wasn’t doing that comparing, and I agree it’s not the same thing. I’d be very surprised if any major release (by which I mean studio or major indie) went down this route at launch.
What I was driving at was more the anomalies in the prices people were willing to pay. PArticularly that $1-$2 spike and the Steam thing. If I were to offer an Economics 101 answer, I’d say that some people find utility in the future survival of 2D Boy and were thus willing to pay more than they had to and more than those who don’t value 2D Boy’s future survival. It might even be possible to test that hypothesis by comparing the answers to the motivation question with the price those people paid.
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Fascinating results – I wonder what would happen if this had been done from the beginning? i.e. does it rely somewhat on brand recognition?
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i suspect it relies a lot on “getting a bargain”. If they released it for very little originally, people would probably have considered it worth very little. But (like the steam weekend sales) the chance to get something at much lower than the usual price is a BIG draw.
I’d guess it’d be much less successful if done from launch. But it seems like something that could be done much more successfully later on. At some point, everyone who really wants it has got it… so you might as well give it away.
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It’s a shame that the ease-of-pay offered by PayPal comes with a punishing commission for smaller donations. Other than that – that’s awesome to know.
This kind of data is extremely valuable. I think it would be great to get the Steam-sales stats when various weekend and other deals come on. I seem to remember Valve saying that the first time they brought L4D down from £27 to £14, they got a record number of sales, in that short period outstripping their sales in all the time before.
(Armed with that info I’m still surprised at some of the Valve pricing though…)
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Was thinking the same thing about paypal. Did 2Dboy mention that paypal does that? If not you have to wonder what people would have done had they known. Sad if they still would have paid 1c, cool if they’d paid double the paypal cost (someone said 30c – so 60c then).
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Hooray, now every game is gonna start doing this. Can’t wait to buy twenty games for twenty cents.
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I think I paid 15 Euros. It was always one of those games I planned on getting but I felt the price point was a bit too high compared to what else I could get for the same money, particularly because Steam cheats on the currency conversion. I’m always happy to pay for games, it’s the exact price point that’s usually the issue.
Interestingly I’m actually not that impressed by it. I really like the style of it and the narrative good (with some very excellent geeky jokes/references), but the actual gameplay leaves me almost completely cold. What I really dislike is when you’re trying to do something quickly but it’s difficult the grab a goo because they wander around, but maybe this is made worse by playing on a small netbook screen.
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I really wish more people gave them at least $5 and I really hope most of those $0.01 purchases were for second copies…
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I know someone who bought it @ $0.01 “just because DURR HURR”.
The world is doomed. :P
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I see they noted that the average price rose as time went on – did they link this to the idea that the people who bought early were probably the ones most interested in taking it for a cent?
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I’d be interested to see if an indie game, even a fairly substantial one like World of Goo, actually made more money being sold at £2-5 on release than at the £15-20 we might think it’s worth when compared to other games. I think because people don’t know what they’re getting with these games, unlike the next Call of Duty or Half Life, they’re less willing to shell out full game price, even if the game deserves it.
Oh, definitely. See also the reaction to Braid, which was, what, 1200 MS points on XBLA? People are happy to spend £40/$50 on Madden or Pro Evo every year, but ask them to spend a tenner on one of the most creative games in recent memory and they go nuts.
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I’m surprised so many people paid such a small amount, and so few a large amount. WoG is an astounding game that sucked up hours of my life. If I had to guess, I’d say I got $40 of fun from the game, and I haven’t even finished it.
If I was buying it under this system, I’d probably pay less, like maybe $24, because I only realise how much fun it was once I’d played it.
In fact, I wonder how many people had bought it before and used this as a ‘tip jar’ to throw money at the developers.
At the lower end, I find it weird that people would pay $0.01. That’s kinda strange. It’s like throwing a single penny in a collecting tin. If something is worth *anything* to you, then it’s worth $0.10 at the very least surely?
Even if you only play half the first level, that’s ten cents of entertainment right there. 25 years ago we were paying 10p for a single go at a game of space invaders, surely world of goo is worth more than that?
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I only base what I’m willing to pay on something on how much value it actually has. I have an upper limit on what I will pay, not a lower limit. If someone is giving something away for free I will take it. I’ll probably consider buying their next thing at a higher price point though.
If you bought a meal at a restaurant that had a $5 special, but the meal was AMAZING, would you then pay the restaurant more for it? Or would you just be more inclined to coming back?
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But this wasn’t a $5 special. If a restaurant did this pricing model (one did, and had to stop it ebcause of freeloaders), would you *really* have the cheek to pay $0.01 for a meal?
I wouldn’t.
Not unless it actually made me feel ill, which frankly PC games cannot.
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Two reasons:
1: “I already have the game on Windows. I’d like it to run on my Mac as well”
2: “My budget for buying games at the moment is basically zero dollars. I’d love to pay more, but paying one cent and playing the game is a hell of a lot better than paying nothing and not playing it.”
The thing is, we are consumers. We don’t *have* to think about the developers’ livelyhood. If they’re willing to sell us a game for $0.01, we have no moral obligation to pay them more.
You might feel otherwise, because you’re trying to make a living as a developer, but gamers, ordinary people who *play* games, but don’t *make* them don’t. They don’t care about 2dBoy any more than you care about the profitability of Nike when you buy new shoes.
And to be honest, it’s refreshing to see that some developers understand this. It isn’t *all* whining about piracy and cheap-arse gamers and “why won’t you pay as much for my game as I want to charge you?”
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If a restaurant did this pricing model (one did, and had to stop it ebcause of freeloaders)
You shouldn’t denigrate the users of an establishment because the proprietors FAIL at business forever. I would definitely eat that meal for $.01, and would not consider myself a “freeloader”. Unless they were obviously trying to be a charity or something, then I would support them. But 2D Boy is not a charity, they are a business. They made a business decision to give their game away for as little as $.01.
I already paid for WoG, and would personally have given 2D Boy a few bucks b/c they are cool, but there is nothing wrong with someone taking them up on their offer.
Would you really give EA more than a penny if they did this?
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You might feel otherwise, because you’re trying to make a living as a developer, but gamers, ordinary people who *play* games, but don’t *make* them don’t. They don’t care about 2dBoy any more than you care about the profitability of Nike when you buy new shoes.
If you were right, everyone would have bought it for a cent. But you are wrong. The thing is, some people are idiots, some aren’t. Some people don’t care. Some think that, because they are paying, they can do whatever they want.
But you are wrong.
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Umm, reading comprehension?
I never said **everyone** thought like this. I’d have thought this was goddamn obvious, since I pointed out that we exist as exceptions. Of course some people pay more. Many people pay a bit more, a few pay a lot more. But a lot of people pay the lowest amount they can.
I simply said that *many* people don’t think about the developer, any more than they think about the cow when they buy their milk. It’s a product. They want it. They pay what it says on the sign. If the sign says “one cent or more”, then they pay one cent. Not out of cruelty or hatred against the games industry, and not because they’re deeply immoral creatures who all deserve to die in their sleep.
But because the people selling the game told them it was ok.
I think it’s time for a reality check. No one stole the game, no one broke into 2dboy’s offices and robbed their piggy bank.
2d boy went out and said “hey, you can buy our game for as little as one cent”. And a lot of people did exactly that. That’s hardly a criminal action. 2d boy could have set the minimum price at $1, and they’d probably have made more money total. Calling people “idiots” because they pay what it says on the sign is just dumb, ignorant and offensive. Are people idiots if they accept one of the free copies of Windows 7 too, that Microsoft is giving away left and right?
If you give your product away for free, you shouldn’t expect everyone to pay you.
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I don’t really feel the restaurant comparison is very helpful. If a restaurant gives the option to pay a cent for a meal, they lose a significant amount of money for each customer who does so. They still have to pay for the ingredients even if everything else can be considered a fixed cost. The number of people willing to pay a sum which is higher than the cost of producing the meal has to be high enough to offset all the customers who are losing them money. It should be no surprise that this didn’t work.
For each customer who only pays a cent, what does 2D Boy lose? Nothing, more or less. (Obviously thousands of people downloading 63 MB of data from their servers will eventually amount to enough that the cost of it can be measured, but the per-unit cost is effectively zero).
So while I happily paid $20 for the game, I don’t feel that downloading it and paying $0.01 is immoral or being a ‘freeloader’, especially since 2D Boy are giving you the legal option to do so
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Clovis: Regarding the restaurant analogy.. that’s what tips are for. And yes, some people give tips (and I’m not talking about the absurd situation where staff is paid for by tips. That’s just not done, in my opinion. Employees should have a right to regular pay).
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Yeah, I get it. “It’s being sold at $0.01, so there is nothing wrong with buying at that price”.
You simplify things too much. Money isn’t just for buying, it’s also a way to show that you support an idea. Yes, you can pay $0.01, but if you like it and believe it’s “worth playing” and that more games like that should be made, you’re not really helping yourself. This is a world where you vote with your wallet. If that wasn’t so, we wouldn’t have shitty games flooding out of the gate.
Of course, I write this being mindful of what you’ve written, and I agree that there is “no moral obligation” – but I just happen to personally know someone who has paid $0.01, and he admitted that he paid that amount “just to be a dick durr hurr”. Go ahead and defend him, I’ll still think he is an idiot. If you’re feeling like “stealing it at $0.01″, why not just steal it at $0.00? Just go pirate the damn game and be done with it. It’s easier, faster, etc. Hell, you could even stretch it and say it is safer, no credit card number moving around, etc.
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I just happen to personally know someone who has paid $0.01, and he admitted that he paid that amount “just to be a dick durr hurr”. Go ahead and defend him, I’ll still think he is an idiot.
But here’s the thing: so what? He may be an idiot, but he didn’t cost anyone (apart from, it seems, Paypal) anything. He obviously isn’t the sort of person who was ever going to pay any more for the game, and from what you describe it seems unlikely he’s even going to play it.
I don’t defend him, I just think he’s an irrelevance: to 2D Boy, to the games industry in general. Worrying about people like him will only distract you from catering for the people who do appreciate and pay for good games.
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Hmm… That sounds wise.
But I’ll still go buy some orange juice to spill over his notebook. Bwahaha.
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I bought it for $0.01 because I could.
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This also shows that gamers are filthy liars. With only 13% claiming to have spent a few cents and 25% claiming to have spent between 5-10 dollars.
Indie game is advertised on every gaming blog for two weeks and ends up with a rise in sales? Wonders never cease. People buying games wish that games were cheaper? Wowee!
As for the Radiohead thing. Surely the “great ton” they made have something to do with a) a rabid fanbase including some obsessives who would give Yorke their bank details if asked, b) the fact it was direct to seller so no retail commission or producer cut and c) the crapton of advertising it received.
But in the end WoG is a wonderful game and 2D Boy deserves every damn penny. Just don’t hold your breaths that this will work as well on the 5th or 6th or 807th try.
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Where did 25% claim to have spent 5-10 dollars? The survey only shows those who chose to fill it out. Not everyone did. It doesn’t mean anyone lied, just that, as the RPS post points out, in case you read it, those who paid in the 5-10 range were more likely to answer the survey.
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Or those who filled in the questionnaire are more likely to lie about what price they paid. The 2d Boy servers are down so I can’t read the article but I’m fairly certain theres no real way for 2d Boy to link benefactors to their survey responses, unless you regularly post under your paypal account name which you might want to stop doing, so trying to put the two together is pretty impossible. But so few people admitting to paying a few cents would suggest at least some respondents were lying.
It’s also worth pointing out there is no correlation between perceived worth and actual payment.
14% claim to have paid upwards of $10
86% claim the game is worth upwards of $10
I’m sorry but however I slice it we’re coming up shite.
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That doesn’t prove or even imply that anyone is a liar. It’s entirely possible (and I’d say pretty obvious) that more people who paid a higher amount for the game took the time to fill out the survey than people who paid next to nothing. People who don’t care enough to pay aren’t likely to care enough to fill out a survey. Simple as that.
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So your assumptions are obvious, self evident and unquestionable then?
If you’re true then the whole survey is meaningless as the vast majority of consumers (84% paid under $10) are ignored rather than simply sugar coating their responses for the sake of the company they just gave 10p to.
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Not only did they make a good chunk of change with this promotion, but they exposed a whole bunch more people to their game. That’s bound to bring in at least some future business (or even spur sales for the iPhone version of WoG they’re making).
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of course, it wouldn’t be half as successful if everyone was doing it. The publicity is a major factor.
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I wonder what the most any one customer paid for it was? Did some rich fan pay 50? or 100? I can’t find that info in the data / responses
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well, from that graph, at least 4 people paid $50.
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I paid $5, I think.
It’s all right. Nothing to write home about, I feel. I wouldn’t have paid $20 for it, though.
I guess I’m not really a fan of more casual games. I wouldn’t pay any amount of money for Plants vs. Zombies, for example.
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Well, the chart they generated tops out at $50, with 4 sales at that price, so…
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See what you should do: let people pay whatever they want to read Rock Paper Shotgun!
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Oh wait.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/can-i-donate-or-subscribe-to-rps-like-with-money/
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Although personally I would quite like the option to subscribe but choose the amount I pay in my subscription, because I would happily pay more than $2 but can’t be bothered to manually donate on a regular basis.
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Dan: Some take out multiple subscriptions who want to do that. Multiples of 2 dollars.
KG
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I’m going to admit that I bought it for a penny. I feel slightly ashamed about it as I like to support indie devs whenever I can. (In my defence, I was laid off earlier this year and have had to stay off work to look after my son and my disabled wife due to her condition worsening. Our WoW subscriptions are pretty much our entire entertainment budget and I’ve been able to spend approximately £6.50 on games since April.) However I immediately went off to post about on the main forum that I frequent and I know several people went and bought it for at least $5 a piece. Proof that it works.
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I find it funny that the implications of this are bigger for established studios than they are for indie games.
Let me elaborate: I’m fairly sure this worked mostly because of the large amount of good press that World of Goo has received. Most journos who cover indie gaming have harped on and on about how good it is, and how lovely the aesthetics are, and how 2D Boy deserve to be rolling around in piles of cash because World of Goo is just that good. Sadly, an indie studio releasing its first game isn’t going to benefit nearly as much from a similar sale, because it will be lacking the good press at release; only an established studio with critically-acclaimed games can really make the most of this.
By contrast, this is a great way for big studios to get more cash out of old games that aren’t quite abandonware and that were critically-acclaimed masterpieces but never sold very well (I’m thinking of you, Psychonauts and Beyond Good & Evil – or more recently, Mirror’s Edge). With the sort of free publicity that someone like EA can get simply by doing something, this strikes me as a business model with enormous untapped potential and something that good marketing teams should have picked up on ages ago.
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I’m actually wondering what the reason behind that reaction is. Do we just automatically think indie games are somehow inferior to (and thus worth less than) big budget titles because we’ve been ideologically trained to believe that (maybe BECAUSE they traditionally cost less, chicken-egg)?
I mean, they’re generally not even less value for money than big budget titles, what with a lot of current “triple A” titles being 5-10 hours long. The only significant difference is the production values, which seems to mostly show in the graphics. It’s not that the gameplay is any less creative, quite the contrary. And even then, I wouldn’t consider World of Goo’s graphics to be less aesthetically pleasing than, say, the new Call of Duty’s. In other words: I can’t really see a reason for the price difference, let alone a reason why people would try to continuously justify and agree with it. Curious.
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Another reply fail, that was a reaction to Ginger Yellow.
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@Razz and Ginger Yellow: Totally different demographics. Those who love Braid love intellectual/cultural/artistic things, while those who love Madden love the base/primative/lustful things. It’s like comparing
-Black Eyed Peas (make lots of money)
to
-Ben Folds (probably not as much money as BEP)
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Don’t dis lust, dpCapital.
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Careful there, dismissing popular stuff as inherently inferior is rather dangerous territory.
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I’ve no idea what the reason is, mainly because I don’t have that pschology at all. I’d say I mostly play indie games these days, not out of some ideological thing, but because I find they tend to offer better value and because indies make more games in genres I like (eg point and click adventure, turn based strategy). My only guess is that certain gamers have a fairly prejudiced idea of what AAA games offer versus indie games, and simply refuse to believe that two games from those brackets could be even close in value. Yet I’ve seen on here some pretty bizarre price reactions from people who clearly do play a fair amount of indie games.
As to dpCapital’s point, I understand the games attract different demographics, but that doesn’t really explain the differing reactions to price. Why should someone who values intellectual things be more upset by Braid’s relatively low price than someone who values “base” things is about Madden’s relatively high price? With those two examples I suppose you could argue that Madden has replay value through the multiplayer, but plenty of people balk at paying $20, or even $15, for multiplayer indie games.
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Easy, because “a fool and his money are easily parted” and by this i mean that those who play Madden or who love Fergie’s “lady lumps” are half-wits.
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Easy. Yes, it certainly is easy to explain without all that pesky nuance getting in the way.
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Well this demonstrates what we already knew, gamers are cheap-arse.
If you gave them 1 cent You’re better off pirating it, at least you don’t put stress on their servers that way. Christ, it’s abysmal.
Having said that, you’re also looking at a game which has had multiple sales and anyone interested even vaguely most likely had it already.
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No, it’s still better than pirating it. Because if you bought the game for one cent and you like it, you go out and tell your friends and coworkers “I bought this awesome game, you should try it”. And then some of them might buy it.
If you pirated it, then you can go tell your friends “I pirated this awesome game, you should try it”. And then some of them might pirate it.
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An attitude perhaps not of cheap-arsedness, but of gamers considering all publishers as ‘the enemy’, with any ability to get one over on them considered a ‘victory’.
Partly this is down to a standard adolescant ‘me versus the world’ attitude that probably we have all had at one point, but partly this is down to historical business models – ie. removing power from the consumer by controlling the means of distribution, limiting supply, monopolising markets, fixing prices – all of which were very good for maximising profits from a captive audience. It breeds resentment from that audience, who will then seek to undermine the business model and ‘get one over’ on the publishers.
But now that market conditions are different (or rapidly becoming so) just as big businesses’ attempts to cling to the old models are seen as increasingly old-fashioned, perhaps the consumers’ knee-jerk resentment of all publishers is old fahsioned too – as evidenced by trying to shaft a tiny company like 2D Boy with $00.01 payments, which seems like a dick move to me.
I reckon.
Possibly I am projecting too much forethought onto the decision making processes of gamers.
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I don’t think people are trying to shaft anyone. It’s just that not everyone are as hardcore gamers as you and I. When I play L4D, I think “what a good job Valve has done”. When I play World of Goo, I think “amazing what a small indie company like 2d Boy can do”.
When your average gamer plays World of Goo, they think “this is fun. I’d like to play more of this”.
When you see that it is possible to pay $0.01 for WoG, you think “what a rip-off, how are 2dboy ever going to be profitable?”
Everyone else thinks “Ooh nice, I’d love to play this game, and it’s cheap this week. I’ll buy it!”
Most people just don’t *think* about the developer or the publisher. If they see a cheap game they count themselves lucky, they don’t go worrying about stealing the food out of the developers mouth.
And honestly, I don’t really think that is a problem. Of course people would rather get a product at a low price than a high one. That’s how the market works. And if 2d boy can make $100,000 in a week, on a 1-year old game, by accepting and embracing this, then I really don’t think we have any business whining about the cheapness of gamers or the terrible state of the industry.
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Any market, especially of non-necessities, works almost entirely on irrationality in the attitudes of consumers. It’s why advertising works, for example. So speculating about the attitudes of the consumer goes hand in hand with analysing the numbers. But I guess that does prove your point that there’s no point trying to bring in moral questions of what people ‘should’ do into discussions of business, only practical questions of what they will or can-be-persuaded to do.
Though I do reserve the right, outside of this specific discussion, to whine about gamers.
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People suck.
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This is all beside the point – if you offer your product for $0.01 and then a lot of people take you up on that offer, you can’t complain. Nobody forced anyone to do this.
It’s the same thing that really irked me about the whole Radiohead thing.
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Bah. I don’t think it’s wrong for the people who wouldn’t have bought it any other way to pay $0.01. I think it’s pretty cool – you have $1, pay $1. You have $5, pay $5. Whatever.
Its just that a lot of people who bought it at $0.01 “for the lulz”.
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I find their last point most interesting. That to the question “Why did you choose that amount?” the least chosen answer was actually “That’s what the game is worth to me.”
It appears that “pay what you like” does not equate to “pay what you think is fair.”
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What if prostitutes worked from this pricing model?
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They might run into the problem of not being able to provide for 57,000 customers in a week.
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STD epidemic
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@Sunjammer
Yeah, new games are incredibly overpriced in Norway, 500kr (ca. $90 for you non-norwegians) is way too much for a game, but atleast old games are usually cheap, often just 100-200kr (ca. $18-36), so I seldom buy new games unless it’s a sequel to a game I like, or an MMO, but I buy lots of games that’re a few years old.
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Why did my reply show up down here? I know I pressed reply on Sunjammer’s post.
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$90 is the same price as pretty much everyone has to pay for new games in western Europe. It’s not like the Norwegians are a special case.
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Thanks for the information, I don’t know much about game-pricing outside Norway, but I tought it was lower, as stuff in Norway usually cost alot more than in most other countries.
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What? Maybe for console games, PC games are always cheaper.
Modern Warfare 2:
Console: RRP – £54.99($90) Amazon – £44.96 ($73.70)
PC: RRP – £34.99($57.35) Amazon: £28.50 ($46.72)
It would be more in Euro land of course, since the exchange rate to the dollar is better. The reason Norway is even more expensive is definitely the exchange rate, I was in Oslo recently and it is immensely pricey! Very nice though :)
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Console games in Norway cost even more than that, as they usually cost 600kr (ca. $105) when they’re new, but the high price isn’t only because of the low exchange rate, it’s also because Norway is one of the richest (per capita) countries in the world, so we get charged more.
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There’s also the matter of taxes. Somebody’s gotta pay for paternity leave.
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Baboonanza: I’m not sure if you’d noticed, but “western Europe” isn’t limited to the UK. In fact, we’re not actually on the continent (being a bloody island) and not part of the EU. New PC games are still frequently retailing for 60€ in western Europe, which converts to about $90 US (though granted, some releases will go for 50€/$75). :P
Edit: that said, I don't think console games go for any more than 60€ these days, but I haven't really read up on their prices, being a PC gamer.
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Um, the UK is part of the EU, no?
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Yeah, pretty sure the UK is in EU, while Norway isn’t.
And taxes isn’t an all that big part of the price, just 20%, so with no tax it would still be 400kr/72$, so it would still cost more than in the USA.
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I’d love if Valve/Steam did something like this for once, maybe for HL2 or something.
Not that I think it’s needed, I just want more of those graphs.
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Can anyone explain the logic in buying a duplicate copy? Humans can be so utterly dim at times it makes me weep.
Unless they’re returning their old copies for a refund and then buying the new one at 1cent, i’m afraid this logic is bafflingly idiotic.
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They might have purchased it on a different platform first time round. Now they want it on another platform. It’s been released on Wii and Linux as well as PC. I can imagine a lot of Wii players especially having a pop at this on PC.
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Because you can’t play a Wii game on a PC, or a Mac game on Linux.
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Or, people buying it for 1c to try it out legally (rather than risking a pirate copy that might have a virus on it or whatever), then later buying another one for whatever they’ve decided it was worth.
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Actually, John, Dolphin can run quite a few Wii games on PC.
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I would love to see more of these kinds of offers. I think it might only work if you have a small single player type game. Think of all the Xbox Live Arcade stuff that doesn’t get released on PC. Or it could breath life into other big budget games that didn’t sell too well at retail. Mirror’s Edge, for example.
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I went and checked out how much the game actually cost them to make: it was 116K. Compared to that, 100K a year after release does indeed seem really good.
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Magnatune lets you choose anywhere from $5-$18 (or 4-14 euro, or £3 – £10) to buy an album download. They recommend $8 by default. The artist gets 50% of all sales, plain and simple.
I was the first person to spend $18 on an album. As I recall, the label and artist both wrote to me to thank me. :) But then, I’ve only done it once and not bought much else there, so it’s not like I’m their best customer. Just felt like making a musician happy.
I suspect those paying > $20 for World of Goo had similar thoughts running through their heads.
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Magnatune is fantastic. I’ve paid well over the asking price for lots of their albums. I recommend it to all.
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Alex, I think brand recognition plays a huge part.
Considere the album released by Saul Williams. ‘Tis safe to say that he’s a lot less famous than Radiohead. Despite the Nine inch nails promotion he sold 28K copies at regular price. Without Reznor’s backing, I doubt he would have made much.
Are you thinking of trying this out for Eufloria, maybe not now but later ?
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Kunal:
Yeah I’m open to all ideas man, it’s pretty interesting to see people try new business models. We’re in a transitional time where people are just getting used to new ways of buying things and IP ideas are being chucked around. It’s really exciting.
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Aye, but quite a lot of research suggests that people behave totally differently (ethically) depending upon the company they're in, and how "observed" they feel. In a restaurant, with lots of other real people able to tell what you're paying (or, at least, hear the proprietor call you a cheapskate), you'd never pay $0.01. On the internet, nobody you care about knows how much you paid.
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The race to the bottom in Indie pricing was bad enough before the iPhone came along. Don’t encourage it, it destroys good games, innovation, and games with lots of quality content in favour of cheap junk.
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Oops. That was meant to be a direct response to Kelron, above.
Jeff Vogel has a few big posts on his blog about the subject, anyway. Worth a read.
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How does it destroy good games or innovation? 2dBoy made 100k in a week by allowing people to pay less than usual!
It’s not built into the universe that games **MUST** cost at least $50.
All that matters, from the point of view of “good games” or “innovation” is that these are rewarded with profitability.
And games, like all digital media, have the nice property that it doesn’t cost anything to produce ten times as many copies. BMW would go bankrupt if they started selling cars for $5. They’d lose money on every sale.
A game developer never loses money on a sale (unless it’s boxed, and sold in retail of course). It doesn’t cost anything to put a game on your website.
Whether you sell 100k copies at a dollar each, or 1000 copies at $100 each, it’s all the same. That’s not hurting innovation. It’s hurting old-fashioned developers who are stuck in the mindset that games must be expensive. That there is some kind of fee for “entertainment per hour”, that if a game is good for 20 hours, then it should cost 20 times as much as something that’d entertain for one hour.
All that really matters for the games industry as a whole, is 1) how many people buy games, and 2) how much money they spend on average.
If I spend $50 per month on games, then why does it matter whether that money goes to one or to 10 games? Overall, it’ll even out. The games I like get the same amount, on average.
But I’ve also noticed that I tend to spend *more* money when games are cheap. I have to stop and think about it when I have to pay €35 for a game. I might hold off for a month or more before I decide to buy it.
But if I see a handful of fun games at €5 each, then I can easily spend €35 in an afternoon. And still be willing to buy another €5 game tomorrow.
The games industry just has to wake up to the fact that it is no longer all about retail stores and publishers. There is no longer the same requirement that you *must* give away your firstborn to a publisher, or that every sale incurs a fixed, say, $5 cost just in shipping and shelf space at the store, and other “physical” costs. Back in the old days, it’d have been bad business sense to charge $3 for a game. No matter how well it sold, all the money would be eaten up by these middlemen.
Now, you can also sell it on Steam, or on your own website, and then the amount of money per copy because almost irrelevant. What matters is the total amount spent on your game. In the worst case, you’ll have to buy another $5/month webhost account in order to secure bandwidth for people to download the game (that’s what 2dboy did – buy a handful of these cheap-ass accounts, and write a simple script to direct each download to a different account)
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That was in direct response to someone saying that new indie games should release at £2-£5, which is very different to an existing game lowering its price, or this sort of deal. That scheme “works”, if you like a market flooded with MATCH THREE COLOURS, where there’s no useful way to sell enough copies to make enough money to release something significantly innovative and new, because the “standard indie pricepoint” is £2-£5.
You have to sell a LOT of copies to make a profit on a game that isn’t a lazy clone, at that price, and that is very, very hard without massive word of mouth and promotion. Which new releases won’t have.
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I pay $175 a month for the webhost at http://www.positech.co.uk. You can’t have reliable web hosting for $5 a month, even aggregated, which is evidenced by their servers collapsing several times recently.
Its true that the marginal cost of game production is zero, but the fixed costs are still high, even for indies. Full time indies have to pay themselves a salary for the duration a game takes to make. For me, that’s a full years salary, and the corporation tax on top of that.
That adds up. You need to sell a LOT of games to pay it back, especially at $2, with a payment company taking a big chunk of that,
The cheaper games get, the larger the proportion of total game spending goes directly to the coffers of credit card processing companies :(
Someone needs to offer a paypal style micro-transaction system with a close-to zero minimum cost.
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True, of course. And it’s unfortunate if your site goes down. But if the downloads do go down temporarily, it’s probably not the end of the world.
Of course, but the point is that this isn’t dependant on the *number* of copies sold. (Apart from the fees to paypal or CC companies, but those probably aren’t going to make or break your business, unless you’re targeting a price range like $0.50.)
The main issue is still the total income, not the income per copy sold. The fixed costs are high, but they’re fixed, at least, which gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of pricing than, say, dairies or car manufacturers.
Definitely. Or perhaps a fixed monthly cost, or something like that, which isn’t applied per-transaction. As much as I hate the system, perhaps something like Microsoft’s points might be a solution. But it’d have to be so universal that I don’t feel ripped off if I have to buy for $20 points just so I can grab a $2 DLC pack. If such a system existed which allowed me to spend these points on virtually *any* game, then it might be a sensible approach.
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I think a significant question will be average sales 2-3 months from now vs the unknown average before this. Essentially how many of those penny people tell other people about the game. These kind of second or third hand uptakes move very slow. Ive referred movies or games to friends only to literally months or years later have them come to me to tell me how awesome it is. But then that’s the life of a Maven.
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But it might work the opposite way as well. It’s possible that sales for the next couple of months are going to be near zero, because all those who were considering buying the game just did so this week.
Like you say, going to be interesting to see what happens from now on.
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the game didnt really click with me – I certainly havent had my $20/£12 worth out of it, so I didnt even bother getting extra 0.1c copies.
However, I am still sad for them that the pricing isnt skewed a little higher. an average of around $10/£6 would have been a nicer result
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Great to see 2D Boy are considering this experiment a success. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the games industry react, if they do.
I took advantage of this offer. I’d bought the game upon release and thought it was the best game of the year and was raving about it. I chucked them $1.50 this time around because I wanted to support an interesting initiative and I wanted to get a copy I could give to a friend to help cheer them up after a shitty week and let them see the wonderful game I’d told them about before.
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Wow — I’m very impressed it worked out so well for them.Thanks for the math, M. Walker — I would probably just have glanced at the graph, tutted at the 1c people, and gone about my day thinking their experiment wasn’t successful otherwise.
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I’m not sure i agree with all your conclusions, primarily, i think you over estimate the link between the numbers people pick when being asked to choose randomly vs the significance of numbers people are given. i.e. in this case it’s natural to type £20, not £19.99, but a whole different thought process is involved when people see £19.99 vs £20, for selecting numbers we will separate the two into separate categories, when being given them they will be considered identical, marketing departments have played on this logic for a long time, which is why you see games priced at 17.99, people round 19.00 to 20.00 and 18.99 to 19, therefore, 18.99 == 20 whereas 17.99 is genrally considered far enough away not to instantly round up.
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Did they do this with the intention of selling their future games this way?
Because I think people are going to expect it now, it’s a really brave move.
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If people are willing to wait a full year to save 19.98$, more power to them.
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some number crunching of the name-your-goo-price data:
estimated net profit (after paypal cut) ~ $118900
net downloads : 57074
for fun i’ve plotted a
graph comparing cumulative profits with cumulative downloads
some interesting features from the graph:
bottom 40% of the downloads account for 1.5% of the profit
top 30% of the downloads account for 83% of the profit
top 6.7% of the downloads account for 57% of the profit
top 1.5% of the downloads account for 13% of the profit
assumptions made:
* used mean value = (low+high)/2 when approximating values of intervals
* profit = (1.0 – 0.024)*max(0.0, named_price – 0.30)
— ie paypal takes the first 30 cents of the sale, where possible, then 2.4% of the remaining value
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This is really rather interesting. I think there are some easy conclusions to make :
1) People are cheapskates
2) People still want to be honest, or at least there is some value (even 1p) in not having to locate a pirate copy. The interesting question is where that value lies
3) A significant proportion of people realise there is a non zero value to software, but not many recognise the actual development effort and payback required.
Most of it boils down to people not wanting to pay much. 'That's all I can afford right now' – bullshit. 'I like to support the pay what you want model' – more bullshit.
Still, I freely admit the experiment is interesting and will drag people in who wouldn't otherwise be considering it. I wasn't going to look at World of Goo at this stage (too many other games to try, net enough time), but now I'll download the demo and try it. If I really like it, I'll pay full price – if I'm not keen on it, I'll pay anything from about 3 quid upwards.
For me, it's also a factor that it's an independent developer who is producing something new and interesting. If it's something I'm not sure about, or couldn't trial, I wouldn't pay as much. I do like some of the big budget games, but although the independent studios sometimes can't match them in breadth of features and polish, the functionality they provide is often more innovative.
If I ever produce a game and release it, at least this tells me that a special one pound sale is worth it, once the initial rush of sales has finished and the development cost has (hopefully) been met..
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“Most of it boils down to people not wanting to pay much. ‘That’s all I can afford right now’ – bullshit. ‘I like to support the pay what you want model’ – more bullshit.”
Yeah, people are perhaps honest, but not THAT honest. They don’t pay more money to support developers, they pay money to support developers.
Anyways, I think it should be obvious that the real data lays in the fact that games should be around 10$, instead of 20$. But don’t underestimate the fact that a lot of new buyers probably knew the game costed 20$ before this.
Meaning a future game might see a similar thing happening, but then at 5$ instead of 10$ which is already the original price point.
I think the only true conclusion is that people generally would grab any opportunity to buy stuff ‘for cheaper’.
That in itself probably has nothing to do with the original price point being too high. For many people it wasn’t too high, for more people it was.
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“Most of it boils down to people not wanting to pay much. ‘That’s all I can afford right now’ – bullshit. ‘I like to support the pay what you want model’ – more bullshit.”
I payed all the money I had on my bank account at the time, which was 3,72€ (exchanged it was 5,20$), I think. So, take your bullshit and eat it.
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‘That’s all I can afford right now’ – bullshit. ‘I like to support the pay what you want model’ – more bullshit.
You’ve never lived off pasta and water, have you? Or put your money where your mouth was even though you didn’t strictly have to?
Granted, a lot of people would be full of hot air, but a lot of people actually mean what they say, and do their best to practice what they preach.
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How about “This game looks more like $5 of fun than $20 of fun?” You’re kind of missing the whole point here.
If you sell 10x more volume at 1/2 the price, there is MORE MONEY MADE. Pricing should be set in such a way as to ensure the greatest profit for the company–big margins on a tiny amount of sales would be worth very little. This is a consumer product, not a piece of art.
(video games as art notwithstanding, a game isn’t a one-off–my copy is worth exactly the same as yours. The original is not more valuable than a copy)
We don’t need to price based on perceived value of work, we need to price based on total profit, which is frequently greater at lower price.
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What I like best about this story is that the only reason it worked so well is that 2D Boy made an absolutely fantastic game.
So developers, the take home message is: You can make a huge amount of money, $100,000 in a week, just by asking people to pay whatever they want.
All you have to do is make a super-fantastic, high-quality game. Make 3x as many levels as you need and throw away everything that isn’t great. Pour lots of love (not just technology) into the art and music. Make it fun.
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What about buying 100 copies for 1c each?
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Lol, you could make money by reselling them for 5 bucks each. Not bad. ;)
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Ok, so I re-charted this with showing number of sales multiplied by median price per bracket (i.e. (low+high)/2 ) which shows roughly what each price bracket brought in the way of sales.
http://tinyurl.com/ykd9jpy
I didn’t account for the Paypal cut.
$5-$5.99 appears to be a clear winner netting around $40,372.
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Which makes perfect sense. 5$ but also 10$ is both reasonable and affordable for this particular game.
For people that enjoy the game, it might be worth more, but that doesn’t mean people will easily pay such an amount of money.
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its all win for 2d.
The game has been out for over a year. So people that really wanted it, bought it. Now they got all the other people that were interested but wouldnt commit.
Its just more money, and now all those people are going wow, kickass game. So they have that much more exposure for thier next game.
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damn these rich indie developers, im jealous
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Then go make your own game of the year grade indie game.
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2D Boy give me faith in mankind. It’s one thing to argue “people are decent and will pay for things they enjoy” on internet discussions, and quite another to stake your only source of livelihood on the assumption that this is the case.
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They didn’t launch the game with the pay whatever you want campaign.
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I am certain it wouldn’t have been as successful as it is now if they did so. If millions of people will buy your extremely cheap product, would it really matter much if it’s sold at 5$ or 4$, heck no.
Truth is, those numbers of sales can never be as this much if the product is being sold at a significantly higher price point.
All makes perfect sense.
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Err… no, of course they didn’t launch with pay-as-much-as-you-want, but they DID launch with no DRM whatsoever and took the widespread illegal downloading of their game gracefully rather than throwing a tantrum, whinging about the state of the industry and shouting “get off my lawn you bloody pirates!” as they would arguably been well entitled to do. It’s their general attitude I was talking about, because these people aren’t working for a big corporation that’s gonna pay them a salary whether their game sells or not: they’re actually willing to put their own livelihoods at stake on their basis of their faith in their fanbase.
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I bought the OSX version for $5. I’d have paid more, but I already previously bought it at full price for the PC. Now I know that people like me are in the minority, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the new sales were second time buyers.
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I own it, but plan to buy it to gift someone, but I would also like to mention I paid 5 bucks to the Runman Race Around the World people, who have the same model going.
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What about doing it with a monthly sub game with the subscription price being dictated buy the customer, now that would be fascinating. I paid a quid this month cos i didn’t play it that much. Or i loved the new content this month have a tenner!
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I’m amazed no one has mentioned Championship Manager 2010 yet, a game that could be bought pre-release for whatever you liked (minimum £2.51 because of what were claimed to be unavoidable fixed costs) and that is a proper retail game from a non-indie (but non-huge) company.
I’d give someone’s left arm to compare and contrast a graph of how much people paid for that and how much people paid for WoG.
Also of note is that the Championship Manager types ran a paypal donate to a charity cause thingy a couple of weeks after release, in part for people who paid say £3 and, on playing the game, decided they wanted to pay £10 after all.
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Not only that, but there’s a charitable angle here that just isn’t being considered.
There’s a scenario here where a gamer who might not have been able to budget in a game might be able to get this one, and they’ll remember 2DBoy for it. Put yourself in the shoes of someone with an ancient computer that’s luckily just able enough to run the game, who currently can’t budget in many luxuries at all, because their money is that tight.
I’m not in that position now, but I have been, yes, and I may be again one day, who knows? The thing is, people are pious, snotty, white picket fence, Perfect World idiots (yes, this might even include you, dear reader) who can’t wrap their mind a round the concept that even £15 may be an insurmountable mountain of price for those who’ve fallen upon hard times.
Now this isn’t an argument for piracy, so let’s not go there, but what I’m saying is that it’s a lost sale. That gamer will just forget about the game and move on. Though what if a more generous approach were taken? For those who find themselves homeless and short of food, there are shelters and restaurants that offer ‘pay what you can’ schemes.
Here’s what I’m positing: Not everyone is going to have the cavalier attitude of “YES I CAN PAY THAT MA’AM, MONEY IS NO OBJECT, I HAVE A COWBOY HAT AND AN OIL RIG!”, there are people who’re going to be locked into various monetary brackets for their luxuries, or won’t even be able to afford luxuries at all. However, what if even luxuries were offered on a ‘pay what you can’ basis?
That’s an interesting idea, isn’t it? Not only that, that’s what 2DBoy have done, wittingly or not.
Suddenly, a luxury is put into the range of someone who might not be able to factor normal priced luxuries into their budget. They can dust off their PC and play World of Goo. You’d be surprised how many people I know who fall into this category, and were this deal to continue, I’d even pass the news on to them and explain that there’s no necessity to pay a large amount of money.
Now, with a game that requires a beefy PC, putting a £15-£40 price tag on it isn’t any loss to the developer, since the person who has a beefy enough PC to run their game can probably afford their price. But what if you have a game that can run on older computers? Then you open yourself up to another market who might buy your game, if they could afford it.
I’m betting that a number of people who paid $1-$2 are those who simply couldn’t afford the full price but are happy to pay something. And perhaps this could even be a model for indie games in future, spreading the wisdom that if your game can run on a variety of computers, you could go beyond simply selling a game, to providing a game to those who otherwise might not enjoy it.
And that’s really kind of brilliant, isn’t it?
Now I’m going to go and point this out to a few people who might not normally be able to afford $20 (£15) to spend on a game, but they could probably throw $1-$5 into that hat.
If there’s onoe last thing i have to say, it’s: Good on you, 2DBoy, good on you.
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2D Boy had me when they released their libraries (I bought WoG but didn’t really play it until I started seeing their code framework… geek?). Now this… you know, I kinda hope they start spending their time writing books about game development and just keep on coming up with compelling reasons for new segments of people to buy World of Goo. It’s such a fantastic game.
Be interesting to see the results from the extension of the sale, though.
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“Oh, and 10% of those responding were people who had pirated it and now wanted to pay. Shout that out loud in the street.”
Yes, but were all pirates aware of how a game they had pirated probably over a year ago, came available for much less money, virtually free? I think that percentage doesn’t line up with 10% of all pirates at all, let alone the fact that many pirates might argue… meh, 1ct or free, who gives.
I think the whole claim that piracy means less profit, is simply proven to be untrue.
It seems more to me that lots of people weren’t planning on buying in the first place and many of them probably were not even pirates. Lots of them still won’t buy even if it costs them 1ct.
Only cocky big publishers truly believe that if there’s a million people, a million people should pay or else will pirate. Nutters.
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Wallstreet comfirms that independant developer 2D-Boy (2DB) continues to disappoint with sales beneath the 3 million mark. The DOW continues to dwindle.
In the meantime JPMorgan Chase reports record profits of $3.6 billion! The money was acquired by borrowing money from the government for 0% and lending it back at them at 3% interest.
We’ll have to leave it there.
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They should have set the minimum price at 5 cents and seen what would have happened. Presumably less than 4 out of 5 of the extreme cheapskates would have been deterred, in which case they would have made much more off of their largest buying group.
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Of course, they aren’t actually doing anybody a favour here – they are offering it for nothing in return for a massive amount of free advertising, in the hope that some (sappy, idealistic) people will buy into it and pay significantly more than they need to, which they apparently did.
This idea works as a one-off. If this happened regularly, it would become a non-issue, the free advertising would dry up and people would start to take it for granted (and the average price paid would gradually fall towards the minimum).
Trying to extrapolate anything meaningful from this is hopeless. All we have learned is: advertising still works, $20 is $18 too much for a year old indie game and that a tiny minority of pirates are prepared to pay ~$2 for something a full year after we (the paying customer) already subsidised their copy. Go them.
I suspect if they had just dropped the price to a flat $2 they would have achieved similar results, although we’d still be ignoring the probably-not-insignificant bandwidth costs and fees.
Next time 2D release a game I’ll know to wait until they decide to give it away.
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I was about to write exactly everything you say.
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I agree with a lot of that, apart from the ‘$20 is too much for a year old indie game’ thing, both in principle (who cares how old a game is, its worth what it represents in fun to you) and in practice (as someone who sells Democracy 2 for $20 and still sells copies every day, more than a year after launch)
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Nice claims, but they haven’t been proven yet. Such offers aren’t ordinary for now so we don’t know. It might play out that way, sure.
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cliffski: There is of course something of a contradiction in your position here.
In principle people should pay whatever a game is worth to them, but in practice if someone wants to play Democracy 2 they have to pay whatever you think the game should be worth to them. Which is your right as the game’s developer of course.
In general, the price of games, DVDs etc goes down over time, because after a year the vast majority of people for whom your game had a value of $20 have already bought it, and all you’re doing by keeping it at the same price point is losing potential sales from people for whom it has a value of, say, $10. Which is why I can now buy GTA4 for my Xbox 360 for £15 when a year ago it would have cost £40.
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“I’m a cynical, old codger. Also, instead of being happy about a small indie dev making loads of money, I’m going to feel insulted that some people got it cheaper than me. Thus, paradoxically, I need to grow up.”
Fixed that for you, Jimbo.
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@Dan I like the idea of games reducing in price until they reach a point at which every person’s value is met (trading off time versus price). However, that of course assumes your entire audience knows of the product from day one and is engaged in the process.
While I would say that it would be hard to consider yourself a gamer if you have not heard of WoG, the same is not true of Democracy 2 (no offence intended). While there was probably a spike of purchases at launch, my guess is Cliffski sees a steady trickle/stream of purchases each month. These people are presumably coming across Democracy 2 and deciding $20 is good value. There is still a significant portion of the gaming population who have yet to evaluate Democrary2/$20 and choose to buy it or not.
That’s not to say a price drop wouldn’t result in more sakes overall, but I don’t think you can say the $20 buyers are tapped out.
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I meant $20 is too high a price point after that amount of time. Obviously some people will still pay that, some even chose to pay $50 (I suspect those people are hugging a whale or something as we speak). I didn’t mean to suggest those games aren’t worth $20, only that after so long on the market, virtually everybody that is prepared to pay that will have done so already.
I’m not trying to tell you your business here; but if you (they, whoever) dropped your game from $20 to $2 for a week and could get this amount of free publicity, you would probably see at least ten-fold increase in sales. Whether or not that would equate to a greater profit I couldn’t say. The real problem is that once that week is over, you have pretty much exhausted your market – those people that picked it up for $2 might have sooner or later been prepared to pay $10 or $5.
Out of curiosity, how did the D2D Indie Bundle week compare (in terms of profit) to the regular ~$20 week immediately beforehand? Favourably? Was there a noticable drop in sales between the immediate pre-sale week and the post-sale week? Feel free not to answer if you don’t want to.
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Haha, I can’t deny there is definitely an element of that Psycho, though I’m not annoyed at 2D Boy, more with everybody else for buying into it. I’m indifferent towards 2D; they are a business acting like a business and evidently making a ton of money in the process – which part of that requires consumers to start jumping for joy and fawning all over them?
Reporting like “2D Boy clearly loves its fans. Not only did it put World of Goo on sale for whatever you wanted to pay, but now the developer is extending the sale for another five days.”, does irritate me somewhat. Their ‘fans’ are the single group that does not benefit from this promotion in any way. It’s like being an existing subscriber and being told that super-duper offer x does not apply to existing subscribers. In any other industry most people would consider that rage-inducing, but in the Indie gaming industry (which it is, check out those profits) we’re supposed to start holding hands and rejoicing. If they wanna ‘celebrate with their fans’ or whatever then send us back half of whatever we already paid for it.
Promotions like this rely entirely on the free advertising they get from sites like RPS; I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility to suggest that the guys at 2D might be savvy enough businessmen to understand that and factor it into their business plan. They knew for a certainty that a) everybody would cover it and, b) that it would be covered from an extremely generous perspective. There was zero risk in this promotion.
2D were smart to implement it, RPS have a duty to report it to their readers and we, as consumers, should be smart enough to see through it, select $0.01 and help ourselves to a pretty good game. Anybody that thinks stumping up more will cause this to catch on and become a viable, commonly used business model is, I think, naive in the extreme.
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“2D were smart to implement it, RPS have a duty to report it to their readers and we, as consumers, should be smart enough to see through it, select $0.01 and help ourselves to a pretty good game.”
So we should be ungrateful leeches on society?
Gotcha
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2D Boy aren’t society, they are a business like any other. They aren’t doing this for the fuzzy tummy feelings you guys have for them. They ran a promotion and their week-on-week profit went through the roof – I’m having trouble understanding how that can be seen as them giving a gift which I (or anybody) should be grateful for.
If they want to manipulate (leverage?) the press in order to turn a profit, then I have no problem with somebody calling their bluff and paying the minimum.
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There is no clear dividing line between “society” and “a business”? Plenty of members of society (eg nurses, teachers) ‘do stuff for money’, which is when you get down to it identical to “a business”. ‘Businesses’ sometimes do stuff for free – same as individual volunteers. Your analysis is reductive and flawed.
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Yes, how *dare* they advertise!
How *dare* they try to turn a profit!
How *dare* they get some free promotion!
How *dare* someone try something different, and meet with success!
How *dare* people be glad that an indie developer met with success!
(Also, businesses are part of society, genius.)
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‘Society’ and ‘Business’ are not synonyms, you can’t pretend they are just to back up your pithy comment above. Well, you can if you like I suppose. If you want to elaborate on how paying exactly what the company said you could pay makes you a ‘leech on society’ then go ahead. It seems to me that any loss incurred from paying $0.01 will be entirely limited to the individual business that made the offer in the first place – not society as a whole.
Why are you any happier about 2D Boy making a massive profit than any other developer? Why do we as a community feel the need to pretend a business taking $100k in one week was some kind of happy accident on their part? Why can’t we just say “Hey, manipulating the market to their advantage like that was pretty damn smart!”?
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I never said businesses and society are synonyms. I said one is an aspect of the other.
I am happy that someone met with success, because my sole source of happiness isn’t childish schadenfreude.
You are a leech on society, because you repayed kindness with exploitation.
You are a child, because your arguments are increasingly looking like “BUSINESSES ARE BAD, OH HOW I HATE THEM GRRRRR.”
It’s comical, really.
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Should have released it as a torrent that way they wouldn't have had to pay any bandwidth fees ;)
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How many who bought it for 1-99 cents would’ve bought it if $1 had been the minimum price, I wonder?
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I ran the numbers in my head before finishing the article, and they indeed made about $100,000 dollars by a conservative estimate. So they are certainly justified in making a note: “huge success”. But one thing that’s interesting about this is that the people who paid 1 cent contributed a total of 168 dollars, a negligible fraction of the total income. Buying the game for 1 cent makes virtually no difference from pirating it.
It makes me wonder what the numbers would’ve looked like if they’d capped the minimum donation at one dollar. If every one-cent payer bought it at that price, 168 dollars becomes about 17,000 dollars. But how many people who bought it for one cent would be willing to pay one dollar? Is it an appreciable fraction? Would people who payed one, five, or twenty dollars have been less likely to buy it at those prices if they hadn’t had the option to pay one cent? Was the publicity generated by the offer less than what would’ve come from capping the minimum at a dollar? Would this work as well a second time?
There are all kinds of questions to be answered, and one way to answer them: have more pay-what-you-want deals!
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‘Makes no difference’ in financial terms maybe, but there are plenty of people who will have ‘evangelised’ this software and got it onto friends and relatives computers who would not have done so with pirated software. They will have got second copies – which they wouldn’t have done with pirated software.
It will benefit 2DBoy because it will increase the fanbase for their next game and will drive more traffic towards their website (they host user-made levels). It gives them publicity for current and future games and more chance of getting extra funding for future projects. Having a provable and legal installed base will benefit them as a business in the eyes of investors/accountants etc. in a way that piracy doesn’t.
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It’s difficult to extract any long term benefit of this strategy from the figures. Since 2DBoy announced that this offer was short-term, I imagine there was a large sales rush.
It’d be really interesting to see what the figures would be like over an extended period. Over a longer term I’d expect the total volume of sales will normalise somewhat, but that the trend of prices paid will stay similar – profits wouldn’t be particularly good as there just wouldn’t be enough people paying the larger costs to cover those paying next to nothing.
It could be a great strategy for shorter period sales or maybe even for launches, now that would be brave! Still, it represents a great way to revive a great game, and to make it available to those who wouldn’t normally be able to afford it.
Did Radiohead ever publish their figures like this?
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@Urthman: You are wise beyond your anonymous blog commenting venue.
This same success could easily be repeated by any company with a venerable, quality game. It’s just that Ron and Kyle are indie and therefore don’t have a wall of bureaucracy to scale before implementing. Bam, done, and now they can vacation in the Bahamas.
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If they released this as an offical torrent file and seeded it just long enough for it to build some seeds up then stop. It would cost them nothing in bandwidth past those first few people . (maybe if you paid 10-20 dollars you could download it directly from them)
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I just hope they use all that money to create new great indie games.
Haven’t heard about any new projects they started in the last year.
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I'm sure there are people who genuinely can't pay more than a small amount of money, however what I'm saying is that I don't think these are the majority and that more often than not it's a euphemism for 'I'd rather spend it on something else'. Effectively, that boils down to 'I think it's worth this' or at the very least 'I think something else in my life is worth more' – which isn't actually the same thing as 'I can't spend more on this'.
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‘you can begin to see why 2D BOY describe it as a “huge success”.’
I’m making a note here: this was a triumph.
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That last fact blows me away. ~$50,000 each for this “experiment”.
Despite the rather predictable number of people paying $0.01 something about this story makes me feel good and proud to be a PC gamer. And even $0.01 > $0.00.
2D BOY is/are my hero/heroes.
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$0.01 is exactly the same as $0.00, or any amount up to roughly $0.30, in this case, in terms of the profit seen by 2d boy after paypal’s cut : zero. it might be marginally more grim factoring in their server costs.
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Curse you, PayPal! I wail and gnash my teeth at thee!
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Eh, I never pirated the game, and I paid $15 for it during the sale. I don’t have a large budget for games, and that was a workable compromise for me between the $10 I felt I could easily afford and the $20 the developer set as the standard price.
The conclusion you’ve come to – that a bunch of cheapskates are now cashing in on a game you and other early adopters “subsidized” – is overly cynical, and just as much a matter of seeing what you want to in this single set of data as is the contention that this is a revelatory, model-changing occasion. Without more data points, it’s just too early to come to any firm conclusion about what this means. Would the effectiveness of this type of sale diminish if it became more common? Maybe. Would developers consistently convert a lot more potential paying customers (if at a lower price than “usual”)? Also possible. We just don’t know right now. All we do know for sure is that 2D Boy netted a pretty nice sum this week. Until and unless it stops working, why stop doing it?
You say that they might have gotten similar results with a fixed price reduction to $2. Possible, but why throw away the option for people to give you more? Assuming PayPal supports it, simply upping the minimum “donation” to $2 seems like a better plan to me. I actually wondered why 2D Boy didn’t do that on this occasion while I was considering my purchase, but I suspect they just wanted to run the experiment with as wide-open a price range as possible.
Anyway, I’m glad they did it, and I hope we see more sales of this type from other developers. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating experiment.
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Argh, dammit, that was supposed to be a reply to Jimbo’s post above. Not sure what went wrong there.
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I paid 5 bucks for it, and never got an e-mail…
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Drop them an email?
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Ok, the e-mail is here. Kinda wish there was a serial so I could add it on Steam…
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I wish they had a checkbox for “I already bought the game on another platform” on the order form. It would have been interesting to see how many of those <$5 purchases are from people who bought it on Wii or some other console.
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Does anyone know how much of this money got eaten up by Paypal and hosting fees? I’ve seen one person claim that they ended up in the red, but they didn’t back up their claim at all.
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I remember when the Radiohead album came out, their servers clogged and it was taking forever to download. I had only pledged one penny so i thought i’d look up a pirated copy, just so i could grab it before i went to work. On the pirate forums i remember laughing out loud at people being appalled by people pirating something that was essentially free. And there was a lot of narky pirate types saying how they resented HAVING TO PAY JUST ONE LITTLE PENNY. It’s a funny old world i guess…
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yes i have put my money where my mouth is. if youre living off pasta there are very few people who would waste money on computer games ime. 9 times out of 10 it means they want to use the money on something else non essential – nothing wrong with that or getting something for free but its often something people are not completely honest about
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@Pantsman
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-receiving-fees-outside
(which apply to donations as well)
http://thefeecalculator.com/
Though I don’t know if they had some special merchant account to bypass the $0.30 fee per transaction.
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This model allows for a free trial; if you like it you can pay something for it. If you don’t like it, don’t pay and erase it. I see nothing wrong with those two positions; it’s the third possibility, like it/keep it/don’t pay, that offends. Truth is, the developers set it up that way, so they have no grounds for complaint.
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I absolutely agree.
There have been times in the past where I have wanted to purchase a game/DVD/album/book/whatever, either on a whim or as a long desired purchase, and I just couldn’t afford it at the time. By the time that I had enough to buy it I will have most likely found something else to spend the money on and the previous purchase will be all but forgotten. They’ve lost a sale from me, and likely countless others.
If I were given the opportunity to pay a smaller amount then I likely would have, and they would have more money from me than they would have if I were forced to pay full price and couldn’t. Let’s remember that when it comes to games, once the software is completed it costs nothing further to manufacture beyond a minimal cost to pay for the DVD/case/manual or the download server, and in that case they lose nothing from letting me pay £1, £5, £10, etc. and feeling incredibly thankful for the affordable entertainment as opposed to paying nothing at all and forgetting them.
I would likely never have played World of Goo if it weren’t for this offer, and as a result I convinced several of my friends to buy the game also and I now have a very high opinion of 2DBoy and will likely buy any future games from them without a second thought. Having had it on sale for a year and gotten most of their full price purchases out of the way, this was an incredible way to squeeze a bit of extra profit from their game whilst keeping public opinions of them very positive.
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Personally I think they'd have been better off like some have said with a 1$ min, or even better make it the lowest amount you can pay for them to break even with paypal fees and download bandwidth and still make 1 penny ;P That way you're giving them 1 cent profit and getting the game on the cheep, I'm not sure how much money that would have to be.
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if everyone is an idiot like you jimbo. then 2d would not be in business anymore. If you arent willing to pay for a product, they wont make it. So had people not bought it in the first place, you wouldnt even get the chance to pay .01 for it later, or even have a chance to buy a future product from these guys.
Pay something fair for it, and be part of the solution, not the problem.
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I already bought it ages ago as it happens, but there is nothing idiotic about the consumer paying the advertised price. If they’re making a loss at $0.01 then they should have advertised above break-even like every other company.
This isn’t the Soviet Union; if you want something you can’t afford then you work harder, longer or smarter so that you can afford it – you don’t simply ‘pay what you can afford’ and have the difference subsidised by another consumer. I don’t consider that to be a ‘fairer’ model at all, I consider it further encouragement for people to expect something for nothing – which we have more than enough of already.
If this business model ever became common (which, thankfully, it never will) then I will consistently pay the minimum until people snap out of the fantasyland they inhabit and start treating games like any other commercial product.
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So you will abuse, exploit the system to prove that the system is wrong? Isn’t that somehow ironic?
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Makes me sad to see lots of people only pay $0.01.
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A lot of posters seem very conservative, but I think the internet grants media like games a whole new field of financial possibilities, and this remains largely unexplored. So, Jimbo and Tei I sort of see where you are coming from. If this happened regularly the free advertising would evaporate etc, but this could just be a step towards a fairer future with alternative payment methods. This is just a prototype method, not fully developed, just a little prod at a new direction. Stifling it now is surely to disgard any move towards a fairer world for gamers.
It’s success should not be understated because it’s another demonstration of a viable alternative to the one-off payment method. This will make publishers more willing to explore in this area. Remember, this hasn’t really been done in history before- there could be something big out there.
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to point out what should be obvious the fact someone is poor and cant afford the price does not mean its a good idea to sell at a quid as that kills the tenner market . What the figures tell us is that once a tenner sales dry up its probably worth starting at a quid. personally id probably sell half the game for a couple of quid with an option for the other half at two quid more..
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Paying .01 isn't taking advantage of anything other than the price at which they are selling their product, no one forced them to sell it that low. Are you taking advantage of other shoppers at a food store if you buy the dented cans for half as much as the rest of them? All this is doing is allowing 2d boy to squeeze every last penny out of their product , literally ;P Also in the future they'll be able to say, "look, we sold X number of copies of our game" when they're making their next game, without saying that a lot of thoese sales were for 1 cent :P
If they offer the game for a penny then no one should feel guilty for buying it for a penny. If you want to pay more than's fine as well but at that point it is more showing support than anything else.
I wouldn't be surprised however if a small number of people are angry that they paid 20 bucks for a game and now the same game is on sale for .01 , that would irk me a bit depending on how long ago I baught it.
Shadowcat “It hammers at my retinas like an evil woodpecker of pure energy”
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That implies that you would have bought the game for a higher price than it is worth to you. Why would you do that? (It’s a provocative question, of course ;-))
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Far as I can see, paying a penny if it’s all you can spare at the time is perfectly legitimate. 2d boy’s being nice and giving a gift, not a crime to take them up on it.
I mean, it’s nicer to pay what it’s worth, but paypal won’t accept the essence of happiness and beauty as payment. Lazy bastards.
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He's just being helpful really, showing the company in question how wrong they are to offer their product at any price. It says a lot that I won't even buy World of goo for 1 penny.
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To whom did you adress this answer? :-/
If to me: No, I think it’s the opposite of helpful. If there wouldn’t be guys trying to prove the system wrong than the system would just work fine. Okay, it’s probably an overstatement, but at least it would work better. So…
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But what if 2d boy set their limit for 1 cent sales at 17,999 sales , anything over that and they’d never do it again. Without him buying that last 1 cent Goo Boy to push it over to 18,000 sales they’d never learn ;P I’m being silly of course.
Even if guys weren’t out there trying to prove the system wrong there would still be plenty of people out there proving the system wrong without realizing it or doing it on purpose, just taking advantage where they can. (Who in their right mind would pass up a game for a penny if they were strapped for cash and needed a new game fix, honestly? : ) Hopefully this will pay off for them and when they sell their next game, whatever that might be these people will remember they got World of Goo for a penny and spend full price on their next game.
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“It says a lot that I won’t even buy World of goo for 1 penny.”
All I can extrapolate from that is that you have no soul :|
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Or that I don’t even have a penny, or that I like the game so little that I wouldn’t waste a penny on it if I had it (This part isn’t true I like the game)
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That's a bit cynical, Jimbo. Even some of the more hard nosed businesses fundamentally want their customers to be happy, even if the fuzzy tummy feelings only go so far.
It's pretty obvious why they did it – their product has been a success, their sales are dropping off, and they took a punt to check how to position their next product.
The risk was not zero – but it's a careful gamble, certainly. It'll have destroyed their full price sales for quite some time. They also must have expected a large amount of 0.01$ sales which boils down to being nice to the fans, whether they wanted to or not.
Still, it's not as if they are a business like EA (even though EA's financials are apparently dire..). If you believe the articles, two guys (plus a QA guy of some sort) quit their day jobs and bet a not insubstantial amount of money on something original which deserves supporting. Unless of course you fancy running up the conspiracy theory : split EA into lots of 'indie' businesses and aggregate all the earnings together..
Still, I agree with the rest of your above post – games *are* a commercial product, and the something for nothing culture does not help.
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I think it’s significant that this was tried on the first anniversary of WoG’s release, as well as being a time-limited offer. At one year, the game is old enough to have likely eaten through the bulk of initial buyers, yet young enough to still be enticing to new buyers. The anniversary sale drums up promotion and catches a bunch of those who knew about the game, but weren’t impressed enough to purchase it on release. The renewed interest and renewed player base should foster further interest that leaks outside the time-limited offer, putting a hump in the long tail. As an engineer, that sounds like good marketing strategy to me. Even if it became a regular thing for a game to go pay-what-you-will after a year, the above should still apply. Only the most patient, disciplined, and frugal would wait a year to play a game they really, truly wanted.
(I didn’t bother purchasing this when it first came out; the demo suggested it wasn’t a game I’d fully enjoy. With this sale, I thought I’d take a gamble and see what all the praise was about, since the demo seemed to fail at capturing that aspect. My initial disinterest was justified, and I didn’t lose out on other purchases to find out. At $5, it’s a less consequential loss to me, more a ticket to see where 2D-Boy were going with this than a full investment in its capacity to entertain. $5 is more than $0, and I’m more likely to talk about it: +1 2D-Boy.)
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Actually, my backlog of games that I really, truly want to play is at least a year long.
I really, truly want to play Batman:Arkham, Red Faction Guerilla, Risen, and Torchlight, but by the time I finish Oblivion, Gothic 3, King’s Bounty, Tomb Raider Underworld, Mercenaries 2, Titan Quest, Lego Star Wars, Beyond Good and Evil, Thief 3, Braid, Far Cry 2, MIrror’s Edge, Penny Arcade Adventures, and all the other games that are ahead in the queue, it’ll be a year later and they’ll all be about half price.
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The Steam spike is simply confirmation that people are INSANE
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That is obvious, but not enough. Is a confirmation that just logic can’t help you manage people. You need experience, since people will do some “ilogic” things.
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I still want my profanity pack!
Not because i think it will be good (it would rather negate the charm of the game in my mind) but because it was promised. I pre ordered before any of this malarkey started and I’d quite like to get what I ordered! it’s just the principal of it.
I’m glad this experiment went well for the guys.
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Jimbo: Gotta say you seem pretty naive if you don’t think *real* businesses never give away product for free.
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Just wanted to say thanks. I got the Windows version during last year’s Steam Holiday Sale for five bucks. I paid five more here to have the Mac and Linux versions.
I just wanted you to know I was already looking to buy the game again at a discounted price. $20 Was just a bit high for me and this sale hit at the right time. I was extremely happy when this popped up because I could get the game and have the money go to the right people.
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Well, I bought it once (for the 1st time) at $3 and, after playing it for a while bought it for $6 for my girlfriend’s birthday present. I don’t see myself as some kind of idealistic communist for buying the game for a low price or even that I was being taken advantage of buy the 2D Boy corporate monster… I wasn’t “paying what I could afford” or “paying what I thought it was worth” I just payed what I wanted to. Whether it catches on or not, I don’t care, I’m just happy I got a quality game at a bargain pirce. Which is how I imagine a good number of people feel.
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It's also worth pointing out for those people pushing the 'it's just a business decision' angle, that although it's arguable that releasing it for any cost you're willing to pay is good for marketing, releasing the sales figures probably isn't..
For anyone other than an indie games developer, people who want to be indie games developers or a minority of people interested in the industry, it's simply not of interest.
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Not only that, but let’s just say it’s nothing but a business decision. Given the amount of goodwill it’s generating and the amount of additional profit it seems to have generated, one has to deal with the apparent fact that sometimes doing right by the customer is a really, really good business decision. Shocking, I know, but one of the finest things about PC gaming right now is that a lot of these indie projects are giving us proof positive that putting the customer first can make you a ton of cash, provided you do it right. Not very fashionably cynical, I suppose, but the truth is the truth.
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I already had a copy ($30 steam indie pack!) but I bought two more – one because my WoG on Steam works poorly in offline mode, and one for my brother. One at $1 and one at $5.
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When I worked in retail I was told that $8.99 is the price where products go to die. People prefer to pay either $10 or $7 but not $8-9.
Totally weird but it might explain why people are using round numbers.
I bought it at $20 (before the sale). World of Goo is better than some games I’ve payed $100 for.
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By “go to die”, you mean actual reduced sales? Interesting.
The reason there are spikes at the round numbers in this case (presumably) is that people are specifically being asked to put in a number, and they’re going to pick something round.
But if you’re the one setting the price, and you price a $10 game at $9, logic would say that the only thing you’re doing there is short-changing yourself by $1 per copy — not actually reducing sales.
If sales are actually being reduced between $7 and $10, I think that’s pretty fascinating. I would tend to assume it’s because people judge a product by its price — and if it’s not at a well-established price point like $10, they assume they’re being ripped off for buying a $7 game at $9?
Reminds me of how a lot of people don’t trust free software (as in FOSS) because they assume it can’t be as good as the “real” stuff.
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I wasn’t aware that there was a paypal fee on the purchases in this sale at all, since the payment form was set up as a “donation” link. I would’ve sent 30c extra to cover that on my own if I knew.
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If you want more graphs, I’ve made some:
http://blog.mostlytigerproof.com/2009/10/21/radiohead-model-applied-to-world-of-goo/
I’ve looked into what price point got the most revenue, which reasons people use for price selection at different price points, and also what kind of correlation there is between what people think it’s worth and what they actually paid.
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Interesting analysis. With respect to the “got it on another platform” question, you’re neglecting all the people that bought it on Steam, but took this opportunity to pick up Mac and Linux versions (or just a DRM-free version, for that matter).
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Do you get to play the game before you pay? I’m assuming you do
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Don’t forget that if you download on the wii, you have no choice but to pay the 1500 points for it, this will squew the figures slightly…
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I wish all the stores would learn from this and stop with the prices like 9.99 (WHAT THE HELL???)
I’m happy to see Ron and Kyle having good sales :] they really deserve to get money for one of the best games made.
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You can download the demo version of it to check out what the gameplay is like. I didn’t try it too long before thinking my kids (ages 9-11) would like to try it out, and sprung for it for $5. I know that’s on the cheap side, but if the kids like it on the PC, we’ll get the WiiWare version as well.
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because 2d is making loads of money by also helping the consumer. Rather than going the Infinity ward route and charging pc users $60 instead of the usual $50, in an attempt to make more money. Nothing wrong with making more money, unless you do it at the expense of the people who pay your bills. Devs need to remember they are nothing without thier customers.
Honestly take your pick of the 2. Which one would you rather have?
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Got here and seen your stuff – way to go!
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A lot of wrong conclusions made in this article. “People prefer to pay round numbers for stuff” – this doesn’t mean pricing a software at $10 rather than $9.99 is a good idea, it just means that when people are picking numbers, they tend to pick more “normal” or “common” numbers rather than weird numbers like $7 or $9. When you’re pricing a product, $9.99 still looks cheaper than $10, and it will still probably sell better at that price (at least, marketers seem to think so).
The other thing is you refer to the buyers in the $1-$1.99 bracket as paying 2 dollars. (“Until you multiply 15,797 by 2, and put a dollar sign in front of it…”) In fact I would bet like 99% of them paid $1. Who’s going to pay $1.99?
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I saw this “deal” listed on at least two of those discount roundup blogs (dealhacker, sickdeals, etc) and the headlines read “blah blah video game PC – $.01″
You only learned that you could pay any amount later on in the process, long after most people have already “caught on” that they could get away with paying next to nothing & resolved to do that.
I think this was all in the way it was spread around the internet.
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I wonder if they fully exhausted the market for the game this way. I.e. there are no more customers who will buy it
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Wealth isn’t just about money– getting tens of thousands of people to play your game even for a penny, who would otherwise neither pay your game nor give you any money at all, is great. It puts your name out there, gives you brand recognition. I suspect the best indie game devs aren’t in it just for the $$$, they enjoy sharing their game with the world, and this is a great way to share it.
Incidentally, about the paypal fees, it would be pretty trivial to rig it so people who chose <30 cents don't get processed at all. And PayPal surely has safeguards against charging people more than the transaction itself, otherwise you could surf the net on a wild bankrupting spree making repeated $.01 "donations" to people you hate.
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I for one would never pay EA anything since they’re the biggest example of being a sellout of game publisher/distributor. They used to be awesome, making great games themselves…
Either way, I personaly think this kind of payment system only works for the smaller, or even indie, developers.
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