Comments on: World Of Goo Sale Offers Fascinating Results

By: milK

milK — Tue, 25 May 2010 12:06:51 +0000

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.

By: Glowing Face Man

Glowing Face Man — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 07:52:52 +0000

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.

By: Igor

Igor — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:22:38 +0000

I wonder if they fully exhausted the market for the game this way. I.e. there are no more customers who will buy it

By: invisiblejesus

invisiblejesus — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:58:27 +0000

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.

By: Chaely

Chaely — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:41:19 +0000

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.

By: Simon

Simon — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:55:03 +0000

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?

By: texas holdem games

texas holdem games — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:15:16 +0000

Got here and seen your stuff – way to go!

By: Hug_dealer

Hug_dealer — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:19:07 +0000

Anonymous Coward said:
‘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!”?

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?

By: Jason Roysdon

Jason Roysdon — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:08:35 +0000

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.

By: Psychopomp

Psychopomp — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:28:43 +0000

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.

By: Railick

Railick — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:12:45 +0000

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)

By: Jimbo

Jimbo — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:11:06 +0000

‘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!”?