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Comment by matthooks | Hacker News Reader

Hey guys,

I developed this site. I'll be around for a little while if you have any tech questions.

Edit: Please note that this pay what you can was just for the holiday-related expansion set, not the full game.

One comment: Myself and others were initially confused by the layout of the page into thinking that CAH had turned a massive loss. It's only when you get to the bottom that there was any indication of sales.

That was my thinking as well. I saw the giant, red negative numbers and my initial reaction was "Oh, no."

Me as well, the red text made me think they had just lost massive amounts of money and I felt really bad. Then I realized after reading some comments I just needed to scroll down. It probably makes more sense to include those costs with the revenue.

It was pretty clear they made a profit from reading the top paragraph saying $3 per unit was the total cost, and the first block of numbers said they averaged $3.89 in payments. So, that's $0.89 x 85,000 profit. I figured the rest was a story leading up to a good punchline.

For the infographic?

I am not the parent poster, but for me, yes, the infographic!

Was there any way to enter different shipping and billing addresses? Right now I can't have anything shipped to my billing address, and on that form, I didn't see an option to set different addresses, so I couldn't pay for it. If you do this again, I'd recommend having that option (or making it more apparent if it was there).

(I was actually planning on paying $10, until I couldn't see how to enter different shipping addresses, at which point I changed my plan to pay $0 and enter just my shipping address. And then I proceeded to fail at both plans, not submitting the form at all due to my own forgetfulness.)

Edit: Please note that this pay what you can was just for the holiday-related expansion set, not the full game

That's good to know. Did you offer any suggested pricing for the expansion pack? i.e $10, like the other packs? Or did you only list the cost price?

That's interesting. I assumed that the purpose of the sale was to increase the game's publicity/popularity, an attempt to get it into more peoples hands and make it into a household name. But if it's just an expansion pack, then you're really only selling to existing customers, not expanding the customer base.

The production + shipping costs were about $3 with a suggested price of $5. We also had an additional nag screen for people who put in $0.

So the free-loaders basically took $3 a pop from Wikimedia?

Not sure what your nag screen said, but an A/B against putting it in those terms might have been interesting.

Nice of you to donate to Wikipedia.

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