World of Goo Pay-What-You-Want Sale Results
2dboy.com
2dboy.com
"Pay what you want" is teaching your customers "You know what? Most people pirate our games anyhow, and why wouldn't they. They're not worth anything. We can barely bring ourselves to charge for them. You know, its so exceptional to receive money for these, if you give us a penny, we will award you karma points."
Offering someone a penny for their labor is not generous. Why are we teaching our customers to frame their purchases like that? Or like the app store, where software is a disposable commodity item which is overpriced at $2.99?
And they have thus earned this niche's respect and attention, and more importantly, their money. That's quite difficult to earn from an ordinarily pirating gamer.
When you loop every gamer who downloads games into the category of "pirating gamers", you're missing a lot of subtlety among the individuals you're blasting.
If you adamantly eschew the respect of "pirating gamers," you're cutting off an enormous chunk of your potential market share.
If you can convince even a small percentage of these customers to pay, you win big. Especially in the game of software development.
If you can convince even a small percentage of these customers to pay, you win big. Especially in the game of software development."
It's human nature. If someone can get something for free, most will. People don't like parting with their money. This is why you can't make a business out of donation-ware.
However, it's a problem when the torrent and other illegal sites get keywords in the major search engines for legitimate businesses. Many users will go to those sites first and not end up purchasing the legitimate version. You can't tell me that this doesn't effect sales (The actual amount of sales is up for debate).
There also aren't any real stats on how many people that download illegal software actually end up purchasing something from that company in the future.
In my experience, the only reason these people actually purchase software is because the cracks are too difficult to obtain/too much of a pain in the ass or the company they are working for requires it.
Eventually, I think most software will eventually become services. This way, there is no code to share.
It seems that every few years, the reasons why people decide it is their right to other people's work changes (and it keeps moving to more and more industries).
What about Red Ryder, way back when, or Toady, of Dwarf Fortress, or the relative legions of successful webcomic artists that live on donations?
I could be wrong, but those people probably have other sources of income.
Randy Mulholland of the webcomic Something Positive quit his job when he received in a month donations that exceeded his yearly salary.
Most webcomics that are 'full time jobs' for the artist also sell t-shirts, taking them a slight step outside of 'pure' donationware, but including these artists, the numbers of successful donationware vendors go up.
Interesting. Thanks for the link.
"Randy Mulholland of the webcomic Something Positive quit his job when he received in a month donations that exceeded his yearly salary."
This is nice for now, but will this continue in the long-term? I know nothing is definite, even when you sell a product, but I just don't see pure donationware working in the long-term (without some other way of supplementing income).
I think you also forget that games are usually not essential for survival. So it is not just a choice between pirate it or buy it, people can also just ignore it. That quite changes the subjective value, and in turn you better make people like you. They will probably buy bread from a baker they hate if it is the only baker in town, but why should they buy games from somebody they hate?
I respect the lack of DRM.
That being said, when you're a poor high school/college student it doesn't really matter what has DRM or not, you're just plain broke as shit and get everything you can that is free.
they expect us to enter a store here and pay US$200 for a title. and that's for wii. PS3 are double or more then that.
wiiware? Nintendo wouldn't take my money no matter what. ...in fact, let me try today... yep. amazon still can't ship a 10gram card overseas. "Wii 2000 Points Card cannot be shipped to the selected address."
so, yeah, I pirate most games I play. And dare you to buy world of goo for 200 bucks.
I'm not sure that is the case, but I can see how it's possible.
A candy bar costs $0.50 and each one has to be physically manufactured, distributed, and occupies retail space. But that's not a bad business - Mars Co is incredibly profitable. Pricing is an optimization problem, and there's no moral issue here. You are free to charge whatever you like; some prices make you more money. It sounds like World of Goo has made a good deal of money selling their software for $20, and managed to make a good deal more by offering a temporary sale (much like a department store). What's wrong with that?
It's amazing they can't afford to pay even $5 for the game, but they have hours and hours of free time to play it.
On their $2,000 computer, no doubt.
People's sense of value is all over the board (some would say it's f*ckd), and using an anecdote like this and mine above really means nothing in the grand scheme of things.
I'd be more than happy to say thank you in person to one of the devs.
2DBoy offer[ed] World of Goo to the world for whatever price people want[ed] to pay for it so I didn't pay what I thought it was worth.
The game kept me occupied for one evening, quite a long evening, it was fun. I did skip one level though.
"That's what the game is worth to me" is negative since it conveys negative opinion about the quality of the game (if you paid less than $20, that is). "I'm a cheap bastard" conveys negative opinion about oneself, and that's even worse.
"That's all I can afford right now" is a socially neutral and accepted way of saying no without having to explain yourself. If you're in a bar with friends, and want to go home because you don't enjoy the company, that's what you say after the first beer, not "that's all your company is worth to me".
There's an option missing which is "You said I could pay whatever, and that's what I felt like".
I agree that that is poor methodology, since it doesn't include the opinions of anyone who didn't care enough to volunteer a response. But to their credit there is an "Other" option, the responses to which are linked in the article... Many of the answers fall into one or more of the categories already in the survey. It looks like the most common answer that isn't already covered is "I just wanted to try the game out and don't know how much it's worth".
Personally I'd prefer them to have an option to give them money after trying the game.
Actually I ended up not buying it (and I was leaning towards 4$), because the PayPal form was too much of a hassle/couldn't get it working. Also I felt a bit like fooling myself - so far I did not buy it, now suddenly I am prepared to spent money? I felt I was falling into a kind of psychological trap...
I seem to remember that an address alone is already worth > 5$, so paying 0,01 cents is actually paying 5$.
Finally, it runs perfectly on my eee PC 1000HE!
This is called a demo.
Then I am sure there is a significant portion of people who didn't even want the game, and just purchased it out of curiosity.
2dboy had a strong viral marketing campaign for this game. It's the only game I have downloaded over 6 years or so. They have exploited social networks pretty well, and now they got first dips on the Radiohead scheme in the game industry. If they made a mil they're doing ok (for 4-5 guys?) but this will be hard to repeat, imo.
- Allan Blomquist (Wii port)
- Paul Hubans (QA and Production associate)
- Maks Verver (Linux port)
Observe skews at multiples of $5 - 5, 10, 15, 20
These tell you how people look for easy anchors to decide pricing. When there is no guidance, easy to think of $5 than $6.21
Heh, Paypal... I could say I don't care so much about them losing money....
Anyway, I'm glad this is going on a little longer; I'd like to see if the average increases, and I get to buy more people the gift [of Goo].
What do you think would happen if you had a some sort of enterprise software that you charged whatever the company wanted to pay for, but you made it very clear that support and feature requests would be prioritized by the amount the company paid for it?
(For the purpose of this thought experiment, let's say the software was very well regarded and actually had a viable customer base.)
Do you think that the amount companies paid would near 0, or do you think you'd be able to find a good pricing level by doing this?
I'm reading the "Other" section for why people chose their amount to donate.
There was a couple that I thought was interesting: "to support Linux games" "iPhone apps are 99 cents" "it's what was left in my PayPal account" and "I plan to more later if I like it/runs on my computer"
I wonder how many of those who planned to donate more later actually did.
Originally, the term "indie" was just this, independent developers, without a publisher, and most likely people working on new concepts, interesting ideas that you can't do on the mainstream game industry.
Unfortunately, marketers are now abusing the "indie" label, for any "little game". And thanks to that, "indie" is now slipping to "cheap". So if a game is not the latest "Gears of Halo 2010", most of people will say it's only worth a few dollars.
That's sad.
Incidentally your $50 games are usually £50 GBP here.