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.
"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".
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.
On their $2,000 computer, no doubt.
People's sense of value is all over the board (some would say it's f*ckd), and using an anecdote like this and mine above really means nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Then I am sure there is a significant portion of people who didn't even want the game, and just purchased it out of curiosity.
Personally I'd prefer them to have an option to give them money after trying the game.
Actually I ended up not buying it (and I was leaning towards 4$), 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.