World of Goo Pay-What-You-Want Sale Results

http://2dboy.com/2009/10/19/birthday-sale-results/

by mqt • 17 years ago

85 61 17 years ago

mahmud2• 17 years ago

I totaled it up to about ~$100k. Not bad for a few days. I wonder how much of their total revenue this is.

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.

aaronblohowiak• 17 years ago

4-5? "2D Boy is a core team of two guys, Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler. Their swanky San Francisco office is whichever free wi-fi coffee shop they wander into on a given day."

snprbob86• 17 years ago

^^ That quote is from this page: http://2dboy.com/about.php

mqt• 17 years ago

The core team is two guys, but they hired/contracted additional people to help with QA/porting:

    - Allan Blomquist (Wii port)
    - Paul Hubans (QA and Production associate)
    - Maks Verver (Linux port)

http://goofans.com/world-of-goo/about-2d-boy

http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/world-of-goo/credits

gnoupi4• 17 years ago

Did you make this total counting Paypal fees ? For example, all 0.01$ orders went only to Paypal, not to them.

mahmud2• 17 years ago

At 100k, paypal an keep all the penny donations, imo. Up to ~7% is acceptable.

coconutrandom• 17 years ago

"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."

shib71• 17 years ago

Altruism (i.e. wanting to support the model) is given as the reason for 1 in 5 payments, and comes up as a factor in a lot of the 'other' responses.

m_eiman• 17 years ago

Not for 20% of payments, 20% of those who took part in the survey.

paraschopra• 17 years ago

Interesting graph - http://2dboy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/histogram.p...

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

gnoupi4• 17 years ago

Unless, I guess, a few who will take this occasion to put their lucky numbers.

stjarnljuset• 17 years ago

yay! I had mentioned in the survey that I wanted to see how their "experiment" had fared, but it would've been nice to see how well the game sold pre-birthday sale.

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.

gnoupi4• 17 years ago

It's really pity that people nowadays consider that there are "blockbuster" games, to pay 50-60 dollars for, and "cheap games", to pay for a cup of coffee price.

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.

pbhjpbhj2• 17 years ago

Someone noted that there were 2 devs plus a few hires for porting. That versus the millions of USD spent on blockbuster games ... $20 might be high compared to the production costs?

Incidentally your $50 games are usually £50 GBP here.

sekizaru• 17 years ago

The Firefox add-ons blog just posted some results from their "Contributions Pilot" where they were testing accepting donations for add-ons. http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/10/19/contributions-a-lo... Interestingly, the $5-$10 range seems to be the sweet spot there as well. In this case though the add-on author suggests an amount to donate which might skew the results compared to Goo's results.

RevRal• 17 years ago

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.

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].

patio112• 17 years ago

I'm going to sound like a bitter old man when I say this but, well, get off my lawn: I would rather turn away a thousand customers with $0.01 ~ $1.99 in hand than give one user the impression my software was worth only $1.99.

"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?

windsurfer2• 17 years ago

There's a culture in the gaming community that despises what DRM has done to the industry, myself included. By releasing World of Goo without DRM purposefully, 2DBoy sought respect from this niche. By selling it at a "pay what you want" rate, they are saying "I respect what you think, please compensate what you will. I already know you can get it for free. Maybe you just can't afford our 20 dollar price point.".

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.

tptacek• 17 years ago

Wow. They've earned the respect of pirating gamers. That's totally worth taking a pricing hit for. I'm sure the pirating gamers will absolutely support them with their next title.

kiba• 17 years ago

I do not see why it is a good idea to lose an income source numbered in the thousands based on the opinion of one user.

scott_s• 17 years ago

This is an experiment. If you could earn significantly more money for your products through a "pay what you want" model, would you really not use it? Is your ego ("My products are worth $X, damnit") worth that much?

I'm not sure that is the case, but I can see how it's possible.

emmett• 17 years ago

Most software is priced like a disposable commodity item on the iPhone because it is a commodity. You haven't developed your own distribution channel, and you haven't developed in any software 8 other people haven't already made, so your software is not worth much money per item. Those with difficult to reproduce software like navigation systems companies can charge $50 on the iPhone, quite successfully.

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?

pjhyett• 17 years ago

I'd like the people that paid 1 cent and also said that's all they could afford at the time on the survey to say that to one of the WoG developers with a straight face.

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.

kniwor• 17 years ago

They might be not from the US?

patio112• 17 years ago

but they have hours and hours of free time to play it.

On their $2,000 computer, no doubt.

josefresco2• 17 years ago

Let's not open up the can-of-worms that is "value". For example: people will work hard to afford huge houses, and lavish lifestyles requiring thousands of hours but then can't spend 30 minutes with their own kids because their too busy earning the money to stick them into private school. What does that say about value?

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.

pbhjpbhj2• 17 years ago

I paid less than $5. It was that or not have the game.

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.

mseebach• 17 years ago

The methodology on that survey if off the charts. The options aren't neutral or even biased in the same direction.

"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".

jcl• 17 years ago

As they say in the article, they didn't choose the responses to be neutral; they simply used common reasons people were voluntarily sending through their contact page.

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".

Tichy6• 17 years ago

I did not buy it so far (for 20$), and if they give it away, they give it away. If they don't want people to pay 0,01 cents, they should put a minimum price of 5$. "Can't afford it" is just a rephrasing of "it is not worth more to me" in that context (I don't think anybody really had not spare $ in that experiment).

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$, so paying 0,01 cents is actually paying 5$.

dkersten2• 17 years ago

I bought it a few months back for €14 or whatever it is they charged and I'm quite happy having paid that.

citizenparker• 17 years ago

Many games have incorporated a feature to where you can try the game, and then have the option to give them money.

This is called a demo.

JeremyChase• 17 years ago

There is another aspect that they are ignoring; I'm sure a lot of people bought the game that had already decided to NOT buy it. This kind of offer will appeal to people that would have liked it but declined to purchase it for one reason or another.

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.

kevindication• 17 years ago

And then there's me, who purchased the game through Steam for full price months ago. During the sale, I dropped $1 just to be able to download the Linux/Mac versions which are normally available with the full price, but not if you bought through Steam.

Tichy6• 17 years ago

Why are people using odd numbers like 5.99 instead of 6 if they can pick the price themselves. They want to fool themselves?

gnoupi4• 17 years ago

It actually works, when you put 5.99, you see "5" in the confirmation, even putting the amount yourself, you feel like spending less. (Plus, years of such prices everywhere)

hegemonicon• 17 years ago

It's worth pointing out that we don't know how much of a success this is without being able to compare it to how much they would have made in the same period of time without the promotion - ie: what were the average weekly sales of the game before this was announced?

e40• 17 years ago

I paid $5. I have an 8 yr old who likes Wii Sonic and Mario games. I didn't know if I could interest him. I didn't know if I'd like it. The $5 was what I was able to gamble. Now that we've both played it (I like it more than my son), I'm going back right now and adding another $10. I think it's worth $15 given the length of the game. I'd pay more if it were longer.

rjett• 17 years ago

I think it would be interesting to run an experiment with this model where some buyers were shown what the last buyer of the game paid and another group of buyers were shown what the average price paid for the game was. My hypothesis is that the group seeing the average price would pay very close the average and have a tight distribution of payers. I think the group being shown what the last buyer paid would have a very wide distribution of payers but I have a hunch that they would see a higher average price paid due to some people seeing a high last price paid and saying, well I should at least pay X (I could comfortably get by with paying this much less) or seeing a low last price paid and saying I'll at least pay Y (I'm a good person for paying above that). Regardless, it would be an interesting experiment.

glhaynes• 17 years ago

Agreed! Also interesting would be to see how many people from those two groups dropped out of the sale after seeing the last/avg price paid. (And the drop-out % vs. what price was shown relationship, by group.)

prewett• 17 years ago

I wonder if part of the success is that World of Goo is relatively well-known. I'm curious if the pay-what-you-want model would work for an unknown game from an unknown company.

d0m• 17 years ago

I didn't really like that game :( (Which could explain the sale results)

NathanKP• 17 years ago

The server says "I am too stressed out. Try again in a minute or two." I guess they are getting some pretty good results. ;)

icey• 17 years ago

So I've been thinking about this as a business model recently.

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?

hernan7• 17 years ago

I guess many users would pay $0 just so they can skip going through their internal procurement process. (Which in some places can be a hassle when buying software at any non-zero price.)

World of Goo Pay-What-You-Want Sale Results

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