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World of Goo Pay-What-You-Want Sale Results
- mahmud 17y agoI totaled it up to about ~$100k. Not bad for a few days. I wonder how much of their total revenue this is. 2dboy had a strong viral marketing campaign for this game. It's the only game I have downloaded over 6 years or so. They have exploited social networks pretty well, and now they got first dips on the Radiohead scheme in the game industry. If they made a mil they're doing ok (for 4-5 guys?) but this will be hard to repeat, imo.
- aaronblohowiak 17y ago4-5? "2D Boy is a core team of two guys, Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler. Their swanky San Francisco office is whichever free wi-fi coffee shop they wander into on a given day."
- snprbob86 17y ago^^ That quote is from this page: http://2dboy.com/about.php http://2dboy.com/about.php
- mqt 17y agoThe core team is two guys, but they hired/contracted additional people to help with QA/porting: - Allan Blomquist (Wii port) - Paul Hubans (QA and Production associate) - Maks Verver (Linux port) http://goofans.com/world-of-goo/about-2d-boy http://goofans.com/world-of-goo/about-2d-boy http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/world-of-goo/credits http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/world-of-goo/credits
- gnoupi 17y agoDid you make this total counting Paypal fees ? For example, all 0.01$ orders went only to Paypal, not to them.
- mahmud 17y agoAt 100k, paypal an keep all the penny donations, imo. Up to ~7% is acceptable.
- coconutrandom 17y 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 17y agoAltruism (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 17y agoNot for 20% of payments, 20% of those who took part in the survey.
- paraschopra 17y agoInteresting graph - http://2dboy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/histogram.png 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
- gnoupi 17y agoUnless, I guess, a few who will take this occasion to put their lucky numbers.
- stjarnljuset 17y agoyay! 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.
- gnoupi 17y agoIt'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.
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoSomeone 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 17y agoThe 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-look-at-some-numbers/ 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 17y agoPayPal 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].
- patio11 17y agoI'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?
- windsurfer 17y agoThere'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 17y agoWow. 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.
- unalone 17y agoI usually don't pay for games. World of Goo is one of the exceptions. When a small company shows they're savvy and doing a good thing, it becomes worth my money. 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.
- 17y ago
- pjhyett 17y agoI'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 17y agoThey might be not from the US?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- patio11 17y agobut they have hours and hours of free time to play it. On their $2,000 computer, no doubt.
- josefresco 17y agoLet'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.
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoI 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 17y ago
- Tichy 17y agoWhy are people using odd numbers like 5.99 instead of 6 if they can pick the price themselves. They want to fool themselves?
- gnoupi 17y agoIt 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 17y agoIt'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 17y agoI 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 17y agoI 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 17y agoAgreed! 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 17y agoI 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 17y agoI didn't really like that game :( (Which could explain the sale results)
- NathanKP 17y agoThe server says "I am too stressed out. Try again in a minute or two." I guess they are getting some pretty good results. ;)
- icey 17y agoSo 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 17y agoI 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.)