World of Goo Creators Try Pick-Your-Price Experiment 216
2D Boy, the independent game studio behind World of Goo, recently celebrated the game's one-year anniversary by offering it at whatever price buyers cared to pay. They've now released some sales statistics about how people responded to the opportunity. The average price during the sale was $2.03; the game normally retails for $20. According to a survey of why people paid what they did, 22.4% said it was all they could afford at the time, and 12.4% said they already owned World of Goo and were buying it for a different platform. (Yes, there is a Linux version.) Over 57,000 people took advantage of the offer, which was enough for 2D Boy to term it "a huge success." Interestingly, they also saw a significant increase in sales through Steam, and a smaller increase through Wiiware. They've decided to extend the experiment until October 25th.
thanks (Score:3, Insightful)
What about absolute sales? (Score:5, Insightful)
How does the absolute intake compare to what it was before the experiment though?
I'm reminded of a sale Valve had for L4D a few months after it was released; Jeff Atwood relayed the results [codinghorror.com]. In short, Valve cut the price of L4D in half, and the result brought in more money (not just more sales!) than the launch day.
So how did World of Goo's experiment do in absolute numbers? Did the revenue increase or decrease from before the experiment? Certainly sales increased, but that's a far cry from revenue increasing.
Re:That's very nice, but (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a sales tactic, not an experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
"Back in the day" the game ended up as a budget release (if it were lucky), maybe first at £10, then £5 - and you know only a teensy proportion of that shelf price ever made it back to the developer.
The "name your own price" strategy seems designed to mop up anybody who had an interest in the game, yet never got around to buying it for whatever reason.
Basically if somebody doesn't buy it - they were NEVER going to buy it under any circumstance at all.
So - nice idea for games in the 'tail' of their lives.
What I'd like to see a publisher try (just to satisfy my idle curiosity
i.e. We are going to sell this game for $25. We are launching it at $10 and every day for the next 2 weeks, we're adding a dollar to the price - seems an ideal way to get your headlines, and convert those waverers (the vast majority who will never buy) into purchasers.
I guess in summary, the general rule is that when you get somebody looking at the purchase page, there should always be a reason for them to buy now, rather than next week.
I for one have been hearing about WOG for aages - have I got around to even playing it - no - I had something 'else' to do. I now see the name your own price is about to finish so in my head I can heat "It's now or never time for me to buy it." *wanders off to purchase*
Re:What about absolute sales? (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt very much they made more with this experiment than before.
Based on the charts / average price paid from the article, they made about $115,129 (probably about a hundred more, I skipped really low data points) on 56,714 sales. They admitted that they lost money on every sale below $0.30, and they had to pay up to 13% to PayPal in fees even when they made money.
I think for any game to have made 56,000 sales (which implies as many as 56,000 new customers to support), but only bring in a little over $100K, that's not a great revenue, unless you are using the iPhone / other app store model.
To look at it another way, at $20 per copy, they only had to sell around 5700 copies, and the profit margin should be significantly higher without Paypal fees.
Re:Legal pirates made me a annoyed panda (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is that at all surprising?
I would expect more, to be honest, out of 57,000 and you have to take account of that when you run any such event. Personally, I'd have said any *dollar* amount, so it would have gone for at least $1 and made the maths a little easier but if it was *possible* to buy at 1c, I quite expect to see a hefty percentage of people pay that.
The so-called "honesty box" system works on the basis that *enough* people are honest (not that all of them are, or even most of them), whether you've put bunches of flowers in a tub by the side of the road, with a tin for collecting payment, or you're selling a game on the Internet. (The flowers thing is quite common the rural UK - a few pennies and you can take as many flowers as you like because they are effectively surplus, and very few people run off with the tin full of change, either).
I've personally purchased two World of Goo's, one for me, one for a friend, and think it's a great game. On reading this article, I emailled a couple of friends that might be interested. I don't really care if they pay $10, or $1, or 1c, so long as they get the game - it's not "costing" the authors anything that they aren't already paying, and it is with their blessing, and the publicity etc. they are getting more than makes up for it.
The fact is that most games are too expensive, and I've often thought "If that was a little cheaper, I'd buy it" but rarely tell the author. The feedback from knowing what/why people are spending what they do if a phenomenal statistic to have. And I don't think they did bad out of a game that most people already have and most people already paid full-price for, and for which sales are sloping:
(57,000 times $2.03) - 13% (Paypal small-transaction fees) = just over $100,000, before they even make the front page of Slashdot. IN A WEEK. I don't think the authors have suffered. I think a lot of people who couldn't justify the expense now get a great piece of entertainment. The authors get a shedload of easy money from an "old" game, tons of free advertising and lots of useful feedback, a few pirates make themselves legit, some people get that warm glow of supporting and author, some cheapskate people get a "free" game and Paypal make a shedload of money too. I think that's pretty much win-win.
Re:That's very nice, but (Score:4, Insightful)
How do they know disappointing sales were caused by piracy? Perhaps disappointing sales were caused because, well, not every game is going to be a massive blockbuster.
Also wasting money on DRM isn't going to stop the game from being pirated, it'll be cracked within days (possibly hours). DRM has been a failure since the days of the ZX Spectrum. You'd have thought developers would have learned it's a waste of time by now.
Re:What about absolute sales? (Score:3, Insightful)
although you can't extrapolate to 5.2 million/year because its unlikely that they could achieve this level of publicity for more than a week or two
Re:Pricing Models (Score:3, Insightful)
There's all sorts of interesting pricing models an indie developer with zero retail distribution [costs] could try if they're controlling the sales.
Running a server that is reliable and can handle ./ is not free. Its not even a close approximation of free. Its real money and its an expense that is incurred every single month. Decent bandwidth for a larger game is also a long way from free, and even if you don't get many sales you still have to pay.
Re:Bill me later (Score:3, Insightful)
First time buy it for 0.01.
After you play you buy it for whatever.
I'm surprised it's not obvious.
But since it isn't, I guess most of the 0.01 buyers didn't do that - otherwise it might explain the two peaks - people buying it for "free" and then buying it again.
It's this simple (Score:2, Insightful)
The game is well-made. It's fun and interesting to me. I have not found any bugginess so far. They produce a native Linux version. They don't harrass us with DRM.
I paid them US$20. That was my pick-a-price. Because, you know what?, the developers felt it was worth that much originally and I agree.
This isn't some contest where I have to make sure I win over the other tens of thousands of customers.
Re:That's very nice, but (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's very nice, but (Score:3, Insightful)
Makes me wonder... how many of the folks who helped make this experiment a rousing success were former pirates who jumped at the opportunity to go legit and support the makers of a game they enjoyed playing to the tune of a price they thought was reasonable? (as opposed to the full price.) I'd be willing to bet the answer is a lot.
Piracy is, in essence, a way to try before you buy. (A lot of people are stingy and will "try" it forever, but that doesn't change the dynamic. It's an unrestricted trial, and there's some normal distribution of how long people try it – some "try" it forever, others buy it up-front.) You know it cost someone money to produce this, but you don't want to pay what they're offering (either because it's too much, or because you don't know if the product is any good yet). Some people eventually buy it, but only after they think the game was worth the selling price.
So, if you have a lot of people actively playing pirated copies of your game, you can conclude that it's a good game, but you're charging too much for it. A promotion like this could actually be the perfect opportunity to convert the pirates into (credit :) card-carrying customers... they might never buy the game for the price you're asking, but many/most would be willing to chip in some small token amount for a game that's really good. They're only lost sales if you insist on charging full price, and these sales are not really lost: they just never existed at that price. If you have a large pirate userbase, you can't possibly expect to get full price from all of them, but something is better than nothing, and $100 grand is certainly a lot of something!
Seriously: similar tactics would be very interesting to see from the record companies. I don't buy CDs; I just don't – I've bought, I think, 2 music CDs in my entire life and one of them was self-produced by a friend of mine. The record companies aren't getting jack squat from me, and never will. However, if I, and the thousands of people like me, had the opportunity to give some token amount to pay for the enjoyment we've had – say "look through your music collection, find the artists/songs you really like, and donate whatever you think is appropriate for those" – publicize it, hype it up, "you'll finally be legit, and you'll be supporting the artists you think are really talented"; they'd probably make a killing in a very short amount of time! Exactly the way this game's developers did.
Re:That's very nice, but (Score:3, Insightful)
That's how much I spent, too, and it's actually more than I initially figured I'd pay ($1). I'm a firm believer in free stuff, and I'm willing to spend a few extra dollars (occasionally) to show my support for a business model that allows people to get free stuff. Especially after it's proven to be massively successful... I figured I'd spend more than the average, just to emphasize the point.
I would never have bought the game for $20, and probably wouldn't have bought it for $5 or even $1 from a bargain bin. But since they're essentially giving it away to anyone who doesn't want to pay, they got my $5.