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?
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.
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.
I didn't buy a single music track until Amazon had DRM free music available. Was it a moral stance? No, it was a pain-in-my-ass stance against iTunes and it's stupid legacy DRM model which forced me into their ecosystem aka iTunes which blows.
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.
I 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.
A pirating gamer isn't some dirty scum that you disrespect. They are customers. They tell their friends. They're ordinary people. Some games have 80% of their installs due to piracy.
If you can convince even a small percentage of these customers to pay, you win big. Especially in the game of software development.
"A pirating gamer isn't some dirty scum that you disrespect. They are customers. They tell their friends. They're ordinary people. Some games have 80% of their installs due to piracy.
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).
"If someone can get something for free, most will."
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?
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.
"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 don't think it's a good position to break down gamers into "pirating" and "non-pirating" gamers. Someone who pirates a title today might pay for your game tomorrow; in fact, someone who pirates your game today might pay for your game in a week, or in a year.
If you adamantly eschew the respect of "pirating gamers," you're cutting off an enormous chunk of your potential market share.
There was at least one study showing that music pirates were also the people who spend the most money on music. I suspect it could be the same for games. Also many pirates turn into paying customers eventually, for example when they earn actual money and are not poor pupils anymore.
Not all markets are the same. I pirate most of my games.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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".
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".
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.
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.
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$.
Sure, but a demo is not very convenient (download, install, test, uninstall, download full game, install...). I guess they want to get people to buy who were so far not prepared to buy, so a low barrier to entry might be good.
I found it to be a really well designed and presented game and really enjoyed playing it. I still play a level every now and then. Also, if you buy it directly (as opposed to buying off Steam), you get the Windows, Linux and Mac versions :-)
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.
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.
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."
"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."
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)
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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?