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World of Goo experiment a "huge success" News
PC News by Robert Purchese
2D Boy has revealed that World of Goo sold 57,000 copies last week as a result of the 'pay what you like' birthday experiment. The developer deemed this a "huge success".
To illustrate, 2D Boy published a graph showing what people decided to pay for World of Goo.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of sales were at the lower end: 16,852 people paid one cent; 6483 paid up to a dollar; and a whopping 15,797 paid between a dollar and two dollars. A further 13,877 people paid under six dollars.
However, it's interesting that people decided to pay anything at all. And these, remember, are people who ignored the brilliant PC puzzle game at full price: $20.
At the other end, four people splashed out $50 on the game. But the biggest pricey-spikes were at $20 (306 people) and $15 (352).
The promotion, picked up by news sites across the web, also caused a 40 per cent boost to World of Goo sales on Steam. Fluctuations are common, but not to this degree.
No this is not Sony conference.
The bottom line, as Rock Paper Shotgun pointed out, is that 2D Boy made roughly $100,000 by writing a blog post and removing a set price for the game. That is a huge and important success.
World of Goo is a puzzle game about building bridges using blobs of goo. It's brilliant; our review explains.
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Latest Screenshots
2 October, 2008 [2]
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Poster
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+18
Oh dear, developers should learn that sales are pointless without profit. Pretty certain any game would shift for £2-£1.....
it might not make them any money, but it gets (an arguably fantastic) game out to more people. and once you release a sequel, the bigger the install base of your previous title, the bigger your profits will be. stuff like this makes perfect sense for smaller/indie devs, and i applaud 2dboy for it |
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Roland_D11
20/10/09 @ 13:49
+13
Oh dear, developers should learn that sales are pointless without profit. Pretty certain any game would shift for £2-£1.....
Of course any game would shift for £2-£1, but for 2dBoy this ist a win-win situation. They get more media coverage and more awareness about their product (see the rise in sales on Steam) and they make some money of it. The product is long finished and they do not need to do any shipping, so there should be some profit for them... |
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farticusmaximus
20/10/09 @ 13:52
+16
"Oh dear, developers should learn that sales are pointless without profit. Pretty certain any game would shift for £2-£1..... "
They made $100,000 though, on top of what had already been made from full-price sales. If a game is well past it's sales peak then perhaps a final super-budget blast works out better than a slow medium-budget re-release? I get the feeling this was more than for profit though. Maybe to raise awareness of their product, maybe to prove a point. Either way I wish them the best of luck - World of Goo was a bit of a gaming gem in my opinion - even at full price! |
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+6
It deserves all the success it gets, quality game.
I bought it for Wii. 'Oh dear, developers should learn that sales are pointless without profit. Pretty certain any game would shift for £2-£1.....' Huh? They obviously wouldn't do this if the game was still selling a shed load of copies and raking in profits would they? The game is already complete and on the market, any additional sales from this promo will either increase profits or at the very least reduce losses.
Edited 2 times,
most recently on 20/10/09 @ 15:01
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optimusprym8
20/10/09 @ 14:02
-2
I paid for it, a reasonable amount, and it doesn't frickin work on my PC. Either a dual-monitor issue or a Windows 7 issue but it just spazzes the screens out and never loads / displays. Arses
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+3
WoG has been out for quite a while now so this sort of idea is great, all the early adopters who really wanted it, paid for it. The people who were either on the fence, or otherwise wouldn't bought the game were given the opportunity to buy it for a lower price. I almost see this being the future of downloadable content, when a game stops selling due to it being out of the gamers "field of view" then just flog it off for a last minute sales increase.
It does help that WoG is quite brilliant, I got it on Wii. |
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+6
EverAfter, you've forgotten that World of Goo is a game that came out a year ago and probably had it's biggest sales spike already. With this promotion, that they had to invest almost nothing in themselves, got them nearly 60,000 sales. That's 60,000 people legally owning the game and having payed for it (even if it's only 0,01) versus them probably warezing if they had to pay $20 for it. It's a great sales boost for a game that's past it's prime in sales.
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+3
I paid full price for it when it first released and also paid $10 for a copy for my brother during this sale. After the hard work and an excellent game how could i pay any less? And even though i could have bought 1000 copies, i still don't feel like i was ripped off (plus i gain the moral high-ground :P).
Its commendable to see that 4 people paid $50 for it as well mind. I really hope to see more from 2DBoy.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 20/10/09 @ 15:24
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+5
1cent for World of Goo? People are cheaper than we'd expect them to be. I would feel embarassed of myself to buy a product with open price and pay 1 Cent. You give to beggars way more for doing nothing and for something so smart like World of Goo 1 Cent? I really cant get over the fact of the % of the losers that paid that lil. Way to go.
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kangarootoo
20/10/09 @ 15:22
+10
@EverAfter
And do you think this experiment didn't make any profit? "developers should learn that sales are pointless without profit" Yes, because currently they don't know that. Thanks for the heads up though. |
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ukuleleimport
20/10/09 @ 15:24
+1
I bought it for one dollar also, got it a long time ago on Wiiware and now I can also play it on Windows and Mac :) Love these guys ^
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IneptPercy
20/10/09 @ 15:41
0
Of course you can say that a lot of the money they got they would never have seen otherwise, but on the flip side how many people won't pay full price next time and wait for the 'pay what you want' price.
As with digital distribution profit isn't the same in the respect of a download doesn't cost them much unlike a boxed product. Of course any money is better than no money. |
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+1
Just goes to show what IGNORANT, unapreciative brainless fuckwits there are in the world to only give 1 cent.
I think it was a great idea to allow it - as it shows fully well that if the people dictated game pricing, there would be NO games made any more due to your tight fisted ness! Shame on you. I paid $5 which is only £3.21 and I even felt cheeky doing that, as I simply thought about the time it took to make, and not just wanting to rob them regardless of their efforts. Shame on you all who only paid pittance |
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Rev. Stuart Campbell
20/10/09 @ 16:13
+12
"Oh dear, developers should learn that sales are pointless without profit. Pretty certain any game would shift for £2-£1..... "
Halfwit. 2D Boy are two guys, and World Of Goo took a year to develop. If it had sold ZERO copies before this promotion, the $100,000 it made in a week would still be a very respectable wage of $50K each (over £30K) for a year's work. And that $100,000 was of course ALL profit (since that's the figure after PayPal fees), because the game is a digital download with essentially no manufacturing costs at all, duh. And also, it's presumably still selling and making more profit as we speak. So even if it had launched at pick-your-own-price from day one, they'd still have done okay out of it. (Incidentally, do we know if any of the 1-cent purchasers bought it to try it out legally and then bought another copy for what they thought it was worth? No, we don't know that either way, so let's not get after the 1c crowd with a shrieking pitchfork mob just yet, eh?) |
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Rev. Stuart Campbell
20/10/09 @ 16:15
+11
"I think it was a great idea to allow it - as it shows fully well that if the people dictated game pricing, there would be NO games made any more due to your tight fisted ness!"
It shows no such thing, you innumerate fucking twat. It shows that even with half your audience only paying 1c, you could still make a nice living out of writing indie games. $50,000 a year (and rising fast) is a lot more than most people in this country earn for doing much worse jobs. |
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+3
well, while it may be true that people would wait for the pay-what-you-want instead of purchasing it day one, I believe gamers already do that. a lot. as the pre-owned market shows. the difference is that this way, the profit goes to the developing team, and not the gaming shop. of course it could work only as a download.
and we are quite drastic here. nothing prevents EA to go out and announce they'll be selling fifa09 at $5 for a week (yeah, right! XD), it does not have to be 0.01. (you can replace EA with any other publisher, it wasn't meant to be a stab to them specifically :P) still, as the articles state, it's and old game, and the most profit came from the $1-2 sales. very interesting. |
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George Roper
20/10/09 @ 17:32
-3
Oh man, that is SO tragic! Are there really so many soul-less cunts out there who, when given an opportunity to pay what they feel actually do feel it's worth 0.01p?
Fucking. Cunts. |
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Alterego-X
20/10/09 @ 18:20
+5
I totally DISAGREE with those who hate the 1c payers.
It was a DONATION system! 2DBOY obviously expected people to use this possibility, they even accepted that EVERYONE could be 1c-er, but they were fine with it. 2Dboy was already famous for experimenting with no DRM and allowing piracy, I guess they just wanted to give it away for anyone who wouldn't have bought it otherwise. |
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midnight_walker
20/10/09 @ 18:31
+2
I paid 1c. I had no idea what I was buying, but it's a game for 1c, right? I liked what I got though, so I'll be on board for the inevitable sequel, which I wouldn't have been without this promotion.
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George Roper
20/10/09 @ 18:47
+2
@Spadge
It's all well and good bemoaning the 16.500 tight bastards (1c ffs) but hundreds of thousands of people paid NOTHING for it. I agree but just hurry up and put Alien Breed out, ok? :) |
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