Wednesday 21 October 2009

World of Goo promotion - Pay-What-You-Want viable?

On Gamepolitics.com (recommended site - great for mature game new info) the results of 2D-boys "Pay what you want" promotion seemed to be a success.

PR wise the move gathered only praise and pushed a year old game back into the main news streams of most big game websites. Apparently 57,000 people purchased the game and a 40% increase in purchases over Steam.

Where this falls down a little is the price - the average was $2.03 paid and 17,000 paid $0.01. Personally I thought it would be around the $5 mark as I had hoped gamers would react in a more positive way. This is after all a company giving them a choice of what to pay for a game and not putting any shitty DRM in it, something many people in favour of file sharing have argued for.

I guess those people who paid a cent would probably not have ever bought the game so $170 for thos downloads is something and if even a few thousand enjoy it enough they may buy any follow up games from the studio. The main response on the survey for people buying World of Goo was "I Like the Pay-What-You-Want Model and Wanted to Support It" with 24% so it got a postive response.

I hope that gamers would rally around developers like 2D-Boy and support them when they act in such a way, similar to the way Stardock has acted with its game. Who knows maybe people will not pirate their games because all the arguements in support of file sharing can;t argue with the way they have acted....

Whats that, this is the internet....oh well!

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