World of Goo Birthday Offer Brings in Mixed Results

When World of Goo celebrated its one-year anniversary, the developer decided to let gamers in on the fun by introducing a “Pay What You Want” scheme to the game. In essence, anyone could access the official site, download the game and pay any sum of money they thought it was worth. Ron Carmel, one of the people behind 2D Boy, recently offered a look at what the new offer meant for the developer and the title.

His conclusion is that “Few people chose their price based on the perceived value of the game. How much the person feels they can afford seems to play a much larger role in the decision than how much the game is worth.” This is based on a post purchase poll that asked the purchasers for their opinions.

Some 57,000 people have picked up World of Goo since the offer went live (players can still take advantage of it until October 25 by using this site). The average price that the game netted was 2.03 dollars, with most of the purchasers paying just 1 cent to get it.

There were some 16,000 people who paid between 1 and 1.99 dollars for World of Goo. The title nominally costs 20 dollars. An interesting side effect linked with the “Pay What You Want” scheme has been to drive up sales of World of Goo on the Steam digital distribution service.

It would be nice to see how the prices would have varied if a question about how much the game was worth had been offered to possible customers before they actually paid for it.

2D Boy says that the current scheme is just a first step in trying to figure out a new way of pricing and selling videogames. The developer is not sure what the next step will be.