The game sounds good thanks to the description I got earlier, can anyone advise me on the size of the game (yeah my bandwidth is pathetic I know).
As for this cost issue, no company is going to go head first into this sort of selling and think "oh, no one will pay us less than $10", they know that people are cheap, moreso currently, and a lot are going to pay the minimum possible. Second, most of these people wouldn't have ever bought the game, a lot of us hadn't heard of the game/company before (I certainly hadn't), so lets assume than 10,000 people buy the game, and assume that 90% of those pay $0.01;
9000 x 0.01 = $900
Thats $900 more than they would have got from the cheapskates alone, now take into consideration that the other 10% will have paid more, you see my point, no?
"Oh noes, but what about the bandwidth?" Most companies will have a lot of bandwidth spare at the end of the month, some servers even offer unlimited bandwidth, so this will cost them next to nothing if anything at all.
Now, consider if they were to market their game in a 'normal' way, that involves paying lots of money to TV companies, magazines, web-adverts etc, thats going to cost them a lot more money than -$900.
I know those numbers were random and incorrect, however they are just chosen to show profit is here, despite what you think.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people will have been introduced to this company by this, and best of all, if you got the game and ended up enjoying it, or finding the mechanics good, you will be more likely to buy that next 2DBoy game, because you know that studio produces quality games (even if you didn't like World of Goo).
Overall, I thought Radiohead did a very good thing with Rainbows (it was that album right?), even though I don't like the band I can only sing praise for how they handled selling it, and it gained them a lot of attention from people who otherwise wouldn't have heard them.
Moving on to another thing, I used to program on the PSP, I hacked out my own 'XMB' to replace Sony's directly in the firmware, this was given out for free, yet I still made £100 by doing something that I loved in my spare time. Some people are still good willed, may be difficult to believe but its true