World of Goo 1 year old today - Pay what ever price you want for it!

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...and this is what I think is sad.

Rather than people demonstrating they'd be happy to give a few quid for something decent, most have seemingly just shown that unless they can get something **** takingly cheap, they aren't interested in stuff that isn't Call of Duty or FIFA.

So in future, all this experiment will likely have told them is that beyond a small group of people who were happy to pay $10 or something, the rest would rather just take advantage of such generosity.

There is going to be no incentive to perhaps price something at $10 instead of $20 in future because rather than this demonstrating that people would deem it worth that, it has more likely shown that if someone didn't reckon it was worth $20, they don't reckon it's worth more than $.01.

Wow you certainly gave something stuck somewere....

Read my post, obviously this was brought up for other reasons such as marketing aswell, or are you too blind to see that?
Game sales will have most likely dropped to none excistant aswell.
 
Soldato
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Wow you certainly gave something stuck somewere....

Read my post, obviously this was brought up for other reasons such as marketing aswell, or are you too blind to see that?
Game sales will have most likely dropped to none excistant aswell.

I'm not blind to anything and marketing issues are somewhat irrelevant to the point i'm making.

This was a fantastic chance for the gaming community to demonstrate it is prepared to reward a developer for providing some good content and being forward thinking, instead it would seem the majority of people just saw it as an opportunity to take advantage.

Thanks for the aggresive and patronising tone too btw, much appreciated :)
 
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1) The reason they didn't put in a 'minimum price' was that then this thread would be entitled 'World of goo -- only 50p' and everyone would pay that. It would become 'the price' like any other good -- and the 'pay what you think its worth' concept is lost ..

2) The people buying for a penny (and the people who didn't pay at all for radioheads 'downloadable album') prove that this business model doesn't work. Humanity just isn't ready for it. People are *****. People are gypsy. People are only really interested in #1. Call me a cynic, but I see it every day.

All 2Dboy has really done is worsen their business .. as when 'World of goo 2' comes out for £20 -- people will just think 'I'll wait for it to be 1p' or 'I won't bother waiting, I'll copy it for free. After all, I'm only stealing 1p, to play it 12 months earlier'.


This business model fails, because people fail. (Grinning, giggling, and saying 'I gave them 1p hohoho' .. I mean .. you're hardly dealing with reasonable customers here -- you're dealing with ******!).

Bad business decision by 2D boy. Who'se going to pay for their next product if in a few months it's '1p day'??

3) It's a 'pay what you think it's worth' concept. Not 'pay what you have to'. If you can't seriously argue that the game is worth only 1p to you, but you DEFINATELY WOULDN'T pay 2p for it if the offer had been 'World of goo - only 2p' -- then it means you have CHEATED THE SYSTEM! It may have been easy to cheat -- but still, you CHEATED THE SYSTEM and DIDN'T pay what you think it's worth! So, go on '1p'ers .. explain why the game was not worth 2p to you ... if you can't -- it means you've just been a bit of a thieving ***** that didn't enter into the spirit of the offer. And I hate ******!
 
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I'm not blind to anything and marketing issues are somewhat irrelevant to the point i'm making.

This was a fantastic chance for the gaming community to demonstrate it is prepared to reward a developer for providing some good content and being forward thinking, instead it would seem the majority of people just saw it as an opportunity to take advantage.

We didn't take advantage of anything, im sure the developers knew a lot of people would pay the minimum. Its obvious. I still paid for it didn't i?

And no, the marketing isn't irrelevant at this point, as i'm sure the developers don't give a dam about the tonnes of change there getting atm.
The amount of attention there getting at the moment is far more valuable than any product there selling atm.
 
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Regarding all this talk of marketing, I can't quite see what the point is in marketing a game to people who only want to pay $0.01. Marketing is only worth what it'll generate as sales, and I can't see any way whatsoever that someone paying a pitance for this game means that the marketing is a sucess.

Still, I'll probably pay somewhere between $5 and $10 when I get home tonight, and help pay for some skin flint to get it for next to nothing.

I think britboy has got this nailed.
 
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I dont see why people on here are trying to make others feel bad for buying it for the amount they want or can afford.

Just bought it for $3, I think thats just considering I probably will only play it now and then.

also this sort of deal will let people who normally wouldn't consider it (like me) a chance at playing it.
 
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Regarding all this talk of marketing, I can't quite see what the point is in marketing a game to people who only want to pay $0.01. Marketing is only worth what it'll generate as sales, and I can't see any way whatsoever that someone paying a pitance for this game means that the marketing is a sucess.

Still, I'll probably pay somewhere between $5 and $10 when I get home tonight, and help pay for some skin flint to get it for next to nothing.

I think britboy has got this nailed.

What about the long term marketing? Most people will have never heard of these developers, nor the game, that contributes to something right?

If there sales have dropped which they most likely have, $0.01 is still better than nothing.
Seriously, no matter what someone does, theres always someone complaining...
 
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I too only payed 0.01 USD one the basis that I don't know the game, don't really play puzzle games, I don't have any money and lastly the fact i'll get charged by my bank for the currency conversion, somewhere around the £1.50 mark.

Is the game worth 1p, Yes. Is the game worth more than that to me? No, I already uninstalled it after around 30 minutes and dont intend on installing it again.

I think for 1p, 2D boy has achieved more brand awareness to gamers than an advertising campaign cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. I'm a lot more likely to check out further products from them, who know maybe a ful price purchase.
 
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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 :D
 
Soldato
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With regards the cost issue - what it's costing them or how much they are making is not relevant. They'll probably have planned to make a loss anyway.

The point i've been trying to make, which everyone seems to just completely miss and then start waffling about costs and marketing, is that this was an opportunity to show games publishers everywhere that we are prepared to dish out some cash for games and we'll buy something in droves and happily be paying a tenner or so for it. Instead everyone has just gone for the minimum amount possible and if anything affirmed the publishers views that if people won't pay full price, they're only interested when it's available free, or pretty much free anyway, so lower prices probably wouldn't really help their profit anyway.

This is entirely separate and unrelated to what it has cost 2dboy, or how much marketing focus they have achieved etc. etc.

As a marketing tool, it has worked very well for them, even if it probably has cost them money to do so, I Just think it's a shame that as a group, when there was an opportunity to make a positive statement through action, the majority just decided their 1p game was more important to them.
 
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I see your point, but it would be naïve to assume that 2DBoy didn't already know this was to happen.

I agree though that we're sending the wrong message, however I'd like to think that those who paid rock bottom for the game are the same people who wouldn't have paid for the game anyway, maybe I'm wrong, and obviously there will still be people who would've purchased the game at full but chose $0.01, as well as those people who chose to pay nothing and download illegally anyway.

I'm not sure, personally I think they've made a good move, as its squeezing the remaining buyers out there who wouldn't have heard of them otherwise, if there were ever acurate figures of pirates vs real purchases, I'd guess they correlated with the bad price vs good price choices here.

As I said, not everyone is a villian, and maybe, just maybe, some of those people who would have pirated have been more inclined to throw in a couple of quid here or there; without figures we'll never know.
 
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I've not bought this game yet, still don't know whether to either, but don't you think the developer saw the obvious coming, i mean, would you go into a shop that had a half price sale on and say 'come on, this tee shirt is too cheap at £5, i'll give you £7.50 for it'? no you wouldn't, if the developer coudn't afford to do this, he wouldn't have done it, like mentioned earlier, the game has reached saturation point, it's probably sold all it is ever going to sell before this offer, now they have squeezed quite a bit of extra profit from the game that they probably wouldn't have, got a lot of publicity from it too.

We are all at a time where we are all looking after the pennies and anything we can get for free / cheap, whether we want it or not, we will get and normally, i wouldn't buy this type of game, but in this instance i might download it to see what it is like, so there is an extra customer that they never would have had.

lets all face up to the reality - do gooder or not, it's human nature, if you feel guilty for paying $0.01 for a game that the developer is legally allowing you to do, then you pay more, i'm going to pay $0.01 for it because i can, whether i think it's worth more or not (although i have no idea whether it's worth that yet as i might think it is rubbish after i download it.)... I'm sure 2dnoy isn't going to lose any sleep over all the $0.01 downloads

and for the record, i do pay full price for games that i do like / fancy
 
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Soldato
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I agree though that we're sending the wrong message, however I'd like to think that those who paid rock bottom for the game are the same people who wouldn't have paid for the game anyway, maybe I'm wrong, and obviously there will still be people who would've purchased the game at full but chose $0.01, as well as those people who chose to pay nothing and download illegally anyway.

This is the only point i'm trying to make - it's a shame that the message this sends is that as a group, we will by and large pay the absolute minimum we can and that the extra people interested who weren't really interested at $20 are the ones who only deem it worth a penny. If people had paid $10 or so, it would have sent the message to publishers that there are droves of people willing to pay a fair amount of money for a game, just not quite the prices they usually charge. It may have provided a small bit of evidence to say 'hey, you know, if you started charging £15 for games as standard, there are a lot more people here who are willing to buy them'.

Comments like "but don't you think the developer saw the obvious coming" are just missing my point entirely. I don't think anyone in this thread has insinuated that such behaviour has come as a surprise to anyone, least of all the developers. That doesn't stop it being a shame that people have chosen to respond in this manner though.

edit - oh and wes, you can always try the demo if you're worried about liking it, perhaps then you might even decide it's worth more than a penny to you?
 
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Soldato
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I don't think it's worth convincing people to pay more for it. Remember when that band whoever they were put their stuff online for whatever the user wanted to pay. It's them asking us what we think its worth. If people just want a game for boredom on their hard drive, every so often, then of course they won't want to pay much.
 
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