2D Boy’s Big Pricing Adventure

I miss the coolest news while I’m busy giving PAX its due. You may recall World of Goo, a beverage-driven tower building game. We thought it was pretty spiffy when it came out, and so did about 80% pirates by volume. Despite that, developer 2D Boy gave us all a present for the game’s first birthday: a two week sale where you could pay anything you liked to buy the game. Now that the sale has ended, 2D Boy gave game journalists another present: they posted statistics about how it went.

The first wave of stats came a week into the sale:

If you look at the full-size histogram, two things are immediately obvious. The first is that gamers are cheap bastards. World of Goo retails for $20, but of the roughly 50,000 people who bought the game during the first week, under 10% payed more than $5, and around a third payed one penny. Secondly, players pay in round numbers. there are spikes at $0.01, $1, $5, $10, $15, and $20, and although they get progressively smaller with increasing price, they’re still at least three times more frequent than their neighbors.

At the end of the promotion, the sales had climbed to about 82,000, pretty tremendous sales for an indie developer. There wasn’t a final histogram to be had, but 2D Boy did post average prices for each day:

The gradually rising prices are plausibly the result of increasing customer awareness, though there is a jump on day 9. This came after 2D boy posted the first set of statistics, and blogged that transaction fees ate up any purchases under $0.30. So in case you didn’t know, guilt actually drives prices up!

The real question that this promotion raises is whether or not another developer would be able to replicate 2D boy’s sales strategy. Part of what made this sale a success was the extensive media coverage and corresponding consumer awareness. Is it really viable to pay what you want when it’s no longer a novelty?