More recently "Pay What You Can" has come to private, for-profit enterprises. The ease and relatively minimal cost of transferring certain types of goods over the Internet had allowed certain companies and artists to dabble in giving their content away for whatever the customer feels is an appropriate price. Radiohead is probably one of the most well-known examples of this, and the concept seems to apply very readily to music in particular (likely because it's only very slightly less convenient to obtain albums illegally via torrenting clients).
It's a different story to see pay-what-you-will exchanges for videogames. Unlike some free to download or even free to play games, World of Goo isn't based on micro-transactions after you've started playing like most games which follow such a business model. How exactly does a year-old game releasing its content for as low as $.01 pertain to pre-game advertising? The question becomes: what is 2D Boy (the publisher of World of Goo) playing at here? It could be -- and is likely -- that they've sold all the copies they believe they're going to sell for the going rate of $5-20, and are just trying to eek out the last bit of potential profit by reaching people who might pay $1, but not $5.
While this certainly has to have some benefit, another possibility -- and one that may be more likely, given how notoriously low the averages raked in using "Pay What You Can" systems tend to be -- 2D Boy is now more concerned with building an audience. World of Goo has been a very successful small game for the PC (as well as the Wii, though that version is not part of this promo), and at this point, it may be more important for 2D Boy to increase their brand recognition as a smaller company that releases really solid games, rather than attempting to sell however many more copies at a fixed rate.
If 2D Boy is confident enough that their gameplay will encourage fans to purchase the games they make in the future, the strategy of giving World of Goo away for a penny becomes its own word of mouth advertisement -- without having to spend anything on a hefty campaign, new insights, or even distribution aside from bandwidth costs.
The video games like World of Goo are then exchanged almost like free music (ie. Radiohead)? If advertising costs are paid for through "word of mouth" advertisement, then do the profits that are made go to a good cause?
ReplyDeleteSometimes they are, though I think that the gaming community frowns on downloading games more than most people frown on downloading music. That isn't to say it doesn't happen, just that there is more respect for game designers who are seen as putting out good content and "deserving" not to have their content torrented, whereas many people don't see much connection between purchasing a CD and paying the actual artist.
ReplyDeleteThat (and probably more importantly) it's moderately less convenient to download a videogame than it is a song from a CD, or even a whole CD -- not only because they are bigger files, but because you often need to go through the hassle (which can be pretty mind-boggling for even the average computer-user) of getting around serial locks.
I doubt the profits go to a "good cause" in the sense of going to a charity, if that's what you mean. I'll definitely check into that over the weekend, when I'm not so swamped with classwork -- it would be interesting to see if there are games who have donated to charities! (I know many gaming groups have, but I'm not so sure about publishers.)