Sales Follow-Up on World of Goo

Last week I posted about the temporary Pay-What-You-Can offer for World of Goo, and on this past Wednesday GamePolitics.com reported some of the numbers that the stunt generated. "The ability for consumers to pay what they wanted to for the title also generated an enormous amount of publicity, further benefiting sales," they reported. Publicity might be harder to measure, but I did touch on the fact that it could boost future game sales and new launches.

For anyone interested in the sheer numbers, however:

The average price paid for the game was $2.03, while almost 17,000 people chose to pay a single cent and another 21,000 plus paid between 2 cents and $1.99. The next largest category was the $5.00 to $5.99 range, with over 7,300 customers. At the other end of the spectrum, 4 people chose to pay $50.00 for the game.

Not necessarily within the scope of this blog, but I thought that it was a nice follow-up.

Facebook: Soon to be more Civilized.

Yesterday Games.com reported that Civilization, one of the pillars of the real-time strategy videogame genre, will be launching a version of its long-running franchise on Facebook in the upcoming year.

As I mentioned to fellow classmate katdiogo in a comment on a recent post about Farmville on Facebook, there are very few games available on Facebook that appeal to me. Though I clearly enjoy playing videogames, as someone with regular access to other gaming platforms, Facebook does not tend to draw me in.

However, the news of Civilization coming to everyone's favorite social-networking site, for me, could be a (no pun intended, honest) game-changer. When I grew up, the bread and butter of my videogame experience was half Doom, half Warcraft and Command and Conquer style RTS (real-time strategy) games -- until I was about 8 years-old and started playing online games.

Civilization is a game which defines the RTS genre for many people. Much like something in Farmville, the game is based on progression (rather than say, Pacman or Tetris -- you are generally building off of where you left from. The idea is to take a group of people (normally sorted by nationality) from their start as simple gatherer-hunters, up to their pinnacle as world-dominating superpowers.

I initially heard about this game via Twitter, when all the gaming sites I follow suddenly went crazy as they broadcasted the news. Then, I had gaming friends who similarly tweeted and retweeted the information. I know I just made the point about buzz driving games on social-networking sites, but this is a prime example of what I meant. Already, without having to do anything other than pump their story into the right channels, many people in the target audience (people who have enjoyed past Civ games and would be likely to try out the Facebook version) have this news on their radar.

It remains to be seen if the game would have any more power to retain a player-base than the usual Facebook game-application fare, but given Civilization's (well-earned, in my opinion) good reputation amongst avid gamers and even an older audience (the first Civilization game was published in 1991), I have high hopes already.