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.

World of Goo: Pay What You Can

"Pay What You Can," while not exactly a widespread phenomenon (to put it lightly) isn't a completely new concept. Obviously not-for-profit groups have been executing this sort of donation-based system for quite some time: churches are probably the longest running business in the world, and they've been passing around the collection plate for thousands of years.

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.