The archive · Business Models · Financial decision · 2009
2D Boy drops World of Goo's $20 price for a week and gets 57,000 sales
For World of Goo's first birthday, two-man studio 2D Boy let buyers name the price — 57,000 copies sold in a week at a $2.03 average.
2D Boy
What it had to solve
World of Goo was a critical hit but a year old, and 2D Boy estimated that around 90% of PC players had pirated it. For the game's first birthday the two-man studio ran no ordinary sale: it made the game pay-what-you-want on its own site.
How it works
World of Goo, the physics puzzle hit from two-man studio 2D Boy, was a year old in October 2009 and selling for $20. Rather than run a conventional sale for its birthday, co-founders Ron Carmel and Kyle Gray removed the price entirely for a week: buyers could pay anything from one cent to $50.
The experiment was a press event before it was a sale. Rock Paper Shotgun called the disclosed sales data 'an unprecedented amount of detailed sales information': 57,000 copies in the first week, an average of $2.03, 16,852 people paying the one-cent minimum, spikes at round numbers like $5, $10 and $20, and 306 people who paid the full original price anyway.
The numbers told a story about pricing psychology — most buyers said they paid what they could afford, and most thought the game was worth $10, not $20 — while the free version actually pulled buyers into paid channels: Steam sales rose 40% and Wii sales 9%. 2D Boy walked away with over $100,000 from a game it had already finished, and the model it proved carried straight into the Humble Indie Bundle the following May.
Why it lands
- A free-price experiment is more newsworthy than a discount, so the promotion itself generated the coverage
- Removing the price let each buyer pay what the game was worth to them, capturing money discounts would have left on the table
- Publishing the sales data turned a sale into a case study other developers studied
- The spillover effect — free copies driving paid Steam and Wii purchases — showed the offer advertised the game
What it did
Roughly 57,000 copies sold in the first week — over $100,000 even after PayPal's 13% cut — plus a 40% jump in Steam sales and a 9% rise on Wii from the publicity. The experiment became the reference point for pay-what-you-want in games and preceded the first Humble Indie Bundle.
What you can take
Letting buyers set the price turns a discount into a news story and a goodwill gesture, and lets each customer pay what the game is worth to them — publishing the data doubles the impact.
Since then
2D Boy extended the sale to October 25 and kept reporting figures as they climbed. The experiment made pay-what-you-want a named indie-games strategy: when the first Humble Indie Bundle launched in May 2010, World of Goo was in the pack and the whole bundle ran on the same let-buyers-name-the-price model, this time with buyers splitting their payment between developers, charity and the platform.
Sources
- World Of Goo Sale Offers Fascinating Results
- World of Goo experiment a "huge success"
- Lessons From Pay-What-You-Wish Gaming
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