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

创意是什么For one week, drop the $20 price and let buyers pay anything from one cent to $50, betting attention and goodwill beat a discount — then publish every number.伤筋动骨

当时的题目

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.

它是怎么成立的

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.

妙在哪

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

做出来什么

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.

可以借走的

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.

后来

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.

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