Name your price for World of Goo

Bobby Miller 14 Oct, 2009 at 2:09am ET Article published in Gaming

Perhaps you’ve heard of World of Goo, the delightfully gooey puzzle game found on the PC, Mac, and Wii platforms. World of Goo is a game that challenges logic and focuses heavily on physics and engineering. The basic idea is to create structures by attaching balls of goo to one another. These structures–thanks to the physics engine–will move, bend, and break depending on structural integrity. The objective is to transport goo balls to the end of the stage by building structures and helping the goo balls traverse the hazardous terrain.

2D Boy, the developer of World of Goo, announced on their website Tuesday that the game had turned one year old. To celebrate, 2D boy is having a sale. You can buy World of Goo for the PC, Mac, or Linux platforms for whatever price you deem appropriate. Any price from $0.01 to $900,000,000.00 and up are acceptable. I’m seriously not kidding–pay anything. I bought the game for six cents just a moment ago.

Name your price! Seriously!

Better yet, 2D Boy is offering the game without any sorts of DRM. If you want to put a copy on your PC, and then install the game to your Mac as well, you’re free to do it. 2D Boy is trusting the consumers and not punishing them with draconian DRM. Don’t take advantage of them and give the installer to others. If you want the game, pay them and support their efforts. It doesn’t have to break the bank. Act soon, however, as the sale only lasts through October 19th.

World of Goo made a huge splash in the indie game world just a year ago, and now 2D Boy are celebrating huge. If you’ve been wanting to give this fresh, ambitious title a try, you’ll find no greater time than now. And hey, if you like it, pay them a decent amount to support the developers. I’m going to buy a second copy to gift to a friend. This is a bold move by a small crew, show them your appreciation!

Comments

14 Oct 2009 ~ 5:17am macbook mani WOOOOH ILL GET IT!
14 Oct 2009 ~ 6:09am Snarkasm Please pay a reasonable amount. It's a great game by great devs with great intentions - they deserve your dollars.
14 Oct 2009 ~ 7:13am SPIKE09 Very true Snark being of the not sure if i'll like it camp , gonna give the free demo a whirl before commiting cash.:D
14 Oct 2009 ~ 9:18am _k ya I just payed .01$ for it cause I can.
14 Oct 2009 ~ 9:24am Obsidian I wish they would have at least set the minimum amount at $1 for assholes like _k.
14 Oct 2009 ~ 9:32am _k Wait so if i paid six cents for it I would of been fine and not an asshole?
14 Oct 2009 ~ 10:20am Cliff_Forster The developers agenda is obviously to introduce more people to their brand. They know that pay what you want is more or less a giveaway. Radiohead and Trent Reznor have gone on record as saying their pay what you want experiments were largely disappointing. Reznor had an artist that he was promoting, somebody that was up and coming, I don't quite recall who but he said it was really hurtful that people would give no more than a few cents for a whole album of amazing music, but there you have it, given the option, people will exchange as little money as possible for the experience they want, its capitalism.

I don't think exploiting the system makes anyone a jerk, I don't do it, I don't necessarily agree with it, but I can understand peoples motivation.

A better model in my opinion would be to give people an unlimited trial for two or three days like they do with the Unreal weekends and such, that is a great model to introduce people to the product then give them an option to buy at a discounted price that you set. Coming in and saying, pay what you think its worth, well lets be real guys, its wasted on this youthful generation because they think they are entitled to great experiences for free. They have this sense of entitlement, and the developer is only strengthening it with this model.
14 Oct 2009 ~ 10:30am Snarkasm

However, [Radiohead's] publisher, Warner-Chapell, has just released figures proving doubters wrong. Across all mediums, physical and download, the band sold three million albums. Considering their previous three albums sold in the low hundreds of thousands, that's not too bad.

The album has sold 1.75 million physical CDs to date and even before physical copies were issued, the band had made more money than they had made on the previous, non-downloadable album. The band have over 17 million plays on Last.fm, and have sold 1.2 million gig tickets. They also sold 100,000 box sets online, which retailed at Â£40 or so.

So basically, despite allowing people to download the album for free, the band sold more records, merchandise and gig tickets than they had on the last three albums. Also, by releasing it themselves rather than going through a traditional record company, the band made a much bigger chunk of that cash than they would otherwise have had.

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14 Oct 2009 ~ 10:41am Thrax M-m-m-monster kill.
14 Oct 2009 ~ 10:49am Cliff_Forster Read this.... Reznor's complaint.

And I will find it, but I am sure there is sales data that basicly showed people on average paid less than the price of a single happy meal for "In Rainbows." Now, that's not to say it did not make money for Radiohead , but do you really think a music album is only worth about $3.50? And ask yourself this, why did they end it? Why is the album now sold in traditional distribution channels? Somebody was not happy.
14 Oct 2009 ~ 10:57am Snarkasm Oh look, somebody wanted MORE money despite the original action being a wild success. That's totally unexplainable, isn't it?
14 Oct 2009 ~ 11:10am kryyst Fun game, but the demo was more then enough for me.
14 Oct 2009 ~ 11:19am Cliff_Forster Now, now, Snark, you know this generation has that sense of entitlement, you just wrote about it in life.

Read the link, Reznor, the man who more of less ushered in the idea of pay what you want for content, publicly complains about peoples lack of generosity for art.

If pay what you want was a truly profitable buisness model, more people would be doing it. The people that developed world of goo simply decided that giving it away to a few people might make sense to build the brand up for future installments.

If you remember, years ago Pepsi and Itunes had a joint promotion to give away millions of dollars in free itunes. It introduced people to the brand, and the initial investment worked out very nicely for them. Copyright holders can't say pay what you want and expect that the majority will pay a fair market value on a product they have an option on, it just wont happen.
14 Oct 2009 ~ 11:22am _k Well if you want to get all srs about this. This falls into the argument that every time someone downloads a movie off the internet that sale was lost. But this is not the case there are a high number of people who follow this practice that would of simply passed on the movie even if viewing only cost a small amount, because they did not actually want to see the movie it was just there.

In my case with this game I would of never played this game or cared to even bother with the demo. I might not actually play this game at all but I will keep the copy I PAID for because they gave me the option to pay what I wanted to own their game. They got one more penny they would not have gotten otherwise. So jog on /razberry
14 Oct 2009 ~ 11:26am Snarkasm Honestly, my problem with Reznor's model was that he offered a free version that was probably good enough for almost everybody OR a $5 higher-quality version. Given that choice, what percentage of people did he THINK would pay for the $5 version, especially when studies show most people nowadays actually like the compression artifacts in low-bitrate music?

Radiohead, meanwhile, just said "pay what you want" - not this tier or that tier - and they appear, by all accounts, to have come out of it all right. I honestly think it might have been a failure in his model, not in the system.
14 Oct 2009 ~ 11:43am Cliff_Forster Snark, that may be fair to say, and I honestly hope you are right. I think we would all be far better off in a world where people could pay what they feel is fair for content, but you do understand my pessimism, especially given a response like _k_ has given.

_k_, lets say you play it and love it. Will you go back and pay more for it?
14 Oct 2009 ~ 12:02pm _k NO. But if they have another similar game they are selling I would not think twice about paying full price. Saying I should pay more later if I liked it would equate to finding a game in a discount bin that you said "wth its only 2$" but you enjoyed the game and replayed it several times. Are you going to mail a check or contact the company to find out how to give them more money cause you really liked their game you got cheap from a retailer. This would equate to all the other sales of steam games where people buy and play games they wouldn't not normally because they are 5$ instead of 20$.

If you have a problem with my ideology in this matter why don't you start a personal campaign to get money out of everyone who plays on our TF2 server. There are hundreds of people who enjoy something we host but only a few pay, even regular members. They enjoy playing a game that we make sure they can play, well heck why don't we just pay for steam while we are at it they give us a utility to play the games we already paid for, and we can't play some of them when it jacks up, but it also is its own free IM and social tool.

If you feel I am using an extreme hyperbole its because you feel we need to conform to your moral standards of paying people what Cliff would give them. I gave them money they would not get otherwise if I play their game I don't care but I also might want to play their other games that are full price after this. This is a marketing tact they took with positives and negatives. They know what will happen because others have done this.
15 Oct 2009 ~ 4:09am FelixDeSouze sweet, got it
15 Oct 2009 ~ 7:27am Zuntar It was the company's choice to set the game out there for "free". I agree/understand with both sides of this argument, but ultimately this is advertisement for them, nothing else.
19 Oct 2009 ~ 11:48am FelixDeSouze Lovin this game, on the 2nd chapter and there is more to go! Can't complain for $0.01
21 Oct 2009 ~ 4:37am Snarkasm

/. wrote:

2D Boy, the independent game studio behind World of Goo, recently celebrated the game's one-year anniversary by offering it at whatever price buyers cared to pay. They've now released some sales statistics about how people responded to the opportunity. The average price during the sale was $2.03; the game normally retails for $20. According to a survey of why people paid what they did, 22.4% said it was all they could afford at the time, and 12.4% said they already owned World of Goo and were buying it for a different platform. (Yes, there is a Linux version.) Over 57,000 people took advantage of the offer, which was enough for 2D Boy to term it "a huge success." Interestingly, they also saw a significant increase in sales through Steam, and a smaller increase through Wiiware. They've decided to extend the experiment until October 25th.
21 Oct 2009 ~ 7:21am Zuntar Beautiful, lets hope other companies will see try for "a huge success".
21 Oct 2009 ~ 7:28am Snarkasm I guess that's $120k that they may not have gotten otherwise, but I wish people would have recognized their talent and courage a little more.