The World of Goo Birthday Pricing Experiment

The World of Goo Birthday Pricing Experiment

WoG_happybday1

2D Boy’s amazing World of Goo turned a year old last week and since then, and until this Sunday, they have been running an experiment where you can buy World of Goo for any price you want.

I won’t delve into too much detail, RPS have done their fair share and Ron and Kyle have also provided a lengthy analysis of what has happened so far.

One of the most exciting statistics to come out of this little experiment is the figure of 57,000. This is the rough number of people (as of Monday) who had put bought the game at an average of $2.03. Further to this Steam sales of the game rose 40% on the previous week, a massive increase, especially as the game is still full price there.

While 2D Boy have all the hard stats available for analysis Kyle had some other interesting things to reveal to me.

This has been the year of World of Goo for us! And when we are 80 years old, we can say “Hey kids, I was that guy who made World of Goo!” and they will briefly look up from their Hologram Phone and be so impressed.

The pay-what-you-want Birthday Sale has been fascinating so far. We posted a bunch of stats, and will post a bunch more next week on Monday when it’s over. But here’s one stat that’s not exactly quantifiable, but really interesting: We’ve received thousands of emails via our contact form since the sale started, and found that email politeness more-or-less correlates with the amount they chose to pay for the game. Emails in all-caps yelling at us about slow download speeds (no secret our server has been very busy lately), are in general, regarding orders of 1 cent. On the other hand, very polite emails, saying thanks, or nicely asking for help with their order, tend to be from those who chose to buy the game for a bit more. And of course there are exceptions. I’m curious if age correlates too, which might explain it, but we don’t have that data!

I can’t wait to see what information Ron and Kyle reveal to us next Monday, I am sure they will have some more startling figures to show off. If you have never played the game, please try it now. It is a joy to behold.

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