launch day is coming up this monday and the 2d boys have never been so anxious and excited!  world of goo will still be available for purchase on our website, and the boxed version is already available for pre-order on amazon.com.

starting this monday, you’ll also be able to purchase it on wiiware, steam, and direct2drive.  the game’s nintendo channel page is already up as is the steam page.  thanks to the two jasons and doug over at valve for helping us get the game set up with steamworks so quickly! (can you say achievements?).  huge thanks to dan adelman at nintendo for all the help and support he’s given us over the last year.

the game will also be available on greenhouse, the most indie friendly portal there is.  2d boy cheers for penny arcade and hothead games for bringing it into existence.

last but not least, the good people at brighter minds, our retail publisher for the PC version in north america will make the game available on their new portal, beanstalk games.  thanks ran and jody!

[ update: several people who have pre-ordered have asked us if they’d be able to activate the game on steam.  we contacted valve about this and the answer is a big fat YES.  when the game releases, anyone who pre-ordered from our website will be able to use their magic key to activate the game on steam. we’re working with them right now to make this happen. ]

as some of you already know, world of goo will be released DRM-free on our website.  once a purchase is made, a download link is sent out and there are no restrictions on where and how many times the game can be installed or additional hoops to jump through before it can be played.

so far, the experiment is going well.  we’ve sent the full unprotected game out to the few thousand people who pre-ordered it before this past monday and we haven’t yet found the game on any torrent sites.  we were told about one warez site where someone posted the chapter 1 preview and their magic key (the key is needed because the preview did have some homebrew copy protection, it came out before we decided to go DRM-free).   frankly, we’re pretty amazed and encouraged that this is the extent of the piracy we’ve seen.

so a big 2D thank you to everyone who’s helping us show that if you treat gamers with trust and respect, the same treatment tends to be returned.

i’d like to end with a request for help: if you see world of goo being freely distributed somewhere, please send us a note about it from our contact page.  it’s not something we intend to fight, we’d just like to be able to share the data from this experiment with the rest of the game development community, hopefully to encourage more DRM-free games.

[update: i’ve gathered some data from the last 24 hours about how many people tried to use the license key posted in the warez forum.  there were a total of 77 activation attempts from 17 unique ip addresses.  8 of them from argentina, 2 from israel, and 1 each from australia, denmark, ireland, netherlands, UK, south africa, and USA.  this data doesn’t really say much on its own, but since i already collected it i figured i’d post it. ]

we just received word from cortex command that the ultimate interface for world of goo has been found: a tablet pc!  data made a video to illustrate his point.  thanks data!