Pay-What-You-Want Birthday Sale Wrap-up
13 days of birthday celebrations are now officially over. It’s been educational. Thanks again to everyone who bought the game, hope you’re enjoying it. [Update: 83,250 total birthday copies]
Before we never say another word about this ever again, we wanted to share a few more interesting tidbits that came up since our last post about the subject.
Donation Average Over Time
We’ve already posted the daily average for the first 6 days, but something a bit surprising happened after our previous blog post, which was posted late on day 8: The average donation increased pretty significantly.
We can only assume that it was related to our publicizing that the most common price point chosen was $0.01 and raising people’s awareness to the fact that we don’t see any money for purchases of $0.30 and under.
Breakdown By Platform
We were expecting the average price paid to be highest for Linux users and lowest for Windows users, but the gap was larger than we thought it would be…
Also, the per-platform download breakdown was pretty surprising, with Windows accounting for 65%, and Mac and Linux pretty much splitting the remainder evenly:
Donation Average By Country
This measure varied even more widely than by day or by platform, which is to be expected. Out of curiosity, we normalized the donation amount using the per-capita GDP of the country in question to estimate “generosity”. This is of course a totally flawed measurement because we’re pretty sure that the people who bought the game don’t represent the socioeconomic fabric of the country they live in. After all, they do have a computer and an internet connection. Here’s the data for all countries from which we had at least 100 purchases during the birthday sale:
And finally, we wanted to give an honorable mention to Stuart (A.K.A. Sticky) for being extremely generous with his donation of $150. Thanks Stuart!
October 29th, 2009 at 9:00 am
I would say the reason for some countries to have a high “generosity” index can be explained by inequality. In countries like Brazil or South Africa, I guess the avg GDP per capita is far lower than the income of those people who have an internet connection at home and spend money in PC games.
October 29th, 2009 at 9:47 am
According to my calculations, you made almost $46,000.00 in Linux sales alone, or am I missing something here?
October 29th, 2009 at 10:52 am
As others have pointed out the generosity figures are rather meaningless because you do not use nominal GDP per capita (but PPP adjusted figures) and relate that to nominal price. Either use nominal GDP or determine the appropriate multipliers for each country and adjust their us dollar amount to the respective international dollar amount.
Cheers
October 29th, 2009 at 11:01 am
“from an unknown company”
Why’d that make a difference (considering there’s a demo)?
October 29th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Like “Old like the world” said:
“Well french are generous, brits are cheap and swiss are loaded nothing new there”.
Indeed nothing new here.
October 29th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
I had always meant to go out and buy your game but I just never got around to buying it on WiiWare. Then your sale rolled out and I paid $5 for it. I figured if I didn’t like it but I still played it for a bit and killed some time, I’d have spent $5 well.
Needless to say, I now wish I’d given you guys more money, because this game is stutterfuck amazing!
October 29th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Hungary was the most generous country. Congrats hungarian fellows :)
October 30th, 2009 at 3:08 am
I really wish more companies would do this.
Sadly, the model did not extend to WiiWare, if it had, I would have purchased a second to compliment the one I got for my Mac. As it stands, it’s the first non-concole game I’ve bought since Starcraft back in 1999.
October 30th, 2009 at 7:09 am
“Hajoonor CANADA”
You dumbass.
And I enjoy my windows with no problem. Although, I do buy my own windows.
You cant blame the buyers, you have to blame the economy and with the massive lay offs. Oh, I guess you’re in Canada. Maybe nothing bad happens there.
October 30th, 2009 at 11:21 am
I think $20 is the minimum anyone should pay for this game
October 30th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Great deal! I bought this game directly from you for 20$ shortly after it came out and bought another copy for 5$ to gift to a friend… which I haven’t done yet…
October 30th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
[…] 2D Boy’s pay-what-you-like World of Goo results wrapup […]
October 30th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
I’m really great that it appears you consider the exercise a success. I’m running Linux, I downloaded a copy for Windows just in case I want to use it on there too (hope you don’t mind). I love how open you are, that you actually provide Linux binaries and not just for one of the distributions but multiple ones.
I got a few of my friends to buy it and hammered home the point that there’s no point in paying basically less than $1, and I’m glad to say nobody did pay less than that.
I paid $5 for your game and I’m very happy with it. I would certainly consider buying more games from you with the great support for different OS’ and no DRM. Although I must say I wouldn’t have paid full retail price for this game, not out of any spite, I just don’t play or put as much emphasis and therefore money behind my diminishing habit.
Thanks a lot anyway for showing the right way to be in the indie games business.
October 30th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
@Tolan:
Yes…
Meh, I blame uninformative scale on graph.
October 31st, 2009 at 9:21 am
Well I reckon this was an excellent product. Unlike many games and utilities, which carry a price tag that completely do not reflect that substance of the program, this one was reasonable at $20. I took advantage of the pay-what-you-like, program and paid $20, only because you supported Linux. Now once you have made enough money to retire…you could make this open source, before you go on to your next work of genuis.
I am at least glad that Linux users were more generous that Windows users…we may be a minority, (1-2% or so, mostly non-gamers, but contributed 17%), but we do not steal and we understand value.
October 31st, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Thank you guys for such an amazing offer !!!
October 31st, 2009 at 8:09 pm
Hajooner says
“I guess this new study just proves that Windows users are pretty much dead-beat tight wads”
You’re from Canada, do you really want to generalize an entire group of people based on these statistics? Because it’s not exactly flattering to Canadians either.
November 1st, 2009 at 10:34 am
@ 2D Boy: Thanks and my respect for Linux support!
PS The show must go on :-)
November 1st, 2009 at 10:52 am
I want to thank you for the wonderful offer. It was really satisfying knowing that someone is still willing to help people get games for a low price! I feel bad for only donating above a dollar but I wasn’t going to pay at all if it wasn’t for the offer so I guess I helped :\ I’m from Brazil and I’m quite surprised by this. Piracy here is HUGE. I guess it is all a matter of price then. Games here cost as much as an US Citizen paying 500$ for a game
November 2nd, 2009 at 6:15 am
@ 2D Boy.
Thank You so much for an amazing product. My wife is enjoying this…well, more than I thought possible. I only wish I knew how great this game was before I donated a measly $2.00. Kind of odd to ask ppl to donate how much they think the game is worth before they have a chance to play/evaluate it.
November 2nd, 2009 at 6:22 am
[…] you might heard 2dboy , the company (of 2 people) behind the indie game World-Of-Goo (WOG) made a birthday sales week, which was extended to 13 days. During the birthday sales users could pay for WOG from 0.1$ to how they valued the game and the […]
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:00 am
It is very difficult to make a donation from Russia.
November 3rd, 2009 at 7:51 am
I would gladly have paid $10 but already bought it for Wii well before this announcement. Thanks for the great indie sleeper hit!
November 4th, 2009 at 1:56 am
I loved the game so much on WiiWare that I decided to drop another 5€ on the PC version (which rounded nicely to $7.50! ^_^).
I’m also quite proud (not to much, but not to low) that my country (Italy) is in the top 10 position for average payment, well ahead of other more rich and prestigious countries as Germany, UK, US and others.
A big APPLAUSE for those countries that rank high in “generosity” column, and a big BOO to South Korea which rank 1st lowest on “generosity” and 2nd lowest in the avg payment…. cheapskates which only recognize a good product only if it’s free!!!
November 4th, 2009 at 5:52 am
Congratulation, Where is Slovakia?
November 6th, 2009 at 7:19 am
I wonder if Stuart meant to write 1.50 in the donation input box, but missed the period. XD
This game is awesome, thanks.
November 10th, 2009 at 1:14 am
Really great game, thanks !
November 11th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Just to add that the uk figure will be affected by the fact it appears on very popular deals forums with the title “game for only $0.01”.
Also you might want to think next time about allowing local currencies. Think of a number….1….okay 1 UKP, or 1 Euro, sorry $ only, okay $1.
November 11th, 2009 at 10:41 pm
I also bought it for 0.01 because i have the Wii version. I know legally it’s a different game, but i only wanted to try it in my computer and i thought it’s better pay the 0.01 than download “free” from another place. At least you know people want your games
November 20th, 2009 at 5:32 am
Congratulation :) you’re game is just amazing !
November 23rd, 2009 at 1:32 pm
It’s sad so many people paid so little for such a great game. Keep doing what you’re doing, 2DBoy!
November 24th, 2009 at 9:13 am
I bought for $20. And I think that game is worth of it. You have done great job, thank you.
November 27th, 2009 at 11:00 am
i was planning on buying it but i didn’t. i bought it on the wii and off of steam already. but i’m glad to hear that you made great profit in that short time span.
@Lohkay: sorry but you really sound like a douche
December 7th, 2009 at 3:54 am
I really liked the demo, but I can’t see myself dishing out over 10€ for the complete game.
Too bad I didn’t hear about this when it happened, I would have happily bought it for 6 or 7 euros…
January 12th, 2010 at 11:48 am
[…] word for it, just look at the statistics. The developers of indie game ‘World of Goo’ found out that Linux users are willing to pay higher prices for their game. And my own statistics on Mystic […]
February 1st, 2010 at 7:19 am
[…] you can see in World of Goo, created by 2D Boy, they had about 17% of their sales on the Linux platform. It looks like a lot of […]
March 30th, 2010 at 3:56 am
[…] großen Erfolg, den 2D Boy mit ihrem World of Goo bei der Linuxgemeinde hatten. As you can see in World of Goo, created by 2D Boy, they had about 17% of their sales on the Linux platform. It looks like a lot of […]
May 5th, 2010 at 3:49 am
I’m just pleased that South Africa actually made the list! :)
May 5th, 2010 at 1:03 pm
It’s too bad that you didn’t lock the donations to either being in one of the two categories: either $0 or greater than $0.35, so you wouldn’t lose money on the individual transactions.
My $0.02 (+$0.30 obviously).
May 6th, 2010 at 8:52 pm
[…] Game Bundle, a killer deal with several other indie developers. Similar to World of Goo’s temporary pay-what-you-want pricing model, you can pay anything upward of a cent. The games included in the bundle are the famous World of […]
May 7th, 2010 at 6:01 am
[…] of World Of Goo which BTW is also a part of the Humble Indie Bundle, made the birthday sales week, GNU/Linux users chose to pay more the the Mac and Windows users. Koen Witters from Koonsolo the developer of Mystic Mine which I reviewed and interviewed several […]
May 11th, 2010 at 1:40 pm
[…] gehen. Im Schnitt hat also jeder Käufer neu Dollar bezahlt, Linuxer zahlen freiwillig – mal wieder – deutlich […]
June 29th, 2010 at 8:28 am
[…] As a bit of a contrast to that viewpoint, I would like to make a case of 2d Boy’s World of Goo. According to their blog announcement of the Linux version of the game Linux versions account for 4.6% of the full downloads from their site. (source) During their Birthday Pay What You Want Sale, Linux downloads accounted for 17% of all downloads. (source) […]
July 19th, 2010 at 3:28 am
[…] games, for instance when 2D Boy held a special pay what you want birthday sale on World of Goo some very interesting figures emerged. Windows users only accounted for 65% of sales with the remainder equally split between Mac and […]
August 31st, 2010 at 5:00 am
Great stats! Please do a similar experiment soon. I love reading about the results, maybe I am more of a nerd then I thought…
September 3rd, 2010 at 8:01 am
[…] word for it, just look at the statistics. The developers of indie game ‘World of Goo’ found out that Linux users are willing to pay higher prices for their game. And my own statistics on Mystic […]