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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

I think they're going to get a huge influx of pathological users who mostly pay amounts which would amount to 80% off the face price of the cheapest game in the bundle.

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...who almost certainly wouldn't have bought the games anyway. The exposure that some of these sales bring is immense, partly because they're novel. Who cares if a large percentage of people get the games for really cheap? They could easily get it for free at The Pirate Bay.

The total is going up by over $300 a MINUTE right now.

This is by far the biggest argument in favor of the "pay-what-you-want" model. It's an efficient way to capture customers that would have been priced out of your product. The other edge of the sword is the tendency of customers with the cash to skimp.

> ...who almost certainly wouldn't have bought the games anyway.

Exactly. I just paid $15 just because I thought it was a neat idea. I don't know if I'll even play the games since I don't really play video games much any more these days. If I do, I won't spend much time on them, and I definitely wouldn't have ever purchased them. So my money to them is 100% money they would never have had otherwise.

"who almost certainly wouldn't have bought the games anyway"

exactly. I bought World of Goo when 2D Boy had such an offer. And i had not heard of the others. Now after the video i want to try Lagaru HD

I'm not sure what you mean by "pathological users", though isn't 20% better than 0%?

In general, you will find that a very small fraction of your user base constitutes a huge portion of support requests. A fraction of this fraction has entitlement issues and simultaneously believes you are trying to cheat them (dimestore psychology: because they know they'd cheat you if they could get away with it). Those are pathological users.

I have repeatedly found personally, and talked to other software developers, that increasing your price drives pathological users away and decreasing your price (particularly dramatically decreasing your price) draws them in like flies.

I do not think it is obviously true that selling 8 games for, e.g., $1 is better than not having that sale. If folks offered me the option of participating in a similar deal, I would decline. In addition to customers paying essentially nothing but requiring disproportionate support, I would be worried about auto-commoditizing my software offering. Why pay $30 when I've publicly demonstrated that I consider it to be worth less than a buck?

On a related topic: dangrover's comments about participating in Macheist are a great read, regardless of your feelings on the matter.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=945869

I think you'd be justified in doing a refund-only support model here. Game doesn't work on your machine? Happy to give a refund!

Can you explain to me how the developers of World of Goo, who field the support requests for WoG, are going to refund the bundle price despite a) having not actually received the bundle price and b) having no direct commercial relationship with the customer which would let them click the Refund button in Paypal?

Prior arrangement with the organizers of the deal. I just don't think that this is a big problem.

You have a point regarding pathological users, but this promotion also draws in people who might have already played or heard of one or two of these games, and are willing to drop $30 or $40 to check out the remaining ones.

Also, even a cost of $1 incurs the friction of the transaction. That ought to turn away a significant percentage of the freeloaders, who probably paid 0 on pirate bay a long time ago anyway.

"Why pay $30 when I've publicly demonstrated that I consider it to be worth less than a buck?"

I think that's where the charity comes in. I see a generous indie developer giving to a good cause, not one admitting their goods are worthless.

In general I see what you're saying.

They're making less per game than they would charging a lousy buck on the appstore. Given all the ways they can make whole dollars, as in plural, per purchase I'd say it's not better than 0% at all.

This is free advertisement for indie developers, who have a very hard time getting publicity. Not only does it pay off in the short term (many of these are users who I can promise you would never have bought these games for anything more), it also pays off for the companies in the future. Wolfire, the creator of Lugaru, is currently working on the sequel, Overgrowth, which they have been funding exclusively by using preorders of the game. If someone buys Lugaru here and enjoys it, they may just preorder Overgrowth, which will net them more money.

It's the same with Frictional Games (creators of Penumbra) and the game that they're funding through preorders, Amnesia.

It seems like pretty expensive advertising actually - a normal sale makes them $x minus the ad or whatever that brought them the customer. Now $x is somewhere between $0 and $1.58 where it used to be up to $20 minus whatever advertising.

They're not making more they're just selling more.

World of Goo did the same thing a while back. They made an incredible amount of money and reached a large amount of people. Yes, many people paid 1 cent, but they still made more than they would have otherwise.

Read the attached article, it's their response to their sale: http://2dboy.com/2009/10/19/birthday-sale-results/

Exactly. I mentioned this in my original post above. They already know whether the "pay what you want" sale works or not.

Not disputing they're going to make a lot of money from this, obviously when they wake up tomorrow morning they're each going to have tens of thousands more than they had when they woke up this morning. In that sense it "works".

But relative to other models the "pay what you want" is a terrible failure - any of those games could have singlehandedly grossed $30,000 to $60,000 from the number of sales they've had today, and that's going to lose a big chunk to advertising but still make them a lot more than $1.66 a sale.

Could have, assuming that the people who paid $7 would have still payed $20. This just isn't the case.

It's been the case for many, many years and remains the case today as well.

Appstore-like pricing is the exception, not the rule.

I think you misunderstand. It's not true that everyone who paid $7 would pay $20.

No it's you who misunderstand.

That some of the 6000 purchasers today would not pay $20 is irrelevant, others would and others from the remaining millions of game players would too.

You also disregard that I already factored in a 50% - 75% discount - the prices I put assumed a $5 - $10 price on sale.

Okay, we're talking about two totally different things.

Cheers.

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