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Comment by benologist | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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