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2D Boy has revealed key sales data behind the one year anniversary pay-what-you-want promotion it ran for its first game World of Goo.
Over 57,000 consumers bought the game during the time of the promotion, the studio has revealed, selling on average of $2.03 a copy.
The offer also drove sales on other services, with Steam sales up 40 per cent and WiiWare sales up 9 per cent. The latter was described as ‘large enough to have not been entirely caused by normal fluctuations’ – proving that price promotions of PC products can drive sales for console counterparts.
So encouraged has the developer been by the sales spike, it is making data available to all and extending the pay-what-you-want deal until this Sunday.
The studio has said others should experiment with digital pricing to help widen knowledge of how consumers react to special offers and deals.
"This is just one data point about how this kind of pricing methodology can work, and we would need other developers to try it with different games and under different circumstances in order to be able to draw any real conclusions," the developer’s Ron Carmel wrote on the company blog.
"One thing that the survey data might suggests is that despite there being a lot discussion around what games are worth and the dollar value of an hour of play, few people chose their price based on the perceived value of the game."
"How much the person feels they can afford seems to play a much larger role in the decision than how much the game is worth."
