World of Goo experiment a "huge success"

Pay what you like adds 57,000 sales.

2D Boy has revealed that World of Goo sold 57,000 copies last week as a result of the 'pay what you like' birthday experiment. The developer deemed this a "huge success".

To illustrate, 2D Boy published a graph showing what people decided to pay for World of Goo.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of sales were at the lower end: 16,852 people paid one cent; 6483 paid up to a dollar; and a whopping 15,797 paid between a dollar and two dollars. A further 13,877 people paid under six dollars.

However, it's interesting that people decided to pay anything at all. And these, remember, are people who ignored the brilliant PC puzzle game at full price: $20.

At the other end, four people splashed out $50 on the game. But the biggest pricey-spikes were at $20 (306 people) and $15 (352).

The promotion, picked up by news sites across the web, also caused a 40 per cent boost to World of Goo sales on Steam. Fluctuations are common, but not to this degree.


No this is not Sony conference.

The bottom line, as Rock Paper Shotgun pointed out, is that 2D Boy made roughly $100,000 by writing a blog post and removing a set price for the game. That is a huge and important success.

World of Goo is a puzzle game about building bridges using blobs of goo. It's brilliant; our review explains.

Comments (84)
