Did you help make World of Goo's birthday special?

World of Goo was recieved very well by critics. The Wiiware game averages almost a 94% on Game Rankings and currently stands as the 3rd highest ranked Wii game on the site. It released last year (2008) on October 13th, and just recently 2D Boy celebrated World of Goo's first birthday. How did they celebrate it? With a sale nonetheless! This was no ordinary sale, however. Instead, this was a sale that allowed you to pay as much as you want for either the PC, MAC, or Linux build of the game. The results are in, and 2D Boy is excited at how well the sale was received.

In total around 57,000 people bought the game over the course of the week (running from October 13th - October the 20th), at the average price of $2.03. Unfortunately, the most common amount paid for the game was one cent (the minimum requirement). Almost 17,000 people took the game at that price. There were glimmers of hope, though. 2D Boy was kind enough to create a graph (above), and on the graph there are spikes at $5, $10, and even $15 and $20, though the latter two were smaller. There were also four people generous enough to pay $50 for the game.

2D Boy also released a survey to coincide with this experiment. The survey asked three questions of those who purchased the game. The customers were asked how much they paid, why they chose that amount to pay, and how much they thought the game was worth. The most common response for how much they paid was in-between the $5-$10 range (29.4%) compared to those who said a few cents (12.5%). The most common response of why they paid the price they did was "I like the pay-what-you-want model and wanted to support it" (26.3%) followed in close second by "That's all I can afford right now" (20.6%). When asked how much people thought the game was worth, 35.8% said $10 followed by 25.7% at $15 and 21.4% at $20.

So even though and overwhelming 85.7 % people who took the survey feel the game should be valued at $10 or more, only 12.1% of those people actually purchased the game for that amount.

Nonetheless, 2D Boy is happy with the results of their experiment, so much so in fact, they extended the birthday sale until October 25th. Yes, that's right, you can still buy the game for whatever price you want. Head over here to check out some more statistics of the sale, or here to buy the game. (Note: This sale does not cover the WiiWare version of World of Goo)

What do you think of the pay-whatever-you-want price model? Is it something more developers should try?