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World of Goo Creators Try Pick-Your-Price Experiment
2D Boy, the independent game studio behind World of Goo, recently celebrated the game's one-year anniversary by offering it at whatever price buyers cared to pay. They've now released some sales statistics about how people responded to the opportunity. The average price during the sale was $2.03; the game normally retails for $20. According to a survey of why people paid what they did, 22.4% said it was all they could afford at the time, and 12.4% said they already owned World of Goo and were buying it for a different platform. (Yes, there is a Linux version.) Over 57,000 people took advantage of the offer, which was enough for 2D Boy to term it "a huge success." Interestingly, they also saw a significant increase in sales through Steam, and a smaller increase through Wiiware. They've decided to extend the experiment until October 25th.
This is a pretty cool experiment. But...
Why would I have to purchase the game multiple times to be able to play it on different platforms in the first place?
Well, if you buy from them directly, you get all of the PC/Mac/Linux versions at once for $20 (before this experiment), which is quite reasonable. However, the WiiWare/Xbox Arcade versions are obviously separate; there's no way the console manufacturers are going to allow cross-platform buys, and the only recourse developers like 2D Boy have against this is to not put it on consoles, which would be pretty stupid for the developer.
And the actually working link