Pay What You Want — a Sustainable Business Model?

revealingheart writes "As 2010 comes to a close, it could be remembered as the year pay-what-you-want pricing reached the mainstream. Along with the two Humble Indie Bundles, YAWMA offer a game and music bundle, and Rock, Paper and Shotgun reports on the curiously named Bundle of Wrong, made to help fund a developer who contracted pneumonia. More examples include when Reddit briefly let their users donate an amount of their choosing for upgraded accounts when they were having financial difficulties; the Indie Music Cancer Drive launched Songs for the Cure for cancer research; and Mavaru launched an online store where users can buy albums for any amount. Can pay-what-you-want become a sustainable mainstream business model? Or is it destined to be a continued experiment for smaller groups?"

Comments

Publicity worked for Humble Bundle

[devxo]

Humble Bundle is a success because of the publicity it gets. It gives them lots of sales, but the same model doesn't work without the publicity and if there would not be nothing special about it, well they would get all the reporting from gaming websites and sites like slashdot. Remember that if user pays $5, it's less than $1 per game. The normal prices were at least $20.

Re:Publicity worked for Humble Bundle

[Monkeedude1212]

I don't think it can function without the fixed price system working in sync.

Sooner or later more people will get used to paying less than $60 for a game by using a digital download like the Humble Bundle and sales through Steam. I don't think I can ever justify paying even $40 for a game ever again, just in my experience. I've now come to think that full feature titles are only worth about $20 - and if they aren't on sale throughout the year, they will be eventually. When I can get any number of indie titles for 5 or under, that's even more reason.

Eventually it'll reach a point where I think $20 is almost too much, and that $5 is average, and that a "Pay what you want - oh sweet, only $1" scheme might take over. Which won't be nearly as profitable.

I need those higher up publishers ripping people off in order to keep my perception of a games worth in perspective.

And then years down the road, pay what you want turns into basically freeware.

Re:Publicity worked for Humble Bundle

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry but you "zero cost" people are talking utter bullshit. Support, patches, maintaining a community, marketing, hosting, payment processing, running a real-life bureaucratic nightmare (i.e. a business), all that annoying shit you need to actually survive while you make the next game and so on don't grow on trees for free. How about you publish a game and run a business yourself, then come back and tell us how everything is free and runs by itself?

Also, the "better 5 than nothing" argument is heavily flawed. They definitely lost full-price sales to people who only paid a fraction of that. It's only really viable if you get a huge volume to compensate the massive decrease in per-sale profit. For one of those games it's likely around several dozens of bundle sales to compensate one full-price sale (low average price divided by 5 games, minus donations and fees is hardly anything). Without the publicity to back it up, it wouldn't work.

Re:Publicity worked for Humble Bundle

[tnk1]

Actually his point is valid, it all depends on the numbers. If you have a game that 100 people would have bought for say 20 dollars then you have 2000 dollars in sales. However, if you assume that "pay what you want" customers will average only 5 dollars, then those 100 people who would have paid 20 dollars then will only pay 5. That cuts your "guaranteed" sales to 500 dollars. So now, the people who weren't going to spend the money at all at 20 dollars need to make up the 1500+ dollars. That is another 300+ buyers. (I use the + in this case to point out that there is no point in this pricing method if you are just going to make as much money as you would have with a regular pricing model.)

If you look at that, you are making a big presumption on just how many people out there would buy a game if it is simply cheaper, even if you might do so. In this case, 3/4 of your customers need to have been people who wouldn't have bought the game to begin with solely on the cost factor.

That probably will work for some games, but honestly, given the fact that millions of people do shell out for expensive games, its more likely that your indie game didn't sell for other reasons such as: no publicity, significantly less polish, no franchise tie-ins, etc.

Bear in mind that people, even hardcore gamers, have only a certain amount of time in a day to play your game. They will want to play the games that they have bought as much as possible to get their money's worth and if the game is really, really fun, they'll play it constantly because they like playing it. Eventually they will tire of your game and move to the next one, but if you consider that a 60 dollar game could net you hours and hours of play, as well as even some social advantages to playing a popular game, that 60 dollars is actually not that much of a price to pay for the amount of recreation provided.

So yes, you may well be willing to buy a game if it is half price, but I think your experience is at best anecdotal, and at worst, you aren't considering the realities of your own spending and time availability accurately.

Another issue with the model is where the expensive games come back to bite the indie games on the ass. Right now, many games out there which retail for 60 bucks, I could just pirate from the internet if I was too poor/cheap to pay for it. Now, while this actually *does not* cut into the sales of the big gaming companies, since the cheap gamer would have never shelled out the money to begin with, it *does* cut into the indie gaming developer's pockets. Why? Very simply because that gamer, who would usually be more likely to spend money on your less polished, but proportionately cheaper product, now gets high quality games for free. Its a lose-lose for indie game developers on that front. That means that there is a whole segment of the unpaying masses that have a limited amount of time and a ton of free, high quality content to fill it with. Is that segment small or large? Its hard to say, but it does need to be considered.

In the end, I feel that the pay as you want model is very simply a gimmick to play to a certain segment of gamers. If a small number of companies tout their liberal pricing policies as evidence that they are "different" than everyone else, that's old school PR value, not a new and interesting way of doing business and that is not a put-down. Such a strategy can definitely work on that small scale. If the whole indie industry turns into that? Well, then it just it won't work. You will find that, as you might expect otherwise, the better indie games will win out, and that would have happened if the price was 20 dollars or 5 dollars.

Re:Publicity worked for Humble Bundle

[pinkushun]

Breaking it down even more, from www.humblebundle.com

Average purchase: $7.77
Average Windows: $6.64
Average Mac: $9.06
Average Linux: $13.78

Re:Publicity worked for Humble Bundle

[Bigjeff5]

You're failing basic supply and demand principles here.

For computer games, supply is effectively infinite, so we can ignore that side of the equation, and we need only look at demand.

The question is, is $20 the optimal price point?

Taking your example, only 100 people will pay $20 for the game. At $30, say the number drops to 50. Sales just went from $2000 to $1500 by raising the price. However, if the $30 price point only has 10 fewer purchases, well now your sales went up to $2700. In this case, the $20 price point is clearly too low.

On the other hand, if $20 is too high then things will go something like this: the price is dropped from $20 to $5, and 900 more people are willing to buy the game at the drastically reduced price. That's $5000 for selling 1000 copies at $5 vs $2000 for selling 100 copies. The $5 price point is the clear winner here. To continue, dropping the game to $1 may only increase sales by another 3000 copies, sounds like a lot, but that only gets you $4000 total - a loss from the $5 price point. On the other hand, dropping down to $1 may actually boost sales to 10,000 copies, a clear win.

Each product has an ideal price point, where the demand for the unit and the price needed to match that demand produce the greatest possible profit.

This is why stores have sales. Think for a moment about Black Friday - the most profitable shopping day of the year. It is called Black Friday because it is the day when most retail stores go from being "in the red" - i.e. no profit for the year - to being "in the black" - profitable. How can this be, when it is the day when retail items are at the lowest price they will be all year?

The answer is demand. You will always increase demand for a product by reducing the price. For almost all products this also means an increase in profit. The question is not whether reducing the price will bring in more money, the question is at what point will reducing the price stop bringing in money. With retail sales there are hard limits - things cost a certain amount to make, so the price cannot be reduced below that and still make money (on that item - you can sell for a loss to boost sales of other items, for an overall profit gain - see Xbox 360 vs Wii for a good comparison of the two strategies). With digital sales the limit is simply a number that needs to be met (the cost to make the first copy), the hard limit (bandwidth & server costs) is so minimal as to be insignificant.

This also illustrates the genius of retail sales. At retail, an item initially sells for its highest price. Once most of the people who are willing to pay the high price have purchased the item it goes on sale, bringing in a whole new set of customers who were not willing to buy at the higher price but are perfectly willing to buy at the new, lower price. Depending on the nature of the item, the new price could become the permanent price, or it could go back to the old price. Either way, once sales level off, there is another sale, and a whole new slew of customers come in to buy the product.

This allows the retail stores to extract the full profit at each stage. For my example, it would combine the $30 profits, $20 profits, and $5 profits. You would end up with $1500 for the 50 who would buy at $30 or less, another $1000 for the remaining 50 who would buy at $20 or less ($2500 for the first 100 sales), and $4500 from the remaining 900 who would buy at $5 or less. Once the money train has dried up, you can then even drop to $1 to catch the remaining 3000 people, for another $3000. This brings the total profit to $10000, and eliminates the risk of dropping the price too low.

As you can see, in my example the last two bumps were the most significant, but for other products that could easily happen at other price points. For example, a polarizing game with a core of fanatical fans but not many others who would be willing to purchase the game no matter the price. You might only get 100 people to buy,

Re:I tried...

[Binestar]

this is like the guy who put a couch out near the road with a sign "Free" and it was there a week. Took the "Free" sign off and put a sign that said "$25" and it was stolen that night.

Re:I tried...

[adonoman]

This model works much better when you're dealing with people face to face. Had you set up a table and asked people to pay what they wanted, you would have either gotten a lot more money, or no one would have grabbed anything. People are a lot more "honest" when someone's watching, even if they know that there won't be consequences of not being so. This is why busking works, but you'll have a hard time selling music on line in a pay-what-you-want model.

Re:I tried...

[sakdoctor]

That's not how it's done these days.

You could have removed some key parts of the stuff, and sold them as "unlockable content".
Otherwise you could have done an advert supported model, with banner ads epoxied to everything.

I Do This

[chromatic]

I've just done this with the book Modern Perl. Rather than punishing paying customers with DRM or trying to track down and stop copyright infringement, my publisher gives away electronic versions for free and asks readers to spread them to other people, to write reviews, and to consider donating a reasonable value for the information.

So far I've earned more money more quickly than I would have with the traditional publishing model.