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?"

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:I tried...

[blahplusplus]

"This model works much better when you're dealing with people face to face."

The truth is many games in the indie bundle are crap, thats why the bundle actually works. i.e. individually they are worth so little that most people would not regularly pay money for them.

I participated in the last one and paid more then then my fair share and ended playing none of them due to not really being that interested.