Pay What You Want — a Sustainable Business Model? 133
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?"
I tried... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I tried... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Seems to work for Restaurants (Score:2, Interesting)
I Do This (Score:3, Interesting)
I've just done this with the book Modern Perl [onyxneon.com]. 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.
Re:Publicity worked for Humble Bundle (Score:5, Interesting)
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:I tried... (Score:2, Interesting)
You laugh, but this works. My parents have used it successfully to separately get rid of a refrigerator and a stove. The fridge had been sitting out for weeks, but it was picked up within hours of the $ sign going up.
In fact the guy started loading it on his truck, looked over and saw us, continued loading for a second, then thought twice and yelled over: "is it okay if I take this?" We yelled back "yeah."
My theory is that the "free" sign tells people it's worthless junk, and they don't want to haul it home just to find out it doesn't work. Attaching a dollar amount tells people that it's worth the effort of picking it up.
Re:Publicity worked for Humble Bundle (Score:4, Interesting)
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