The whole “pay what you want” model is a nice way to get into the gaming industry headlines, maybe, but it’s no way to get rich.
Or even get by.
That’s according to common sense, and also indie dev Joost van Dongen, whose game Proun has been critically successful, but a bit of a commercial failure, as he describes in a lengthy expository on his blog.
He released the game three months ago, offering it up for whatever players wanted to pay for it, including nothing.
It turns out, most people paid nothing.
Of the game’s 250,000 or so downloads, only 1.76% of people actually paid for it, with an average buying price of $5.23.
This works out to an average total price of just $0.09 when the unpaid downloads are taken into account.
In the end, this amounted to a final profit of about $20,000, a figure which would be more than ten times that had every player paid $1 for the game instead.
Maybe the lesson learned here is to set a minimum buying price of $1, which Joost has now done.
Next up, maybe (probably), people simply download it from the torrents instead.
Head on over to the Proun website to check out the game and decide if it’s worth paying for.
Proun dev declares “pay what you want” model an epic fail << Comments and views
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