{"id":14464,"date":"2011-10-05T13:28:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-05T11:28:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T22:00:00","slug":"proun-dev-declares-pay-what-you-want-model-an-epic-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/business\/14464-proun-dev-declares-pay-what-you-want-model-an-epic-fail","title":{"rendered":"Proun dev declares \u201cpay what you want\u201d model an epic fail"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

Or even get by.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He released the game three months ago, offering it up for whatever players wanted to pay for it, including nothing.<\/p>\n

It turns out, most people paid nothing.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This works out to an average total price of just $0.09 when the unpaid downloads are taken into account.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Maybe the lesson learned here is to set a minimum buying price of $1, which Joost has now done.<\/p>\n

Next up, maybe (probably), people simply download it from the torrents instead.<\/p>\n

Head on over to the Proun website<\/a> to check out the game and decide if it’s worth paying for.<\/p>\n

\n<\/embed><\/object>\n<\/p>\n

Proun dev declares “pay what you want” model an epic fail<\/strong><\/a> << Comments and views<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEWSFLASH: People are cheap<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":157,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/157"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}