Interesting!
And of course, being able to draw attention probably has a lot to do with the success of temporary pay what you want sales, etc.
Another question - I've seen some people (The Gratuitous Space Battles guy, for instance) have had some success with "Pick a Price" sales, where they offer several discrete suggested prices and you can pick any of them.
Got any opinion on those? Although superficially similar, I wonder if there's any psychological difference in how customers respond to it. I guess from a technical perspective it might be easier than pay-what-you-want as you could just create multiple "products" with your e-payment provider of the same game at different prices.
Well, as Proun's data shows, people essentially discretize the prices themselves. People like to have nice, round numbers, and I would guess that the salient price points for consumers of indie games are probably:
0 -- 1 -- 2 -- 5 -- 10 -- 15 -- 20 -- 30
And the 30 is probably stretching it.
Responding to Joost (and thanks for contacting him Klaim!)
I didn't realize that the torrent went through his site. I assumed that when he broke out paying 0 and torrenting (effectively the same thing for the consumer, although different bandwidth usage, etc.) that he meant that paying 0 was from his site and torrenting was elsewhere, my bad.
I don't really understand this portion "Even if only 1% of those would be converted to paying if the game were not available for free, that would still be a 50% increase in the amount of people who paid for the game!"
It seems there are a couple of assumptions rolled up in that they I think are specious at best. Does he know that he didn't convert 1% of those people already? I.e. is each person only counted once (with the highest amount they paid) or are all downloads counted. I'm guessing it is the latter. Given that most of the comments that I have seen (over at indiegames.com and MindEraser's comment) seem to indicate that people treated the free download as a demo. Does he have any statistics on the number of people who downloaded it for free, and then kicked a couple of bucks back? Or the number of people who dove straight in and just gave him money.
If all of his sales were converts who downloaded it for free then he got a conversion rate of about 1.8%.
If we assume that all of the people who paid above $2 were people who dove straight in, and all people who paid $2 or less were people who played, liked what they saw, wanted another level, and paid in, then the conversion rate is ~0.8%.
Given the limited data with no cross-correlation information, I'm going to guess that he got somewhere on the order of a 1% conversion.
tl;dr I think it is incorrect to assume that all of the people who paid would have paid had there been no "demo".
Maybe his data actually says otherwise, but from my limited armchair point of view, I'd say that he did pretty well with the pay what you will.
If I were in his place here is what I would have done (knowing what we know now):
*Have a demo (Which he essentially did, i.e. a lesser free version)
*Have a greater differentiation between the demo and the paid version (What is the incentive to pay, except for the heartwarming feeling of supporting the developer? One level doesn't seem enough)
*Release the game through Steam (If it isn't that hard for him, why wouldn't he do it? It seems like a bad business decision to not go through the number one digital distribution system)
*Go for a fixed $10 price point. At first. The market seems to indicate that $10 is about what people will pay for this type of game (i.e. an abstract, surreal racer [I'm going to say that AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! is the closest analogue for Proun]). When sales start to flag, then go for the limited time pay what you want model. I think a major factor in the success of the HIB's is their seeming scarcity. They only last for a short time, they only pop up a few times a year. It makes people think, "ooh I have to get in on this now"
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