MetaFilter posts tagged with gooballs

Step 1. Make an utterly fantastic game. Step 3. Profit!

straight — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:24:08 -0800

2D BOY made around $100,000 in a week. That’s $50,000 each for writing a blog post about a game they finished a year ago. By letting people pay whatever they wanted. 2D Boy stirred up a lot of discussion (previously) about game piracy when they used online scoreboard data to estimate an 82% piracy rate for their fantastic indie game World of Goo (previously). For World of Goo's first birthday, they decided to try the Radiohead model and let people buy the game for any price they choose. Now they've released extensive data about the results. Short version? "A huge success," even though the most commonly chosen price was only a penny. Don't miss the excellent analysis in the Rock Paper Shotgun article (that first link), including the comments where one reader has created a chart showing that the bottom 40% of the downloads account for 1.5% of the profit and the top 30% of the downloads account for 83% of the profit.

The current state of DRM and piracy in casual gaming

tybeet — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 06:50:24 -0800

You may have heard by now about World of Goo, an independent game which can best be described as a "physics/construction puzzle game" that touches on everything from beauty to consumerism to internet privacy. The developer, 2DBoy who had originally released the game under a "no-DRM, don't screw us" policy now estimates a piracy rate of 82%. The authors cite a related figure of 92% found for a game called Ricochet Infinity, which was, in contrast, released with DRM, and whose developer studied the effects of their continued efforts to patch up the keygens and exploits in its DRM along the way. From this article: "As we believe that we are decreasing the number of pirates downloading the game with our DRM fixes, combining the increased sales number together with the decreased downloads, we find 1 additional sale for every 1,000 less pirated downloads. Put another way, for every 1,000 pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale."