The collective internet mind vividly remembers the “Radiohead Experiment,” when the musical group Radiohead decided to put their new album on the internet for download, but with an odd twist. They let you value their product and pay the amount you desired. You could give them a hundred dollars or three cents.
I always though it was an interesting idea, and one that could really work in some cases. Independent game developer 2D Boy is one of those cases…
2D Boy makes World of Goo, an interesting and fun physics game that retails for $20. It’s also one of the most-pirated games on the internet, with a whopping 90% piracy rate. This is a game that’s rated very highly by most sources. (It’s also one of the few games that works cross-platform on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.)
So what did 2D Boy do? They ran a Radiohead-style special for a few weeks, letting you pay what you want to download the game. The results?

Out of more than 57,000 sales, about 68% of the downloaders paid $2 or less. And 16,852 buyers only paid one cent. 7,347 were in the $5.00-$5.99 range though.
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