Gabe Newell: Game "Piracy Isn't About Price"

Re:Gabe Newell: Game "Piracy Isn't About Price" by babebridou on Saturday November 26, 2011 @03:15AM (#3279398)

Here's an interesting experiment done by indie game developer SoS for Black Friday: he released a bundle of 13 indie games for 1$, available for just one day. He got some traction thanks to Notch, who tweeted that the games were interesting and easily worth 1/13th of a dollar each.

The bundle is (was?) accessible from http://sos.gd/bundle/

The transaction takes place in 3 steps:

  1. download
  2. purchase - this step is optional
  3. play
  unspecified 4: purchase if you haven't, still optional

I personally didn't even download them so I can't say anything about the quality of the product, I just thought it was somewhat relevant to the discussion, since SoS published real time stats during the operation. That's pretty much ideal conditions in my book for indie publishing, so the stats are actually worth something:

4207 downloads and $276 earnings within a single day. 6.5% of the downloaders purchased the product, regardless of whether they liked what they saw.

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Re:Gabe Newell: Game "Piracy Isn't About Price" by mikeash on Saturday November 26, 2011 @10:58AM (#3279993)

I'm not sure what to make of that. On one hand, having 90+% of people download but not buy seems awful. On the other hand, this process is essentially the shareware model even if it doesn't use that word, in which case a 6.5% conversion rate is extremely good.

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Re:Gabe Newell: Game "Piracy Isn't About Price" by apotheon on Sunday November 27, 2011 @07:28PM (#3283870)

If you get fifteen times as many people downloading as otherwise would have, and 90% of the people who download haven't paid for it (yet), you still come out ahead. There's nothing awful about a business model like that, period. Never judge a business model by a single metric without context like "90+% of people download but not buy".

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