In a win for micropayments, World of Goo, a top 10 PC game for January this year and popular seller on WiiWare, the Wii game store, was sold in an experiment to see what people would pay for their popular game by giving them the option to choose what to pay for the game.

The “Pay-What-You-Want” sale marked the 1 year release of the game, so admittedly the game was not at the peak of the sales cycle and was likely in the hands of the users who really wanted the software. Also important is that the publisher reports piracy of the game close to 90%. Even so, the experiment provides some insight into pricing models for games and possibly content sold online.

What did people pay when they had the chance? 57,000 people paid an average of $2.03 for the game during the promotion. That’s a quick $110,000+ sales for a one week experiment, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Due to transaction fees, all sales less than $0.30 meant that the publisher received nothing from the sale. Since nearly 17,000 people paid $0.01, with another 6500 paying from $0.02 to $0.99, it’s likely at least one-third or more of sales were unprofitable.

The publisher also took a survey to determine why people were paying what they paid. The largest responses fell into two categories: paying what buyers could afford and supporting the model. More specifically, nearly 23% of respondents said that they chose the “price” they paid based on what they could afford, and just over 22% paid just to support the pay-what-you-want model. More importantly, only a touch over 5% responded that they paid what they thought the game was worth. Twice as many or 11% reported that they were “cheap bastards”, at least they were honest.

The sales figures, piracy rate, and survey lead me to a few obvious and non-obvious take aways:

1. Buyers appreciated the option to choose what to pay, so much so that any mental transaction costs of paying $0.01 were overcome.

2. The price users are willing to pay to has much less to do with perceived value than affordability.

3. Sales experiments, even a year after a game release, can lead to a healthy bump in revenue when done right.

This suggests to me (feel free to argue with me on this) that the $0.99 and $1.99 micropayment sized price points for apps on the Apple App Store and others may be driving huge sales simply because of affordability. If I’m right, where is your $0.99 app?

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