Archive for October, 2009
World of Goo(d) (part2)
Finally, the special offer “Pay-What-You-Want” to get World of Goo is over and 2D Boy has just released its last results. The first thing that the authors noticed is the fact people gave a little more money the day after they published their first results. If we don’t allow the randomness factor in this change, we can believe people felt guilty about paying less than 0.30$ (remember, they did’nt get anything under 0.31$ because of Paypal fees. You can still read my last post about it).
2D Boy also published details about customers OS and how much each group paid (Linux groups are the most generous). One element that makes me happy is the last board they published about customers country. I was very surprised to saw that french people was in second position in the list of the best average payments done during this special offer. Of course, it is just a mean and without more details informations (such as standard deviation) we can not properly estimate how these payments have been mathematically distributed, but this is the only indicator we get. The first three countries at the top of the list are Switzerland, France and Norway, while the last three countries are Lithuania, South Korea and Turkey.
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Windosill : what you click is what you feel
Two weeks ago, I found a game that caught my attention. At first glance, the features of the game look very childish to me. The first screen shows a room with different objects which look like kids toys. After a couple of minutes of wandering, I found how to reach the next screen and all started here. I just could not stop myself playing to it until the end…
I’ll be glad to share my view about this childlike/dreamlike adventure game, but in order to not spoil your own experience about it (if you didn’t tried it yet), I invite you to stop your reading at this line and try it for 5 or 10 minutes here. My tips for you before you play are : put your sound on, take your time, be as curious as a kid, “touch” (click) everything and enjoy ! The first half part of the game is available online for free, and if you want to usnlock the other half, you will have to pay 3$. A relative fair price in my opinion, even if the replay value is close to nought for an adult player.
World of Goo(d) (part1)
Recently (since the 13th october), the creators of World of Goo, 2D Boy, have launched a special offer for their game. In order to celebrate the first year old game, you can buy World of Goo at whatever price you like. A lot of blogs and websites have spread the word during these last days and a lot of copy has been sold (around 57 000 items in six days). 2D Boy have published some statistical data about their sales on their blog in order to show what kind of results one could have with such a special offer.
According to these numbers, I must say I was quiet surprised by the number of people who only gave them, not 1$, but 1 cent. There are 16 852 people just bought World of Goo for 0,01$, while 6483 bought it for a price between 0,02$ and 0,99$, that is 23 335 who just purchased it under 1$ (almost 41% of the customer in 6 days). Knowing the fact that PayPal fees are usually around 5% plus a minimum amount of 30 cents for each transaction, 2D Boy didn’t earn a penny under 31 cents . If these customers had paid exactly a buck to get the game, they would have given around 15 000$ (Paypal fees subtracted) to their creator…
First lines
Here comes the first lines…
It seems to be more and more trivial nowadays to write a blog about games, after all it begins to be a pretty common topic to talk about, don’t you think ? No ? Well, personally I don’t. Actually, my purposes are not to open another blog about video games review. Instead of that i would like to study relationship between games, art and education, and also think about games in our “modern society” in a more general way…
Having been a player for the last 20 years doesn’t made me an expert in this field, or a “veteran” to quote Leigh Alexander, the actual director of Gamasutra, about one of her recent blog entry, but it provides me my own personal background and a purely practical knowledge. As an academic, I also want to use some methodological approaches to analyse and observe topics I’m interesting in. These topics would be about serious game, independant production (sometimes mainstream prod.), digital art, experimental game, game design and a lot of other issues around games studies.