Joost van Dongen, creator of the game Proun has discussed what he sees as the problems with the download for free business model. He made $20,000 on the game with purchasers paying an average of $5.23; including people who downloaded the game for free, the average price paid drops to $0.09.
47,379 people downloaded Proun for free, while roughly 200,000 people pirated the game via torrents. The problem, as Dongen sees it, is the friction caused by having to enter card details.
“People are lazy,” he writes. “Systems that remember your payment details and thus don’t require you to fill in anything each time you buy something are tremendously successful. Think Amazon, think Steam. So I think if I had set a minimum price of $1, way more people would have decided to pay a couple of dollars for Proun. Simply because they already had their Credit Card out for the $1 and figured the game was actually worth a bit more.”
“Fewer people would have played Proun, but I think more people would have paid, making Proun a bigger success financially,” he adds. “Note the emphasis on financially: my main goal was to get as many people as possible to play my game, and the scheme I used was definitely a good choice for that!”
Dongen notes that he will set the minimum price to $1, hoping that people will pay more after crossing the threshold of entering their credit card information.
Source: joostdevblog.blogspot.com
