Why is the second option superior?
Well it all comes back to this:
their argument falls short on addressing the fact that they're costing a charity money.
Like I said before, there is no notion of "cost" in this system. All that there is is customers, and potential customers.
Pirates are just potential customers. They can go back and buy the game for real, or add more to their bundle donation, or buy DLC/in-game stuff, or do nothing at all and just be content with their free game. In all of these cases, the WORST outcome is that you don't make any money.
If there is any non-zero chance that a pirate/1center will eventually give you money, then pirates are a net benefit to you. And then if you include the marketing/social promotion aspect of piracy that I explained in the last paragraph of my post, then pirates becomes even more valuable.
The trick with pay-what-you-want systems is that it nullifies pirates by making them regular customers. It doesn't change anything else, really. An F2Per/1center is entirely equivalent to a traditional pirate, and they serve the same purpose. It's just that giving the option to morally obtain a game for free attracts a HUGE number of people that would previously never have bought nor pirated the game, so the game spreads even faster.
People like Valve and the Humble Bundle and mobile game devs have realized that the key to modern video game marketing is exposure. A typical game will sell 1 million if it's lucky. There's 350 million people in the US, and billions all over the world.
Why would you spend so much effort trying to sell a $60 to 1 or even 10 million people when you could sell a $1 game to 100 million people? That's how angry birds works.
Or maybe get 100 million people playing your F2P game, 90% of which pay $0, 9% pay $5, and 1% pays $100 and 0.01% pays $1000 or more? That's how TF2 and the Humble Bundle work (probably not that many $0s but you get the point).
I could go on for at least 2-3 more paragraphs, since there are so many different elements to think about in these systems, but yeah.
From: WazzupGenius00 | #066
Double Fine bought back Psychonauts from the original publisher so I guess it's technically indie since it's 100% owned by an independent developer
Makes sense
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foolmo
at work