The “pay what you want” promotion for Championship Manager 2010 has turned out to be a big success, with sales of the game actually going beyond what developer Beautiful Game Studios was expecting.
Remember the Little Rascals episode where the gang wanted to put on some kind of play but nobody was willing to pay to see it, so Alfalfa came up with a harebrained “pay as you exit” scheme that would let people see the play, then decide on the way out if it was worth any money? Spanky, ever the astute businessman, got all pissed off because he thought that nobody would pay for it if they didn’t have to, but after a series of madcap misadventures, everyone in the audience was so blown away by the experience that they forked over their cash and the gang made a fortune.
That lesson wasn’t lost on the gang at Eidos and Beautiful Game Studios, who announced in August that Championship Manager 2010, the latest addition to the long-running soccer management franchise, would let people pay any price they wanted for the digital release of the game. Critics slapped their foreheads and rolled their eyes dramatically, presumably thinking that Eidos might as well just give the game away, but according to Beautiful Game Studios General Manager Roy Meredith, the program is actually doing even better than expected.
“It is going well, really, really well. I can’t give out numbers, but it’s going well from two perspectives. The amount of publicity we had exceeded what I was thinking we were going to get. It was amazing. And from a sales perspective as well it’s exceeded what we wanted to do, which is great,” he told VideoGamer.com.
The average price people were paying for the game is “substantially more” than the minimum, he said, adding that one particularly generous customer paid so much that the company had to verify it as a legitimate purchase. He also noted that while there was “a lot of debate,” nobody at either Eidos or Square Enix ever gave a thumbs-down to the idea.
“The Eidos board and the Square Enix board have been incredibly supportive of the idea,” Meredith said. “Now I know that sounds like I’m bound to say that, but they really, really have. When it was first discussed one of the biggest evangelists was the CFO, that’s a finance guy. But they’ve been very supportive. A lot of debate about how it works, how we take it to market, but no arguments.”
The “pay what you want” promotion for Championship Manager 2010 runs until September 10, so you’ve still got a little bit of time to squeeze in an order at champmanstore.com.
