Another note about piracy

Close on the heels of Hanks note about piracy I'd like to bring your attention to a small initiative by 2D boy, the creators of the most awsome World Of Goo which I highly recomend you buy if you havent. What these fine souls did was, put up their game for sale, and asked the buyer to pick their price without restrictions. The final results have been posted here: They've added a few metrics to even see the breakup of price by country. What has happened here is quite a few people prefered to pay 1 cent for the game and happily downloaded it, a few people paid 3$ for it, which considering the volume of sales works out ok for 2dboy. The problem with this approach is that it generates a lot of 1 cent sales that, you know, will never lead to anything more. Those people might as well have pirated the game.

I have an idea for another payment system for any game i'm involved in. The idea is, when downloading the game you can either pay the (nominal) price for it right then and there... or give us an IOU note for it. You'd have to give your email address and verify it to download it but nothing else, no credit card numbers or anything. Now if you owe us money we'll send you emails every once in a while to please pay for the game you bought from us. I at least was in a situation where i couldnt pay for a game simply because i didnt have any money, yet those were the best gaming years of my life. I did have an email address though, and today since I am earning money I'd gladly put my money on those games that gave me so much enjoyment. How long will we keep sending IOU notes? Effectively forever I guess, its a pretty harmless email every few months. If the money does come in, awsome! If it doesnt, well those people would have pirated the game anyway.

Thoughts?