I saw an unusual offer for a bundle of older computer games this week. They were offering 6 games. You were allowed to pay anything you want for the games. You could further decide where you payment gets applied (e..g. to charity, to the original developers, etc). This seemed like a great deal.Then I thought about this for a while. Would I actually play these old games? Probably not. So even for a low cost, they would not be a great deal. I was in the minority. A lot of people decided to buy the game pack. They mostly paid between $5 and $10 for the pack. The total revenue from this promotion was over a million dollars.
The deal was only valid for one week. The week is up. Now I am glad I did not buy the game pack. Turns out they are open sourcing the code for all the games. Now I can get them for free. I even get the source code. Nothing beats free. Free is much different than low cost. I bet this was the plan all along. I would have felt ripped off if I bought the games and they became open source the next day.
