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Last month, Eidos and Beautiful Game Studios shocked the industry with the announcement that it would allow fans to pre-order its upcoming football management title, Championship Manager 2010, by paying only what they felt the game was worth.
The Pay What You Want promotion means that until the close of play on September 10, you can legitimately pre-order a digital download version of the game for only 1p plus a £2.50 transaction fee.
At gamescom last month we caught up with Beautiful Game Studios general manager Roy Meredith, who revealed that the promotion has been a huge success.
“… 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,” said Meredith.
Meredith also explained that there were a number of reasons for running such an unusual pre-order promotion.
“One is we’ve been two years out with this game. We think it’s the strongest quality Champ Man in many years from the feedback we are getting, and it was kind of like a nice thing to do for the community, because they’ve stuck with us,” said Meredith. “When we announced that we were going to move it out from when they expected it last October, they were very patient with us. It’s designed to attract in lapsed players, because of course people grow out of football management games and we think there’s an opportunity to bring them back in. And also to bring new people to the genre, people who haven’t tried it before.
“What we want to do is reinvigorate it and grow the market for football management games. That’s from a commercial point of view and also from a selfish point of view for me as well, because I love these games and I play FM and CM every year and I want to be able to grow that market so a lot more people do exactly that so that we can strengthen the genre, and by doing that we increase competition and therefore give out a better quality gaming experience to people.”
While Meredith wasn’t willing to divulge the figures for the promotion, he did reveal that the average price paid is “substantially more” than the minimum, and one customer paid so much that the purchase had to be verified as legitimate.
Despite the fact that there is nothing stopping gamers from pre-ordering the game for 1p, Meredith said that both Eidos and Square Enix have been very supportive of the idea.
“There wasn’t a fight, but there was a lot of debate,” he explained. “Nobody has ever said no to it. The Eidos board and the Square Enix board have been incredibly supportive of the idea. 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.”
And now, after the success of the CM 2010 Pay What You Want promotion, Meredith says he “wouldn’t be surprised” to see other publishers follow suit.
For more from Roy Meredith check out our interview in full.
CM 2010 is scheduled for release on September 11. You can pre-order now using the Pay What You Want promotion over at the Champ Man Store.
