Every week the LeftStickRight team will take on a different topic surrounding news or interesting topics about games or the gaming industry and open it up for discussion. Our three editors will give their perspective and you are welcome to give your own. Agree? Disagree?

The topic this week is: Could a huge gaming release work with a pay-what-you-want scheme? Would it be better? Worse? Will it ever be attempted?

Tim’s Take

Call be a pessimist, but I don’t see a pay-what-you-want plan finding success on a large, mainstream release.

Pay-what-you-want requires senses of honesty, passion and loyalty to be instilled in the consumer in order to operate in the intended fashion; three qualities the very nature of the Internet tends to handicap or corrupt from the get-go. The Humble Indie Bundle achieved what success it did because of the more trustworthy, low-key characters of the game designers as well as a strong push toward charities and organizations many in the target audience feel strongly about.

But bring in a big company such as Microsoft and EA to pull such an event with a well-known game and I bet you would find them getting a shorter deal from downloaders, even if the very same charities were featured. Honesty and passion will collide with a darker version of the “loyalty” aspect; namely “I’ve given hundreds of dollars to this company all my life. They owe me this; let the n00bs pay for me!” Then there are those who would think, “This company’s already rich. If they want to help people so much, they can give their own money to the charities!”

Lousy excuses to avoid pitching in on what is ultimately a good deal? Absolutely, but that’s how minds work sometimes I’m not saying everyone or even a majority of people would behave this way, but enough to keep a major company from ever trying pay-what-you-want again. Of course, I would love to be proven wrong.

Ian Y’s Take

We’ve seen some limited success with pay-what-you-want systems for small independent releases, but I don’t think a big game release could ever work with sliding price system. Worse yet, I highly doubt that anyone will ever try it. There’s just too much money invested upfront into the marketing and development of big name games. Plus, a variable price system will only really work for a online only distribution system, imagine the logistical nightmare it’d be for game retailers. On the other hand, it’s be an effective way of slaying the used-game beast. Why buy a used game for 10 bucks less when you can buy a new copy for possibly less?

Ian H’s Take

I’ll take Valve’s Gabe Newell at his word that they may attempt something similar in the near future, having folks invest in game ideas rather than actually invest in a finished product. Not unlike KickStarter, a website that has started up a lot of from seed funding. As for the pay-what-you-want scheme, I think it may sting a bit too much to a publisher to have someone walk away with a free product legitimately to actually allow it. That and I would imagine that most people would be hard-pressed to shell out any more than 60 dollars for a shelved product, which they would need to even out all the folks that wouldn’t pay a penny.

It is a great idea and an excellent platform for independent studios to test the waters, but for a larger audience it feels like the pendulum of exploitation would weight out the potential benefits that could be drawn from such an endeavor. Ideally, I’d love to see it, but even in my heart of hearts I don’t think I could pay more than 60 dollars for a game I absolutely adored given the option to pay 50. This is why I hunt for sales so often.