Will be interesting to see if this works for them. Jeff Vogel has preached against the low price approach relentlessly, and with good arguments. They need to get a lot of extra sales to make up for the low price.
I have to disagree. I've read Vogel's arguments and I think he misses completely. It's probably just the businessman in me, but setting your price point because of pride is one of the worst things you can do. The appropriate price is simply the one that maximizes revenue, especially give that the marginal cost of an extra sale is functionally zero.
For games that are 'classical', to use a polite term, you are severely limiting your customer base when you are pricing them near the same amounts as new AAA titles. If I go to GOG and have a choice to buy Arcanum (which I haven't played yet) for $9.99 or Avadon for $25, Arcanum is going to win every time. Even if I've played Arcanum, I'm going to question the value of paying 2.5x as much for a title that is even more out of date (speaking of everything outside of content of course).
Indi titles need to be impulse buys, IMO, to maximize revenue. It sort of reminds me of DVD/Blu-Ray sales. I am a movie collector. I have an HTPC with close to 400 ripped movies. However, I'd probably have a collection rivaling Netflix if movies didn't cost $20+ when they come out on disc. Make new movies $5, and I'd easily buy 10x as many. It goes from being a cost decision to an impulse buy. They make more profit off me at a lower price. You'd also turn a lot of people that don't buy movies into movie buyers because, again, its an impulse buy.
I have yet to buy a spiderweb game. I may buy Avadon (I downloaded the demo to check it out), but I'm not sure yet. If it had been $9.99, I would have bought it already (like when I grabbed a bunch of titles from GOG that were $9.99 just to have them for later). I'm likely to buy DoD, because at $5, I'm sure I can get enough enjoyment out of it to justify the cost, even though it's not my typical type of game.
Now, Vogel certainly could be correct. He's obviously been doing this a long time. However, in all that he has written against lowering the price, I've never seen any hard evidence that his approach nets more profit. He speaks a lot about devaluing, pride, etc., but that is irrelevant unless it directly affects the bottom line.