Larian Studios - Divinity Anthology - the good, the bad, the unexpected

Before we get into this, Melvil notes the Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity versions on GOG have been updated to the new Anthology versions.

Lar has posted a new blog entry talking about releasing the Divinity Anothology and their pay-what-you-want compaign -- and how a generous fan undid their plans. As a side note, if you've been interested in this campaign but the average price was to high for your taste, try checking again.

When the PWYW was conceived, we thought that we’d have a lot of sales at the absolute minimum, which basically is 1 cent, and this assumption was actually never challenged. The idea of the PWYW campaign was to on the one hand celebrate 10 years of Divinity and offer Divinity virtually for free (1 cent really is low), thus increasing the installed base of Divinity fans, but on the other hand also to put the Developer’s Cut in the spotlight.

The Developer’s  Cut (and Beyond Divinity) were made part of the campaign as a kind of bonus and to not completely ruin ourselves, we introduced the rule that to access the Developer’s Cut, you needed to be in the top 10% of customers. Whether or not that was a sound strategy is a different matter and open for debate, but that was the idea.

What happened however is that for some reason, people started looking at this like some sort of Kickstarter (this was the very first time something like this was done on GOG), and in the very first hours of the campaign, we saw the average pricing go to heights we never expected. Somebody even paid a 1000US$ for one of the games!!!  (Thanks again Alquist for ruining our plans btw )