The Humble Indie Game Bundle

http://www.wolfire.com/humble

by daniel_levine • 16 years ago

185 72 16 years ago

wolfire.com

daniel_levine3• 16 years ago

The games are World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, Penumbra Overture

edit: removed some incorrect info

stevenp• 16 years ago

EFF and Child's Play are actually charities that your payment is split with.

daniel_levine3• 16 years ago

you're right, i was just copying the bar across, my bad

bseo3• 16 years ago

I like this model. Surely the developers behind these games are going to get some new fans and customers.

As an anecdote, I played World of Goo at a friend's once. He copied it on my USB stick and I played more at home. A few months later there was a "pay what you want" promotion for just World of Goo. I bought it to support the developers, even though I had already finished the game and there was nothing new to play with. It's a great game and I recommend it for a few hours of fun.

patio114• 16 years ago

I think they're going to get a huge influx of pathological users who mostly pay amounts which would amount to 80% off the face price of the cheapest game in the bundle.

bseo3• 16 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean by "pathological users", though isn't 20% better than 0%?

reitzensteinm3• 16 years ago

...who almost certainly wouldn't have bought the games anyway. The exposure that some of these sales bring is immense, partly because they're novel. Who cares if a large percentage of people get the games for really cheap? They could easily get it for free at The Pirate Bay.

The total is going up by over $300 a MINUTE right now.

jaaron• 16 years ago

I know and love both World of Goo and Gish. Any reviews or recommendations on the others?

daniel_levine3• 16 years ago

to be honest they're all pretty cool. Aquaria is an Independent Games Festival winner. Lugaru is sick if you're into awesome fighting rabbits. Penumbra: Overture is highly rated across a bunch of gaming sites including metacritic.

kevinh4• 16 years ago

Lugaru is reminiscent (at least to me) of the Redwall books. It has awesome combat and you shouldn't miss it.

Aquaria is an amazing adventure game that is somewhat reminiscent of Metroid in how you explore the environments. The environments are beautiful and the game play is fun.

Penumbra Overture is a horror game that has scared me more than any other horror game I have played. It has an incredible atmosphere and is definitely worth the play through. The game ends on a cliffhanger, but the sequel is even better than the original, so I would recommend getting both.

benologist9• 16 years ago

Average contribution of $8.64 for 5 games or $1.72 per game.

It's a nice PR move but that's just disgusting I'm sorry.

sadiq• 16 years ago

Heh, it's even less than that if you leave it distributed evenly between the developers and two charities.

$8.64 is $2.88 for the developers or about 58c/game.

jcl2• 16 years ago

It's a little better for the developers than that... like $1.23 per game:

"By default, the amount is split equally between the seven participants (including Child's Play and EFF), but you can tweak the split any way you'd like."

mikeyur• 16 years ago

Depending on the total sales, they may get more than a MacHeist bundle.

A few friends have been approached for MacHeist and only offered $1-10k depending on the bundle. A friend went through with it and got $2k cash and a few little extras for giving away his app to 400,000 people.

levesque2• 16 years ago

The thing is that by making the prices so low (as low as one feels comfortable paying for them), they increase their sales number by much thus helping counter the low price.

Without this event there would be close to no sales since some of these are pretty old games. 40$ * 10 sales is much worst than 2$ * 1000 sales.

The iPhone app store runs on the same idea.

Jeff Atwood also wrote an article about that : http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/software-pricing-ar...

heyitsnick2• 16 years ago

Well I just purchased it for $10 and I already own 2 of the games. And the other's I never would have considered buying if it wasn't for this bundle.

And I'm pleasantly surprised with gish so far; already checking out the developer's site to see what else that have on offer.

Other people might be paying that average and are only interested in 1 or 2 of the games in the bundle.

You can't just say a blanket "5 games or $1.72 is disgusting".

benologist9• 16 years ago

It's disgusting in the sense that it's a horribly poor valuation of their work by consumers - each of those games is worth approximately half a latte.

The sad part is it'll be celebrated as a victory because they'll gross a lot of money and it's "money they wouldn't otherwise have" ... unless they set their own price and reached a tiny fraction of the consumers that'll buy their games today.

pavs• 16 years ago

I don't even play games and gave them some money and I will most likely never play any of these game, other than probably just check them out once. I can only hope there are others like me who would never spend a dime in any form of games.

aw3c22• 16 years ago

What is disgusting about it? $1.72 per game is more than $0.00 per game. They are making money the easiest way possible here. Everyone can simply download the games without paying a dime, but so far more than 30000 people decided to send them money and the counter is at almost 250000 dollars.

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

Business 101, if incremental costs are low, go for higher volume. The incremental cost of selling 1 more copy of the game suite are basically zero. Cents or perhaps even fractions of a cent. Thus, it makes sense to ignore per-transaction revenue and concentrate on total revenue. If you're able to make 2x or 10x as much revenue even though the per customer revenue is smaller you've still made more money at the end of the day.

Indeed, you've made more money and more people are using your product (many of them paying less than they would otherwise).

In business terms this is called a WIN/WIN situation.

(Consider all the products which used to be expensive but are dirt cheap today. Do you think it's "disgusting" that you pay your ISP a minuscule fraction of what you would have paid per byte per month back in the dialup era?)

samd• 16 years ago

They probably shouldn't put the average amount paid so far on the website. The idea is to get people to pay what they think the games are worth, not what other people think the games are worth.

jcl2• 16 years ago

Still, it's a good idea to put some number for anchoring, and the current average is not a bad one. And a number that seems to come from other people could be more influential than a "recommended contribution".

Edit: As others point out, there are already some other anchoring points on the page, so having an average lower than those may be hurting them. It might have been wiser to make the "Top contributors" tab the default (or only) tab in their realtime stats display.

heyitsnick2• 16 years ago

For me, I made sure to pay something above the average so I feel more generous than the average. If other's think the same, the average will naturally grow :)

rubinelli• 16 years ago

I upvoted you, but I'm not entirely convinced. The creators of this site seem to know what they are doing: they told the "retail" price of the bundle in the second paragraph, then subtly suggested reasonable price points (the lowest being $10) in the form. Maybe they are expecting the $1 to $5 crowd to pay something closer to the average?

patio114• 16 years ago

Here's how I would have done it:

http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/deep-disc...

Anyhow, the idea was to simplify the workflow and simultaneously abuse the power of defaults and user psychology. I also intentionally ditched some parts of the offer which I don't think add business value, such as fine-grained control on the split.

(I'd A/B test including "65% of people pay this much" on the #1 step, probably with a subtle yellow highlighting.)

nopassrecover• 16 years ago

Haha of course. I thought "wow this is great, who is this? they're worth talking to in the future" then see that it's you patrick. Every time..

johnswamps• 16 years ago

I don't think the find-grained control adds any business value, but I think they put it in there for people who had already paid for some of the games, since some of them are fairly popular. World of Goo did a pay what you want approach a few months back.

nym• 16 years ago

The fine grained control makes me feel like I have more say in the process, even if in the end I'll probably just split evenly.

po2• 16 years ago

"Stick it to the man" makes a great bullet point.

po2• 16 years ago

Funny, when I saw that I thought it was genius. Nobody wants to be a cheapskate so by showing the average you encourage people to put in a price above the average. Over time it will trend upward. On the other hand, maybe people will enter in a value just under the average. Right now it is reporting $7.97 as the average. Let's see where it ends up.

I also notice in the promo video it has the average right next to the entry form. On my form it defaults to 29.95 and says "For instance: 10, 20.50, or 100.00." as help text. It seems like they played around with the form a bit.

This is the type of thing that could benefit from a nice A/B test. Might be hard to run on a very public one-time promo like this though.

drtse4• 16 years ago

Agree, they should have left only the "$80 value" as anchor price(plus that strange list of suggested prices). Btw, i i remember right the developer of World of Goo already did this, so i guess there is a tested rationale behind the choice to show the average and that list of suggested prices.

albertzeyer• 16 years ago

Maybe they should combine the old Shareware model with this one. And make it all very easy. Like you download the full game and in the end of the first level, this payment stuff pops up where you can just pay whatever you want to proceed (whatever you think it is worth).

The point is, I really don't know what these games are about and how much they are worth.

levesque2• 16 years ago

These games all have a demo version.

BoppreH3• 16 years ago

I don't usually buy things on the internet. Mainly because it requires money in a PayPal account or similar, and it's very hard for me to get that (I have some dollars from a freelancer work, but it's a hassle to transfer between my bank account and PayPal).

If I had heard only about a "indie game bundle" containing those titles, I would probably have run straight to The Pirate Bay. But this one caught my attention.

The devs are willing to give five high-quality games for whatever I want to pay. The guy even sang a song for the advertisement, for god's sake.

I loved the ad. I loved the bundle. I even loved the website.

This selfish pirate is reaching for his wallet. I will not pay the full $ 80 sum (though more than the average, for sure), but I'm one that would probably not have paid a penny otherwise.

barmstrong• 16 years ago

Haha...on the "no middle man" logo is that a condom (as in don't get screwed by the man) or a bomb. Can't tell :)

Well executed idea!

BoppreH3• 16 years ago

That looks like a tie for me.

BoppreH3• 16 years ago

If you are worried about the process, don't. After filling the short form and login in my PayPal account, the email with the download page was sent instantaneously.

Their bandwidth is excellent and all downloads are direct (no login, download token, download code, wait time, bandwidth limit or whatever).

nnutter• 16 years ago

Watch the video! So worth 2 minutes of your time.

algorias2• 16 years ago

It rhymes!

JCThoughtscream• 16 years ago

In a vacuum, the Humble Bundle can't really be called a success. As I'm writing this, assuming equal split, each developer and charity gets an average of $1.09/purchase - hardly a windfall, though I'm sure the actual numbers actually favors the charities more.

But it doesn't exist in a vacuum. I wonder how much attention the involved studios'll get for future projects as a direct result of this? Aquaria, especially, has been out for quite a while now - this can probably be more accurately considered a way of breaching access to any possible remaining audiences before launching their Next Big Things.

aw3c22• 16 years ago

You are thinking about it wrong. Digital copy distribution is basically free. With your $1.09 each party gets 30000 dollars. How is getting 30000 dollars for a quick sale not a success?

Don't forget that these games are already "old" in terms of the normal gaming market. They already had their heyday.

NathanKP• 16 years ago

I would have bought it, yet the Amazon checkout refuses to let me pay using my Amazon gift card balance. It seems to want me to buy via credit card. If there is a way to buy it using my gift card balance I don't see it.

Ah well, and I was willing to give the developers $20 or so.

Khao• 16 years ago

Wonderful! I just bought them for 50$! I only know of Gish and World of goo since I've played the demos and never got around to buy them, but now I just can't miss this incredible offer!

SingAlong2• 16 years ago

The video could have been a little better while showing the games. I had to rewind a lot of times to view all the 4 squares for each game. Nevertheless, awesome offer and rap song :)

kevinh4• 16 years ago

Seeing analogpixels.com being one of the top 10 donors made me wonder: How many people would donate more if the current top 10 paying people got a link to their website/product for the duration of the sale?

delluminatus• 16 years ago

Try submitting $0. Hilariousness ensues.

edit: Yes, I would have bought it for $0 if they let me.

harada• 16 years ago

This is such a great idea. I donate to charity regularly anyway and I'm a sucker for games. Now I can have both!

I ended up paying $100. Most of the money went to Child's Play but the devs still got $20 and the EFF $10.

The Humble Indie Game Bundle

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