Introducing the Humble Indie Bundle 6

http://www.humblebundle.com

by vibragiel • 14 years ago

101 70 14 years ago

sswezey• 14 years ago

I love this, even if you aren't a huge fan of games, it's a great way to donate to EFF and Child's Play and get free games.

nuttendorfer• 14 years ago

I feel like the last Humble Bundle might have set the bar too high for the following bundles.

duck• 14 years ago

I know this would wreck their whole sales strategy ("X amount of time left"), but I wish you could go back and buy an old bundle for something like double the average or whatever made sense for them.

TillE2• 14 years ago

I doubt the developers want to have their games available permanently on sale. So unless you really want to pay $50-60 for old bundles, it won't happen.

It makes more sense just to buy the stuff you want directly from the developers. Or wait for another sale.

gonnakillme• 14 years ago

They pretty reliably give the previous bundle for free if you pay more than the average for the current bundle, but don't bet on it.

jiggy20112• 14 years ago

These games look pretty good, unfortunately I literally can't spare any more money this month.

Would it be a dick thing to do to pay $0 for this bundle and promise myself to pay a lot more for the next bundle (even if the games suck)?

Flimm• 14 years ago

No. They're offering you the games at whatever price you can afford, you're allowed to take them up on their generosity! If I were you, I'd pay the minimum $0.01, use the torrents to minimize their costs, and increase the amount you're paying later.

batiudrami• 14 years ago

As an alternative to torrents, if you're playing on Windows you can just take the keys they give you and put them into Steam, rather than downloading off HIB servers.

stonemetal• 14 years ago

The default split gives a large chunk of money to the devs. The devs involved in the next bundle maybe(usually are) different than the devs involved in this bundle. You would stiff someone but overpay someone else. If you give it all to charity, their charities stay pretty stable across bundles.

lucian1900• 14 years ago

You can increase your payment later, usually.

Tichy2• 14 years ago

Uh oh - I wasted a lot of hours on Torchlight. Luckily I had to return it (complicated story). I think I should pass on this bundle, too dangerous.

oliveoil• 14 years ago

can someone explain to me how you can make money on a game like Rochard (one of the games in the bundle)? There is such an incredible amount of detail in the background in each scene, it looks like few thousand hours of work just that.

bornon5• 14 years ago

A lot of those backgrounds look procedurally generated or tiled in some way. They're still wonderfully crafted - just not necessarily hand-modeled or hand-painted down to the pixel.

TillE2• 14 years ago

Well, it's a 3D scene with a fixed camera. So a lot of it is about textures and lighting.

jsnell• 14 years ago

Basically you don't.

Most of the games business is a high risk, high reward gamble. New IP much more so than working with an existing franchise. This is in no way unique to a game like Rochard, it'd apply equally much to $0.99 iPhone games or AAA games launching on all platforms and needing to sell 3 million copies to break even.

In this case the original target market was the PS3 store, and my understanding is that the very highest selling indie games there have lifetime sales in the half million unit range. And the sales figures are likely obeying a power law, with the median sales in the thousands of units. It does seem like a pretty horrible place to be selling to.

For Rochard, we can try to make a rough estimate of the cost. First of all the studio making the game was formed for an overly ambitious project (Earth No More), which was scrapped after several years. Mostof the team dispersed, but a skeleton crew started on a new game, and shipped Rochard around 1.5 years laters. The credits show 15 people, but I doubt they would all have been on the project full time. So let's guess 10-15 man-years of work.

On the funding side, clearly they won't have had much if any money left at the start of the project. Early on they sold some part of the rights to the game to an outside investor for 400kEUR.

Even if we ignore overhead, the cost of things like voice acting, and assume Finnish pay levels, it seems clear that the team wasn't working for full market salaries. Maybe they just really wanted to work on games rather than CRUD apps. Or they all had significant equity, and were hoping to hitting it big with that 1% surprise hit.

Judging by Rochard not appearing on the top 20 most sold lists on the PSN, it seems like a fair bet that it did not make a profit there. I don't know whether it flopped completely or had mediocre sales. For the purpose of making money, it doesn't really matter. There's a good chance that they'll make more from the Humble Bundle than from PSN. Even so, it doesn't look like a project that would have broken even for the investors, or for anyone working on it at below market wage.

(Edit: Which is a shame. It was one of my favorite games last year, and I certainly didn't mind paying for it again as part of the bundle).

lifeformed• 14 years ago

Dustforce dev here. We (4 people) just lived super cheaply in a shed and apartment, working day and night for a year and a half. Expenses were about $25k per person per year (pretty much just food, rent/utilities, beer). Lived off of savings and prize money from a prototype of the game.

ashray• 14 years ago

It's interesting to see that Linux users ($8.92) on average donate around 40% more than everyone else ($5.36). Also, Windows users are cheaper than Mac users.

This is from the average donation amounts on the page.

pflats• 14 years ago

There are fewer Linux users than Mac users, and fewer Mac users than Windows users. Thus, the mean sale price for Linux users is more strongly affected by any single big sale than the mean sale price for Mac or Windows users.

I'd be curious to see the median sale prices.

powrtoch2• 14 years ago

Also any random Linux user is more likely to be a developer, which likely motivates them more to support the indie devs. And since Macs are 2-3 times as expensive as their PC counterparts, owning one tends to imply you have money to throw around.

forrestthewoods• 14 years ago

Linux users really, really, really like to brag about HumbleBundle numbers. This is a talking point every single time. I view it from the perspective that after charity/tip they pay one whole dollar to each dev. A whole dollar! It's less impressive from that viewpoint.

lollerpops• 14 years ago

0% of linux users have any of these games, some percentage greater than zero of windows users will have one or more.

pbhjpbhj• 14 years ago

>0% of linux users have any of these games //

If there are Windows users that already have them then chances are there are Linux users that already have them (for their other [other ...] OS partition).

sequoia2• 14 years ago

Negative Nelly warning: I've bought a couple of these bundles but won't buy another. One big selling point of the bundles is that they are cross-platform compatible, and that's one of the reasons I buy, as I have Ubuntu on my home computer. Unfortunately, at least some of the games which are advertized as working on Linux simply did not work for me, Trine in particular (which is sad because that game was the main reason I bought the Frozenbyte bundle).

I initially had issues on an older machine & updated ubuntu, followed the threads (it was a common issue), followed the debug & fix steps, but to no avail. I chalked it up to the hardware but with a brand new linux box and new (months later) download of Trine it still didn't run. I haven't bothered spending another hour searching down and going thru all the fix steps. It looks like there might be a new, possibly working version by now but it's been months and months and I've basically forgotten about it.

I don't expect everything to work OOTB in linux, but I'm using a popular distro, many of the games work fine, and if I'm paying for a "Linux compatible" game I expect it to be Linux compatible with a reasonable small number of clear steps without spelunking thru a dozen forum threads &c.. This is not "free" software, I paid for it and expect it to work.

I want to support humble bundle but it's too frustrating to buy a game and have it not even load.

bibinou• 14 years ago

you should buy a non-free operating system to go with you non-free game, I'm pretty sure it'll works.

please also forward this post to the manufacturer of your non-free video card, which is the most likely culprit.

samdk• 14 years ago

If you're worried about this, you can get the bundle for free, and then increase your contribution later (for as long as the bundle is still going on) once you're sure all of the games work on your computer.

Tichy2• 14 years ago

Fair warning. I only tried to run Braid on Ubuntu a while ago, and it didn't work because of some complicated driver issue (perhaps solvable for an expert, but not for me). However, I think it might work by now - at least those games are rather timeless, so you can still try again at a later time :-/

vitno• 14 years ago

As a counter point, I run Arch. The one time I had a problem I couldn't solve, I fired off an email to the Humble Bundle support team. They had a fix for me in <5 minutes.

kevingadd• 14 years ago

It's really hard to port games like these to Linux. Many of them use closed-source or even binary-only libraries that have no freely available replacements. You can blame the game developers for using non-free technology, but in some cases there aren't any good alternatives.

Indie game development has such thin profit margins to begin with that most developers can't justify sinking man-months of effort into a Linux port that might not produce enough revenue to pay for itself.

This kind of depends on your configuration too: Sure, you may be on a modern version of Ubuntu, but what kind of GPU do you have? Does it have modern drivers that are well-supported by the manufacturer? Does it support the variety of extensions and features that a game can rely on having on Windows/OSX? 'many of the games work fine' is only meaningful here if the games all have the same system requirements and you meet those requirements. If not, the best course of action is to try and communicate clearly to the developers that there are customers who are being shut out by system requirements, to see if there are cheap ways for them to lower the requirements.

winter_blue• 14 years ago

> Many of them use closed-source or even binary-only libraries that have no freely available replacements.

How do they port it to Linux, then? (They have to re-compile it right?)

I've developed games before and I can tell you, if you're not using propitiatory platform-dependent libraries, porting your game is a piece of cake. What I've noticed is that most of the games on Humble Bundle use a library known as SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer.) SDL is a library that handles two main things that aren't platform-independent: creating a window and receiving events (keyboard, mouse, e.t.c.) The rest is taken care of by the cross-platform OpenGL, OpenAL, etc. libraries.

In addition, there's an even better library than SDL called SFML (Simple and Fast Multimedia Library). SFML is much more fully featured than SDL, and is C++-based and OOP. With both SFML and SDL, all you have is _just recompile_. And done!

So really, it's not that hard to port a game. "can't justify sinking man-months of effort into a Linux port" sounds a bit stretched. There are plenty of free libraries available for game dev (atleast 2D game dev), like Box2D, CEGUI (Crazy Eddie's GUI), etc. so if from the get-go you plan on supporting multiple platforms use some of those libraries, and porting will be a breeze.

sequoia2• 14 years ago

I understand but if a game is only linux compatible if you are using a stock dell w/o GPU running archlinux on a Tuesday when Mercury is in retrograde, there is a simple solution:

Don't advertize it as being Linux compatible. I'm not asking for miracles, just a bit more realistic honesty.

rat876• 14 years ago

I don't think that closed-source non multi platform games are too big of a problem. A lot of these games use sdl. One of the games in the new bundle uses unity which is closed source and was ported to linux recently(expect to see a lot more unity games in the humble bundle as unity is pretty popular especially for smaller/indie games). A number of others use XNA for which there is an unfortunately unfinished open source clone version called MonoGame.

A bigger problem is developer effort/binary testing on linux. One guy ported 9 of the humble bundle games to linux by himself(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_C._Gordon#Humble_Indie_Bun... including Aquaria). I believe Ryan/icculus did most of the porting work as well as fixing any bugs filled on his bugzilla(https://bugzilla.icculus.org/query.cgi If you see any unreported, please report) by himself. While he is a good developer that is a lot to take on for one person.

Even more importantly many games are rushed and released/ready just before (or even a bit after humble bundle release). Even "just" recompiling for a new os with the same cross platform code requires binary testing to help find unexpected problems. A number of these bugs are eventually fixed but not all of them.

bryanlarsen6• 14 years ago

It's not a lot of money, so I'm not disappointed if 1 or 2 of the games doesn't work OOTB. I usually don't bother looking for reasons why they don't work and just play the games that do.

jiggy20112• 14 years ago

Yep, just tried to install Torchlight & SPAZ.

Torchlight doesn't seem to work at all, SPAZ doesn't do fullscreen properly.

Not sure if these are proper ports or running under WINE.

Shame because I've had success with previous bundles.

rat876• 14 years ago

Why do you assume wine works worse then a native port?

The windows version of Psychonauts works better under wine then the native linux port(at least for me).

lionyo• 14 years ago

I liked how easy Torchlight was to install, had a nice Linux-native installer with xdg-open links and everything.

It ran, but I couldn't play it for more than 10 minutes before it crashed :(

dpitkin2• 14 years ago

With the integration of the Ubuntu Software Center both Humble and Canonical work really hard to make sure that does not happen anymore. Right now we have two games ready and the others should be live tomorrow, I can't promise zero problems but they are well tested and if you let us know we will get to the bottom of any problems, high profile Ubuntu debuts are great.

whathappenedto2• 14 years ago

How do updates work for hundle bundles? I purchased Bastion in a previous bundle, which was version 1.3. I recently got a rMBP and it flickers a lot during some screens. I noticed patch 1.4 fixes these issues, but there doesn't seem to be a way to get a patch. Anyone know how generally we can get patches?

egypturnash• 14 years ago

I mostly just grab the Steam keys so I don't have to worry about keeping up with new versions.

JoshTriplett2• 14 years ago

In the past, Humble Bundle has occasionally used strong sales of a bundle as a reason to release some of the games in that bundle as Open Source. If they'd consider pre-committing to that based on target thresholds, I'd donate to this in a heartbeat; we need more good Open Source games.

alanctgardner23• 14 years ago

Open-sourcing some games seems like a really good idea, but I think a lot of the Humble Bundle games typically fall into a category where design is much more significant than technology. It's one thing to allow modding on the Source engine, which would otherwise be out of reach for most developers. But given the code for Braid, how would the community improve on it? It's clearly the vision of one man, and it's been developed fully. A lot of indie games focus on fine game balance, distinctive graphics design, or plot to differentiate themselves, where I think of Open Source as a very technically-oriented model. Do you have examples of games you think would benefit from being opened up?

JoshTriplett2• 14 years ago

I can see two major cases where it seems like a particularly big win.

First, quite a lot of indie games build an engine and then numerous variations of levels to support a plot. Braid, Bastion, Iji, Super Meat Boy, Gish, World of Goo, and many more where those came from follow that model: impressive engine, pile of well-designed levels, plot. In those cases, the ability to create more levels and add some technical variations can nicely extend the lifespan of a game.

Second, and even more importantly, the much broader space of design ideas in indie games means many more interesting components with unusual variations. Braid has a physics engine that supports time-based mechanics. Super Meat Boy has an extremely impressive record-and-replay mechanism (used to great effect at the end of each level to show you all the ways you died simultaneously). Several indie games have very impressive lighting models. The Bit Trip games have music syncing engines. Many indie games have impressive dynamic-content-generation engines. The more of these components that become readily available, the more impressive the starting point for any future indie game.

evolve2k2• 14 years ago

'Pay more than the average of $5.50 to unlock Dustforce!' Genius. This should just keep pushing the price up and up as each person pays more than the average. Wondering how this will work out.

bryanlarsen6• 14 years ago

Those paying less than $5.50 are probably paying a LOT less than $5.50, so the average may stay fairly stable.

evolve2k2• 14 years ago

The bundle is fascinating as the page gives many different pricing signals. Other factors being equal I think people don't like to miss out on things. Mentally as this one game has a unlock restriction it 'must be a better game', I think the risk of missing out in the best game by going under $5.50 will encourage people to pay over the average and still be able to mentally reconcile their pricing reasoning as to why 'they' got a good bargain.

People paying a lot less are also already factored into the average and I see no specfic factor driving low payers to be greater in quantity than usual. Hence why I love this approach.

sfaruque• 14 years ago

I keep hoping that they will release Trine 2 as part of the bundles. I know it's only been less than a year since Trine 2 came out. Humble Bundle introduced me to Trine 1, which was the first game I've completed in ages.

jebblue• 14 years ago

I'm a FP gamer, if some of these were FP I'd love to buy them.

emilioolivares• 14 years ago

I keep buying these and never seem to have time to actually play all of the games :(.

Introducing the Humble Indie Bundle 6

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