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Indie Pay-What-You-Want Bundle Reaches $1 Million
Spinnacre writes "The week-long Humble Indie Bundle, a pay-what-you-feel-adequate promotion, reached a million dollars in total contributions with just 50 minutes of sale time remaining. For a minimum price of a penny, gamers could get DRM-free downloads for World of Goo, Gish, Aquaria, Lugaru, Penumbra: Overture, and Samorost 2. The bundle gained great success immediately after being featured on sites such as Ars Technica and Slashdot for followup blog posts about game piracy and multi-platform gaming." According to this tweet from Steve Swink, the milestone means that several games will release their source code. In fact Wolfire is in the process of creating a public source code repository for Lugaru; Aquaria, Gish, and Penumbra: Overture are also due to be opened up within the next week.
Along with Gish, Penumbra Overture, and Lugaru, Aquaria is also being open sourced. Lugaru's game engine was GPL'd but they're retaining the art assets, so I'm assuming the others will follow suit.
Great week for indie devs, charities, and gamers all around.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
They offer the following breakdown:
Developers: $134k each
Childsplay: $154k
EFF: $148k
Pretty amazing for seven days. I admit I kicked in a little extra once I heard they'd go open source if they hit $1M. Note that the open source bit doesn't mean free as in free beer: Lugaru for example is including enough assets in the release that the demo will build, but the assets are still proprietary. As another reward for breaking $1M they also extended the promotion another 7 days.
Penumbra is pants-wetting scary. Seriously, if you don't play any other game offered in this bundle, check it out. It ranks up there with Dead Space, Clock Tower, Undying, Fatal Frame, and the other big boys.
In fact, if the circumstances and your attitude are right, I daresay it challenges the crown for scariest game series.
Living With a Nerd