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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.
I wonder how this compares to the total sales all 5 (now 6) games had prior to being included in the bundle?
Oh, and awesome job, guys. Goo is a great game. Haven't had time to get to the rest yet.
This shows that the giving freedom to your customers can work. It is a momentous slap in the face to the big boys like EA and ilk.
I don't think anyone else will be able to replicate it, though. I think you get the good press for being one of the first to try it and then it becomes old news when someone else tries.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
I'm ecstatic that they're going to open the source!
Having just experienced the Alpha 2 release of Haiku, I'd love to see a few of these games ported to that platform as well.
Now I'm glad I bought the Humble Indie Bundle, even though I haven't had time to play any of the games yet ;)
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.
Let's see... as of right now, the total contributed is $1,030,536, and the total number of contributions is 113,838, making the average contribution $9.05 for a bundle of four games (5 if the people who purchased the bundle before Penumbra was added still get it).
An executive at EA just blew his nose on $1,030,536. They are not interested.
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.
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You have to remember though, EA has FAR more cash with which it can reach non-hardcore gamers (i.e. people that enjoy playing games, but aren't an active part of the culture and don't pay attention to independent games).
Honestly, do you think the average Gamestop-goer has even heard of all of these games, much less knew about the bundle? With some serious money behind a marketing campaign, something like this could have been far bigger.
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I bought Penumbra Overture (and its sequel, Black Plague) a while back on Steam and I just have to plug them here in case you've missed them and since they're so awesome. They're basically 1st person horror adventures. The protagonist ends up stuck in a mine in Greenland and has to explore it in order to get out while unraveling the mystery of what's happened there. The games are very atmospheric and have an interesting, unfolding storyline with supernatural elements (Black Plague takes off where Overture ends). Reminds me of X-Files episodes where Mulder and Scully get stuck somewhere in the middle of nowhere where strange things are happening, except the Penumbra protagonist doesn't have a partner. You should play them alone at night or when it's dark for maximum effect (it's not a pitch-black-surprise-monster-attack-in-your-face a la Doom 3 game). Overture has little combat; Black Plague has none.
The games are about as long as Half-Life 2 Episode 2, and IMO way better. Too bad they were underrated/overlooked by the gaming press. The third Penumbra game, Requiem, is a puzzle game without a storyline unlike the first two. I haven't bothered finishing it yet.
What it does show is that the average target price for a game seems to be 1.80$USD.
I don't think people think that way - dividing the total by the number of games. I think that they averaged spending $9 and some would have done it for one game or three games. The fact that there were five in the bundle just meant that more people were willing to participate.
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I find it comical that the Slashdot submission makes no mention at all that they also said 25% of downloaders were "pirating" it, and not paying even a single penny.
But that doesn't fit the Slashdot worldview, so it was left out.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Saving-a-penny----pirating-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle
The slashdot effect is being used as a force for good for a change, and it feels great to see that! I expect another surge in sales. I just kicked in $10 myself (which makes me a cheapskate compared to the average Linux user).
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
An executive at EA just blew his nose on $1,030,536.
And then tried to figure out how to best claim that indie game developers stole from EA.
"Let's see, a million dollars. That would be three million dollars that would have been spent on an EA licensed version of world of goo. FOUR million if you count the last half of the game as downloadable content. 6 times 4 million... 24 million...
Betty get in here! Immediate press release! Indie developers have just stolen 32 million dollars from the video game industry!"
Thing is, a lot of folks probably felt like they were donating to a good cause when they paid for this bundle, and upped their payments accordingly, whereas there would be no positive karma from giving more than a penny to EA.
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Which is *less* than games with heavy DRM (according to those companies like EA et all). So it does support the world view: DRM hurts sales.
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Maybe now I can play Penumbra without being freaked out by the spiders. That's what I liked about the Thief games; the editor let you delete the definitions for the spider objects.
No, you just want something for free. If you're too cheap to afford a single penny, then I'd question your ability to afford a computer. Even a homeless person could scrounge up the bare minimum necessary to show at least a little respect to the developers.
Oh, I forgot - this is Slashdot, home of the Open Source zealots who believe that copyright only matters when it's protecting something covered under the GPL. Carry on...
Are you for real? :O
Some fans recreated the mod tools already.
Also they never said they had lost the source code of the GAME which they released. Only the asset tools.
There seem to be very few transactions these days that are a positive-sum. This is one of them.
Any voluntary transaction between two parties with full knowledge (or close enough to full knowledge) is positive-sum. In particular, each party must be benefiting, because otherwise he wouldn't participate. You give money to a store owner in exchange for a product because you want the product more than the money, and he wants the money more than the product: you're both better off afterwards. This is why economic activity creates wealth, rather than just shifting it around.
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I disagree. I've read a few of the other blog posts from Wolfire that have been posted on Slashdot in the past. It seems to me, their views (Wolfire) are very much aligned with the majority view held on Slashdot. That is, that DRM is an ineffective combatant against piracy and that it only hurts legitimate customers.
If you read the link that you posted, more carefully, they point out that they are not taking action to stop piracy of their games. Their stance is that any kind of digital restriction imposed on their games could negatively affect a paying customer. He goes on to point out that the trade-off of hurting just one customer is a compromise they are not willing to make, just in order to combat the seemingly marginal effect of piracy on their sales.
If you check out some of the other blog posts on their website, they talk about how piracy is overstated and has a marginal effect on actual sales. In other words, piracy is not creating a loss in sales, because the pirate would never have been a paying customer in the first place. The motivation for piracy may vary from the inability to pay, compulsion to download, or even the challenge of cracking digital imposed restrictions. However, the average pirate may not be downloading software, music, or movies simply to use it. That is simply an ignorant point of view taken by the likes of the BSA, MPAA, and RIAA to justify overstated loss projections. What is more likely, and realistic, is that consumers get no value out of the respective products and sales have declined with value proportionately. It may be true that some consumers have turned to piracy for media they expect to consume, but the actual loss effects on the bottom line have very little to do with the majority of pirates.
So the question remains, how many paying customers do you have to piss off with digitally imposed restrictions before it has a real, and noticeable, effect on your bottom line?
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I didn't know Penumbra was a late addition, but I did get Samorost 2 for nothing after purchasing the bundle.
It was a pleasant experience I could certainly get used to. Never before have I paid an agreed price for something and had the publisher contact me with: "we've changed the deal - in your favour. Head back to our website to download your extra shit".
Indeed and don't forget that the 25% likely include some people that weren't able to get in on the action legally. Either they didn't have a credit card or they live in a part of the world where they have no access to the payment processors. It would be interesting to know how many of those would've paid had they been able to send in a check or pay in some other fashion.
An executive at EA just blew his nose on $1,030,536. They are not interested.
As someone else mentioned, a few *old* indie games have made over a million bucks in the span of a week. This is news worthy.
If your having trouble in understanding why, your not thinking about it properly.
This isn't about impressing or replacing the EA's of the world its about:
1) Demonstrating that you don't need a multi million dollar empire to create fun games that people want to play.
2) Small developers making a reasonable/good living by developing games.
3) (potentially) open sourced works != no more income.
Personally, I'm saddened that when ever there is a story about some open/gpl project making money, the highest modded posts all say "But [closed multi mega corp] makes 3 times that much during coffee break". What is this obsession with striking it rich? Why do we look down upon people making a "reasonable" amount from their efforts because other entities with questionable business ethics make more money?
Well, that's a guesstimate based on number of IP addresses... if you download it from more than one IP your other downloads will count as a "pirate". Plus I suspect that if you tell people they can choose how much to pay, many want to play first and decide afterwards. Like the blog says "25% seems incredible given that you can simply pay $0.01 to be completely legitimate." so why not play first and decide if it deserves a little more. Or maybe nobody at the link site even told them anything about the offer. Does it matter? It just proves that some people really don't want to pay anything, period. I doubt you could have earned anything on them anyway.
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I would pay...but not as much as I would for indie cross-platform games with a bundled charity donation. I paid a good deal above the average payment, but I think if I say a similar package from [major developer], I might pay something around the $10-ish average from this sale.
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How, exactly, are they pirates? There was no minimum amount set. If I got a game on sale for $15 instead of the retail $60, does that make me a pirate? Last I checked, I still bought goods at a price they were willing to be sold at.
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Really? These days it seems more home to astroturfing IP-loving douchebags like yourself.
Thing is, a lot of folks probably felt like they were donating to a good cause when they paid for this bundle, and upped their payments accordingly, whereas there would be no positive karma from giving more than a penny to EA.
My thoughts too.
I just purchased the bundle, though I've bought World of Goo previously.
I paid more than the current average for these games. Though that amount is still more money then I have ever given to EA.
True. They also cleverly added per-platform statistics enticing people to enter higher numbers in order to look good in comparison. I paid 11 USD. Why? Because the Mac average was at 10 USD.
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