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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.
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
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 $1,030,536. They are not interested.
Penumbra is pants-wetting scary. Seriously, if you don't play any other game offered in this bundle, check it out. It ranks up there with Dead Space, Clock Tower, Undying, Fatal Frame, and the other big boys.
In fact, if the circumstances and your attitude are right, I daresay it challenges the crown for scariest game series.
Living With a Nerd
You have to remember though, EA has FAR more cash with which it can reach non-hardcore gamers (i.e. people that enjoy playing games, but aren't an active part of the culture and don't pay attention to independent games).
Honestly, do you think the average Gamestop-goer has even heard of all of these games, much less knew about the bundle? With some serious money behind a marketing campaign, something like this could have been far bigger.
Living With a Nerd
What it does show is that the average target price for a game seems to be 1.80$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.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
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
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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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?
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
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?