Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Scarcity means higher prices, perhaps? There aren't that many Linux games to begin with.
I suspect a bigger effect is "I want more games on my platform, so I want to encourage this sort of thing." (Related, but different.)
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.
Dilbert RSS feed
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?