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Examining Indie Game Pricing
As the second Humble Indie Bundle flourishes, having taken in over $1.5 million in pay-what-you-want sales, the Opposable Thumbs blog has taken a look at indie game pricing in general, trying to determine how low price points and frequent sales affect their popularity in an ocean of $60 blockbusters. Quoting:
"... in the short term these sales are a good thing. They bring in more sales, more revenue, and expand the reach of games that frequently have very little marketing support behind them, if any. For those games, getting on the front page of Steam is a huge boost, putting it in front of a huge audience of gamers. But what are the long-term effects? If most players are buying these games at a severely reduced price, how does that influence the perception of indie games at large? It's not an easy question to answer, especially considering how relatively new these sales are, making it difficult to judge their long-term effects. But it's clear they're somewhat of a double-edged sword. Exposure is good, but price erosion isn't. 'When it comes to perception, a deep discount gets people playing the game that [they] wouldn't play otherwise, and I think that has both positive and negative effects,' [2D Boy co-founder Ron Carmel] told Ars. 'The negative is that if I'm willing to pay $5 but not $20, I probably don't want to play that game very much, so maybe I'm not as excited about it after I play it and maybe I drive down the average appreciation of the game.'"
Personally, I wouldn't have bought those games at larger price. Gish and World of Goo maybe, but others are so so and not that interesting. You will find lots of more fun from Steam sales or Good Old Games. But since I could get them cheaply (I paid $5 so I'm not a total jackass), could as well get them to fill up my Steam games list.
Need more demos for games. Sometimes a game looks like shit but may play really well or vice versa. I'm more willing to download a demo or a game with limited features then I am just to plunk down some cash after only seeing only a handful of screen shots and no video.
Does it give a strength bonus, an extra attack, or +D3 hit points?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I've bought quite a few indie games off of steam and a couple of older titles off of GOG, all of them for less than twenty bucks a pop, and in most cases I feel I got my money's worth. I don't think I'd have bought most of them at triple-A retail prices, not because I'm a cheapskate, but because the games in question aren't valuable enough to me to justify the higher price tag.
I should also point out that most high profile games don't meet my criteria for the higher price tag either. Of the games I've bought this year, I can only think of two that were worth paying sixty at launch. For everything else, I've waited until the price dropped, or it went on sale. I don't think that the average gamer decides what a fair price ought to be based on what the average price is; we balance how many hours of entertainment we're going to get out of a game, and then decide what we think of as a good price for those hours. I've certainly felt ripped off in the past, buying a game at launch only to find it's only good for a few hours of play, hence my current purchasing habits.
Worrying about price erosion seems like looking at the problem backwards. Make a game worth charging sixty bucks for, and you'll sell it for sixty. Make it worth forty, and you might sell copies at sixty, but many gamers will wait for the price to come down before they buy. And the days of a game only being on the store shelves for a month before being taken down are rapidly vanishing, along with the shelves and the brick-and-mortar stores that house them.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
An indie developer studio can charge $5-15 per game and most of the cash goes to the people who made it. A traditional big studio game sells for $50 and maybe ten cents goes to the developers. The rest goes to a faceless corp that is manned by MBas who hate games anyway.
We need to keep in mind that online game sales are intangible products. Sure, as a publisher you're paying a few pennies for the download, but the difference is quite negligible, whether you sell 10 copies at $50, or 100 copies at $5. People are already used to "community support", i.e. forums, so if a lower price results in a greater net profit, there's no reason not to aim for such.
Indie games have such small user bases that the growth potential is tremendous. By selling the game at a very low price, you're effectively buying customers. If you do a good job of entertaining them, they will buy your next game. It's nearly-free publicity, which is good because at that level, the game house probably can't justify the expense of a real marketing campaign. Realistically, if you're bringing in less than six figures with your product, be it a game or app, you're better off lowering the price and considering that discount your "marketing cost", rather than paying up-front for promotion which may or may not recoup the investment. Why gamble the company when you can get rich slowly ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
... indies are competing with discounted AAA games from years prior. It's hard to charge ~$20+ dollars for an indie game when you can get yesteryears hit games for the same or less.
Seriously, that's the price. So many indie games try to push for $15 or $20 and there's just something in my mind that refuses to even consider it, or considers it far too steep.
Even though rationally I can say "well it's just $5 difference" for some reason I baulk at the price.
If someone decided that Mass Effect 2 was worth $30 to them, but the publisher of Mass Effect wouldn't sell it for less than $50, then the publisher will get $0 because the customer will wait for it to come up cheap & used, not buy it at all, or pirate it.
Publishers who suffer massively from piracy should re-think their product pricing. A customer will only pay what they want anyway.
where are they ? i havent seen once since late 90s.
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I'm a grad student and I make what I will honestly describe as a phenomenally small amount of money. A friend of mine from college, with a real job as a developer, worked out that she pays more in taxes than I make in a year.
I paid $5 for World of Goo when it was pay-what-you-want. Likewise I think for Braid, or I got it on a $5 sale. A couple others too. I'm not much of a gamer anymore -- I don't have the time or the, I don't know, lightness of spirit, for lack of a better term -- but I see these games as important, I paid what I could, and I do play them when I can.
So I guess I represent erosion in both price and "excitement", since I only play games when my rather frantic schedule allows, but on the other hand I probably wouldn't buy these games at $20. I understand that's what they're worth to the developer, but I can't pay that. As far as I go, it's a sale at $5, or maaaaybe $10, or no sale at all. I'd pay more than $20 if I had the money, but I just don't. Hopefully they'd rather sell a copy at $5 than no copy at $20, but maybe that won't wind up mattering to them. Maybe they can make more money pricing at $20 forever -- and that's understandable, they have their own problems and bills to pay, but it's nice for me if they realize that some of us would like to support them but can't pay the going rate.
It's some comfort to me that it seems like 2D Boy is pretty well-established with whatever they do next, and it's the truly up-and-coming but unknown studio that's going to price their game at $5 two or three times a year. Some gifted newcomer will hopefully always be looking to get a toehold -- I feel a bit bad for them, but it's good for my present situation, and I think the innovation is really beneficial for games in general.
Also, didn't we go through this with the iPhone game market, like, a year ago?
I bought both Humble Bundles. I hadn't bought a commercial game in a decade when I paid $20 for the first bundle-- big mistake. Was really unimpressed. Maybe World of Goo was worth $5 or $10, but the others... Boring, no replayability, poor gameplay.
Gish even refused to run, and support was non-existant. I then wished I had stayed with OSS games, some of which are much better, and I could have tried to solve the issue myself, at least.
So for HIB2 I payed only $8... if I am really happy with at least one game I plan to drop more.
If you are looking to buy one of the Bundles, I recommend you either try the demos first (which I was too lazy to do) or just pay the minimum, and later, if you like the games, add more.
don't have the huge burden of marketing costs associated with major developers, you don't have to pay a huge team, you don't have to box and ship your product.
In short, there is no price erosion when your profit margin is actually higher per unit than the big publishers, even at 10% of the ticket price.
Its not about that and you know it. Just today I fired up steam and bought 11 games, one indie bundle,(Pretty much solely for Crayon Physics, which I played the demo of last year where it stuck in my mind), the new monkey island installments and an older game that I wanted to reacquire. Total spent? 24 bucks.
I'd love to play black-ops, but not at 60 bucks. I bought MW2 at that price, the last 1/3rd of the single player campaign sucked, and the multi-player was cheap radar/wall hacky/wonky death from above garbage, and don't even get me started on the console bullshit matchmaking. Just because they throw 30 million bucks into production does not guarantee them my hard earned cash either. Will I buy it and play it? Probably, once it hits 20 bucks on steam in a year or so. Or I can pick it up used at about that price for the xbox.
Too many of us have been burned by buying something that was nothing but over-hyped crap. Apparently it's not just me who is tired of it, I'm no longer bleeding edge, I don't have to have it right when it comes out, specially if I know its something that I'll be able to buy at 1/2 price in 6 months.
$60 blockbusters have what going for them?
The name. Alot of stuff we've had come out in the last 5 years stops here. All they had was the name people know... And after one or two times of finding out that name means nothing anymore, that won't sell for 60 bucks.
Graphics. Ok some of them also had awesome graphics. But graphics alone do not a fun game make. And once you've seen one awesome looking but fairly unfun game. You've seen them all. Again not worth $60
Copy protection out the ass... Well hell that's no fun at all. And sure isn't worth $60.. Why the fuck did i buy this crap again?
Sell now patch later... Fuck my game doesnt work till i patch it.. Great.. I'm stuck. Kinda bored. And out $60... WTF is wrong with me for buying this...
DLC.. Ok i got a new game! And i can get the rest of it after paying more money! Damm... Caught me again..
And it stops there... 99% of the big blockbuster games are no fun anymore. Once you buy them you play them thru just to have 'finished it'. And the next time that big name comes around promising new enhanced super awesome neato shiny graphics... You're alot less likely to fall for it again.
The indy games have something going for them the big blockbusters havent had for a long while.... FUN! While keeping crap like drm, sell now - patch later, DLC ect... To a bare minimum..
Fun is well worth $10... It's not worth $60 anymore given what comes with those $60 games now. And sure the name will keep it moving for awhile. But sooner or later you burn each customer enough times and they say fuck your game.. I'm not paying that. I'll go try this fun little game i heard about.
Mainstream gaming companies seem to have adopted the business model of most other large companies.. The customer is the enemy. We gotta nail them for as much as we can before they figure out how bad we're fucking them over. Eventually they will run out of people to screw over.
The indy companys are in a way far far behind the times. Produce a fun game that people like and sell it for a price that moves.
Yet.. the article seems to bemoan the fact they are not fucking customers over like mainstream gaming.... Without asking themselves if they REALLY want to do that...
I suppose if all they want is the big pile of cash in the short term. Without any long term plans to support the game company...... they're doing it wrong.
But if they want to have a long term customer base and make a modest living the entire time.. They're doing it right.
Low prices are exactly what the gaming industry needs...
The production costs of a game are a one-off cost, the actual media/distribution cost is trivial which means that even priced at $1 the game can be profitable with enough sales. Now if the price is low enough, more people will buy it - look at iphone games, i know plenty of people who would never bother buying full priced games but are quite happy to pay $5 or less for an iphone game.
And of course, when the prices are low enough you squeeze the for-profit pirates out of the market (writable media costs a lot more than having thousands of copies pressed).
At $5 it becomes a casual purchase, but at $60 it's a purchase seriously worth thinking about for most people..
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Bungie's Pathways into darkness on the Mac. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathways_into_Darkness ... what are todays 'young' developers worried about? ... sure the market is mature and more people can "code" a game now .. its not the "expensive tools" anymore, just be more creative.
Nothing "up front pricing", "MS", "Sony", "closed systems" "DRM" ect. is holding people back anymore.
People have the websites, codebooks, bandwidth, forums, art work, cpu, gpu, ram ect ie start making something wonderful.
The floppy, boxes, shelf space deals, pressing cd's, magazine reviews, stalls, closed print only game press
Find an engine with the right contract (free), code it up (free) art it up (free), add sounds (free/low cost bulk deals), music (free if skilled/a band friend?), spin up a really good press release with a few (many) thousands of US$ to get your brand out.
As noted "Do a good job, and you can charge [more} and get [some] sales"
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The submitter of this summary tacked the humble bundle on this news piece horribly. In actual fact the opposable thumbs piece makes no mention of it and for good reason. It doesn't make sense within the context of lowering prices and users expectations.
The humble bundle was pay what you want hence there is no influence from the developer putting a cheap price tag on their produce thereby cheapening other indy games. In fact the humble bundle mentions that if you bought all the games then you'd normally be paying around $60 for them. The fact that most people only paid $5 to $10 for the humble bundle has nothing to do with raising people's expectations for similarly low prices on other games.
"When it comes to perception, a deep discount gets people playing the game that [they] wouldn't play otherwise, and I think that has both positive and negative effects," Carmel told Ars. "The negative is that if I'm willing to pay $5 but not $20, I probably don't want to play that game very much, so maybe I'm not as excited about it after I play it and maybe I drive down the average appreciation of the game.
I very much disagree with this sentiment. Maybe he's referring to reviewer scores, but appreciation itself is not a zero sum game. If person A loves a game, and person B only enjoys it slightly - there was still more enjoyment derived than if only person A had played it...
I love buying games at $5-10 - not only do I get ~7 for the price of a new retail game, but there isn't any urge to "get my moneys worth". If I enjoy it great - and if not I don't feel bad because it was only a couple bucks - on to the next one. That's how it should be - getting something you enjoy, not feeling pressured to play something you really don't because you paid a lot for it.
Also from a marketing perspective I would expect to see more glowing reviews this way - people who don't care probably won't talk about your game - but there will be a few that picked it up on a whim and loved it. Those are the people who will tell their friends about the great deal/gem they found.
>Probably, once it hits 20 bucks on steam in a year or so.
Bobby Kotick laughs evilly at your naivety. The biggest discount MW2 ever had on steam was 10% (I think). It's still selling for 60 Euro (79 DOLLARS) even though its successor is out. Compare this to the closest competing product BF:BC2, released 4 months later, which was already discounted to 13 bucks a few days ago. That's also the discounted price for MW1, which is now 3 years old.
Anyway, at that price, of course I picked up BF:BC2 instead, and if I really wanted MW2, 2nd hand is indeed the best option.
You know how many times that gets you 60 bucks Kotick? ZERO.
last game i paid 80$ for and it was a huge box loads a manuals and maps and the expansion disc. I tried diablo 2 first pirated.... i still play it.... I also play battle for wesnoth assault cube civilization 3 master of orion 2 and 3 star wars galactic battle grounds empire earth age of mythology heroes of might and magic 3 and 4 to name a few
am I the only one who thinks Mech Warrior 2 first, when they see Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 abbreviated as MW2?
Get off my lawn.
Captain anti-corporate there doesn't know what he's talking about.
First off, almost all games for big companies are works for hire. What that means is that the company employs the developers, designers, producers, artists, and so on to make the game. It can be as a full time or contract employee. Sometimes it is a regular salaried job (often the case for developers), sometimes it is a hourly contract (like $X/hour spent testing or something), sometimes it is a specified contract (like $Y to produce a musical score for the game). At any rate it is a very up front sort of arrangement, much of it very normal "employee works full time for employer" sort of thing.
The next thing is that these AAA titles are MASSIVE in terms of the teams that work on them. It isn't a developer, it is a team. Take Mass Effect 2. It credits 1 lead programmer, 1 assistant lead, 26 programmers, 3 localization programmers, and 6 additional programmers. So just on the pure "coding" part of development, there were 37 people. There were also all sorts of designers, testers, artists, voice actors, and so on. So, that no one person got a millions of dollars, even though the game had a multi-million dollar budget, is unsurprising. All those salaries and contracts add up to a lot.
Finally, as this all implies, the financial risk is assumed by the publisher. They pay people for their work, as the game is being developed. If it tanks, well the publisher is out their investment. If it succeeds, they make money. This isn't like an indy title where you put in work and hope to make money in the future and if it bombs, you get nothing for it. The people who made the game are compensated regardless of success.
Now I'm not saying all developers are paid what they ought to be (part of the problem is there is a bit of over supply since so many people want to make games) or that the publishers don't often make a lot of money (though many of them have gone through tough times, Atari has been bleeding red ink as of late). What I am saying is it is nothing like the music industry "We pay you a tiny royalty and deduct everything from it," system. It is very much a normal "pay for work" system as most of us have for jobs.
They are the app provider for the pc world. Apps take less money and commitment, but provide satisfaction none-the-less.
I see and era emerging of apps and blockbusters...quality existing on both sides when necessary.
Argue with me, tell me there isn't a niche for both?
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
Still has some interesting things to offer.
I was interested in Machinarium anyway.
Although World of Goo is unplayable (graphics error causes my displays to flash like strobe lamps). Disappointing, considering dual-monitor setups are common enough to warrant including it during the test phase.
All the games in the bundle are "old" in indie terms (even some that are unfinished!). And the bundle will have more reach than normally these games can get. So the net result is that you are selling old indie games to people that normally would have never even know these games exist (so for these people, the games are new).
And is a lot of money!,.. for indie devs. Is very few money for a game studio, laugdable at, but for 1 dude, or 2 dudes, is a lot.
And is not the only way to sell indie games. is a complement. So these bundles what have created is a oportunity to reach more people, and sell old indie titles *again*, and at the same time make a lot of money. So is Win-Win-Win-Win for the indie dev's.
-Woof woof woof!
it doesn't actually examine the pricing of games - it merely lists speculations by game makers & commentators.
what I was hoping for is a proper examination, in terms of how profitable are indie game makers based on sales, how much percentage of their revenue comes from rebates / discount sales like bundles, etc., and how these number compare to bigger companies making games (not the publishers, but the game developer companies themselves)
um... they just cost less to make? 2-3 devs over less than a year can dish out a decent quality indie game. We dont have huge content teams, we dont spend a huge amount on marketing, we dont pay huge royalties to engine devs, we dont have a publisher to swallow up a huge %. That is just how much it costs to make.
Proportions wise, it costs $23 mil to make a AAA title today and the average indie game costs lets say 120k to make (3 devs working for 6 months maybe) so its about what 1/200th of the cost? 1/200th of 60 is a lot less than $10 but that is because a lot of indie games simply sell a lot less.
I just bought "Defence Grid" for $2 on steam. It's not much money, but I wouldn't have paid any more, and wouldn't have even bothered to pirate it. I probably won't even play, but my brother uses my steam account and he might check it out.
My point is that $2 is a good impulse-buy price. I won't even bother to check a demo or reviews at that price. So that's $2 more than they would have gotten.
I'd be interested in seeing their total profit binned by price.
I don't think they're ruining the value of the games. I ended up only paying something like $10.00 for the humble indie bundle but considering I've bought quite a chunk of the games already for other formats (this time I'm buying for OSX) through Steam or directly from the developers I don't feel bad about being a bit of a tight wad.
That and I gave nothing to the charities so it all went to the developers aside form a tiny sliver to help pay for the bandwidth.
Demand goes up as price decreases. There is a point where the profit is maximized by the revenue generated by the volume and the cost to produce.
Lower prices are not necessarily bad in the long run if you can generate enough volume. By finding the right mix of pricing low enough to get the impulse buy bit not so low that the lower price doesn't generate enough incremental volume. If you can hit a sweet spot you can be quite profitable as long as you control costs. Steam gives indies a way to test the demand elasticity and price to maximize profit. Not a bad model if done right.
Finally, if they put out good games people will be more apt to buy them which supports higher prices in the long run.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I do too, and I'm sure many do the same. It must have something to do with the fact that MechWarrior 2 is a far better, more memorable game.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I expect to hear this kind of argument from the music industry ("iTunes is devaluing my music by selling for only $0.49 per song!") but I would have hoped that programmers would have a better grasp on reality. Price has little or nothing to do with the value that people place on things. There are lots of free programs/apps/web services that I value a lot more than the shrink-wrapped crap I paid a lot of money for. Since the copy cost for downloadable games is damn-near zero, the price-point that produces the most sales should be all the developer should worry about. The success of $0.99 games on Apples app store should be proof of that.
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I can't understand this way of thinking:
I have never not wanted to play a game as much, or enjoyed something less because I paid a lesser price for it. The less something costs me, the better.
A thing is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. If you can find everyone who'll buy your game @$60, good for you. But after you've found all of them, common sense says that you should go back through the market and see who'll bite @45, and then again @20, etc. until you've sold as many copies as you can. Since the copies cost nearly nothing to produce compared to the cost of developing the original, the more people you can sell to, the more money you'll make, even if you are selling at a drastically reduced price toward the end of your product's long tail.
What complicates this is piracy. If a whole lot of people would have really been willing to put down $20 on release day, but you were only selling for $60 at that time, then most of your potential market is not going to buy on release day, and may be tempted to pirate. If you can make your product available to them at a price that they find reasonable, many of them may not elect to pirate your product, and you may end up making more in total revenue than if you do the traditional $60-$40-$20-$5 phases.
Of course, most of the HIB games have been out for a while, and were selling at more normal retail prices. What they're doing with the HIB is promotional. They're using their sale pricing to generate word of mouth interest in a few hit games that have been out for a while and have had an opportunity to make their money. They're clearly not interested in maximizing per-sale profit, but are interested in maximizing distribution. I don't think they're all that concerned about whatever revenue they generate, because they allow the purchaser to donate whatever proportion of the sale price, up to 100%, to charity if they want to. In other words, this is not a normal sale model, it's a special. It has its place, but most likely cannot be a replacement for the usual business model.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The problem with reducing pricing in general, any product or service, doesn't matter which, is that the lower you reduce a price and the more often companies do it, the perceived value of that item drops and won't recover for years. (it can take up to seven years for prices to return to what consumers perceive as “normal.” - Martin Lindstrom, Neuromarketer)
There are two downsides and one upside to this:
The downside: Indy developers continually discounting their product means they will never be able to get away with selling it at full price after. If they weren't careful with their pricing, ie, the discounted price being below cost (if 'cost' can even easily be determined for a digital copy of a game) they could find themselves in trouble with funding future development.
The upside? Combined with Steam sales for big games, the discounted prices are going to devalue PC Games as a whole. You're going to see many more sales in the future since it's going to be tough to make the same money as they were used to otherwise.
Downside, part two: Publishers that aren't PC exclusive might see this as a liability for producing games for Windows/OSX. Console game sales aren't likely to be affected (or affected very little) by the devaluation of PC game prices. It can be a smaller market, the development is more complicated and the expected price for new games is dropping. The end result is obvious.
'nuff said. :)
I've stopped buying games, because they are DRM encumbered. I paid $30 for the latest Humble Bundle, simply because they were offering games with no DRM. (That and yes I'm a linux user, who for some reason seem to statistically always be willing to pay more for good honest software. ;-)
Absolutely yes! I practically grew up playing Mechwarrior 2 (Mercenaries, though, so the purists may scream.) Almost makes me want to dig up the old Win98 disc so I can actually get the thing to play. It'd be nice to be reunited with my AWS-9M...
One of the nice things about PC gaming is there is NO shortage of good cheap games
There is if you're looking for games for your home theater PC. Most PC gamers don't have a home theater PC, so they mostly play single-player and online games that fit in with the model of one mouse, one keyboard, one monitor, and one desk. This causes PC game developers to concentrate on desktop PCs to the exclusion of home theater PCs, and some genres have only token offerings on the PC platform. Instead of developing HTPC games, indie developers feel they have to release an unrelated single-player or online PC game, use the money from that to get an office, and then use the experience and office to get a console license to make the game they wanted to make in the first place.
don't have the huge burden of marketing costs associated with major developers
But for games in genres not traditionally associated with PCs, indie game developers still have the cost of leasing a secure office in which to put the console devkit.
I think that's pretty much the nub of that argument. Devs don't sell games at $5 because they want to - it's because they've got no other choice.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I would never buy any Apple stuff.
Then what handheld video game system would you buy? I can think of six handheld gaming platforms, each with a drawback: Nintendo DS (unfriendly to indie devs), PSP (also unfriendly to indie devs), iPod touch (made by Apple so that's out), Android on mobile phones (mandatory cellular data plan), Android on Archos devices (AppsLib has only a token selection), and Pandora (not enough units in existence because manufacturing capacity comes nowhere near meeting demand).
Person is disappointed in game, but tough shit - their money is already spent.
You mean tough shit for the publisher as the end user doesn't buy more games from that publisher. After the disappointment of Animal Crossing 3 for Wii, which brought next to no significant new features compared to Animal Crossing: Wild World for DS other than a strip mall and voice chat and specifically lacked 2-player split screen or multiple towns on one console, I haven't bought any more Wii games.
Mod parent up please.
I wish more games had the kind of encyclopedia/holodeck that provided information on the game world and history. I know that it's from the RPG, but it was still huge for me, and made a great game even better.
Isn't that one of the major things that game publishers say as a reason why they don't program for Linux? The average Linux user is paying over twice what the Windows users pay. (Myself, I paid $15, meaning that I have now bought World of Goo three times, but I care more about giving to the charities.) Sorta shoots that argument in the foot doesn't it?
We need to keep in mind that online game sales are intangible products. Sure, as a publisher you're paying a few pennies for the download, but the difference is quite negligible, whether you sell 10 copies at $50, or 100 copies at $5.
Not necessarily. The game may be based on an underlying work or setting that is licensed under terms requiring a fixed royalty per copy, as opposed to one purely based on an up-front buyout or a percentage.
You will not find a lot of indie FPS or indie MMOs. They exist, actually, but few can go toe to toe with AAA titles. But you get a lot of puzzle games, strategy games, simulations. A market almost left bare by the main studios. Maybe it's not sought after enough for them, but that's where indies shine.
True, indies have some genres to themselves, but the major labels have the market for other genres sewn up due to hardware differences between PCs and consoles. Consoles have screens big enough for several players to fit around; desktop PCs don't. A four-player game like Bomberman wouldn't work well on a PC, and the nontraditional business structures of many indie developers don't mesh with console makers' expectations.
Discounted games of yesteryear may or may not work on your current hardware+OS combination.
That's why some of the old games are sold inside an emulator: Namco Museum, Midway Arcade Treasures, Virtual Console, GOG.com games that run in DOSBox, etc.
I have bought both Humble Bundles. I've paid a few times the Linux average. Both have games that I would not have bought on their own, but in the Bundle I was willing to experiment with them. In one case, I am now awaiting a sequel. I can't say any of the games I have played have been bad or that I feel any were a waste of money. I still haven' played through all of the games from the first Bundle yet, but I have experiment with them. I have tried two older games in the second bundle.
Even with the Bundles, there are still games I will buy and at a good price because I know I like them and I want the developer to keep at it, like the Eschalon series by Basilisk.
My goal as a customer of the Bundle is to experiment with title I otherwise might night try and to hopefully encourage indie developers who meet the Humble Bundle criteria. (Multi-platform, no-drm) Of course I believe it is also important that the Bundles have a mix of interesting games. I wouldn't but a Bundle of 4 Solitaire games and a Pacman clone. I wouldn't mind seeing Annual or Bi-annual Bundles become a reasonable replacement for the large game publishing companies. The Publishers are dead weight and a drag on the game industry.
The only real downside for me is that I am a physical media kind of person. I'm not crazy about downloads, but the lack drm and the price help make of for it. I'd feel safer if I knew the download page would be available indefinitely. The fact that the Humble Bundle now have a backing company helps. I suppose that lack drm also helps should Humble Bundle Inc. ever go under.
I had a G1 with a deactivated SIM card in it
If you buy the phone up front and put in a pay-as-you-go SIM, it costs twice as much as an iPod touch or an Archos product. I'm just bitter that only $500 phones, not $250 media players, have the Market. Please allow me to rephrase:
Nintendo DS and PSP (no indie), iPod touch (made by Apple so that's out), Android on mobile phones (the device costs twice as much as the rest), Android on Archos devices (no selection on AppsLib), and Pandora (no manufacturing capacity).
They are laughing all the way to the bank on the proceeds of the game you just bought from them.
Game, singular. How much profit did Nintendo make on the subsequent games that I didn't buy from them in the two years since then, such as New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Super Mario Galaxy 2? The disappointment of Animal Crossing 3 and the Wii Menu 4.2 and 4.3 updates has cost Nintendo more than one sale.
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As atomicxblue pointed out, these Humble Indie Bundles allow Linux users to vote with their dollars, and yes, most of us are willing to pay more to have our vote be noticed. These indie developers are coding games we can play natively right out of the box. Typically, our other options are to wait for a company to release the code, use emulators for very old systems. stuff it through the Wine API (which has problems) or run a Windows virtual machine (which still has problems).