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Latest Humble Bundle Hits $1 Million
dylan_- writes "The Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle — where you pay whatever you want for a collection of games — has just hit the $1 million mark with 1 day and 9 hours left to buy. The games are DRM free, available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and include a donation to the EFF and Child's Play charity. As with previous bundles, Linux users are the most generous, paying an average $9.18, Mac users come in second paying $6.58 leaving Windows users lagging behind, paying $4.11 on average." These stats are presented right on the page dynamically, so you might see slightly different figures — the dollar figure should only be moving one direction, though.
Credit Card Transaction Fees: $999,999.99
Even though my Mac wouldn't play anything from the last bundle. /shakes fist at OS 10.4
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Yea I did the same thing with your wife, she is too stupid to understand how prostitution works.
Let's see the aggregate totals, the distribution curve, a blind average would be like me asking people's current temperature outside and assuming it is relevant to the Earth's.
Most people are buying this to either 1. Make themselves feel better about supporting indie games 2. because the idea is novel I'm sure a few actually like the games. But I tried it out once and most of the games were pretty bad. Either way they should slow down the number of bundles they're releasing. The novelty factor is dropping quickly.
It's interesting that the average price donated is inversely proportional to the number of games available on that platform.
You are better than those paying $.01, which actually costs them Paypal fees exceeding the purchase price.
And the last one...The games are pretty fun and it's nice to see Linux titles!
BJ away
Frozen Synapse is highly addicting. I love posting my victories on youtube and replaying my loses to study mistakes. Definately try all the various game modes.
I actually find Light Extermination more challenging than Dark Extermination. In Dark, you need to have line of sight to know an enemie's exact position. In Light, all positions are known and it's more an exercise of System Mastery than luck in discovering your enemy first. You work each 5 second turn to squeeze the most optimization from your turn. More like chess... with rocket launchers...
I bought 2 bundles. The charity and devs got the lion's share. I gave EFF pennies, I respected them until recently. Very disappointed in their open wifi access point commie nonsense. Those pennies are acknowledgement of the handling of GURPS Cyberpunk, back before they drank the koolaid.
I picked up the bundle in order to play Frozen Synapse but I got several other games thrown in because I made a decent contribution. I never heard of most of the games but I have spent the last week playing them. SpaceChem in particularly is extraordinary. It is an extremely challenging puzzle game where you must build complicated machines out of basic building blocks in order to synthesise chemical compounds. It sounds naff but it is incredibly addictive. Beware though the challenges are very tough but I reckon it would suit the the nerd quotient of the average slashdotter.
Perhaps Windows users pay less because they are on a platform which has the highest cost associated with ownership/maintenance. You can do very little with a stock windows install other than run notepad and get on the web. They pay for *everything*.
Macintosh has a subset of FOSS which works with it (libraries not always compatible) so there are add-on software costs incurred (iTunes downloads).
Linux users are more comfortable giving a little more because they spend next to nothing on out-of-pocket software costs. Anything you need is usually readily available via the package manager (Libre Office, Firefox, Tbird, Sunbird, etc, etc).
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Was pretty saddened that I missed the last one.
I was in hospital at the time and came out a day after it finished.
Glad to see they raised a million again. Hope it goes towards helping just as many in people, especially the kids.
The bundle is the same regardless how much you pay. In this case the Humble Bundle people gave away another game for free to those people how payed more than the average amount. So yes, the Bundle is the same for everybody but you might get a bonus if you pay more than the average amount.
I give them my email address every time, but they don't email me when a new bundle comes out. I actually missed the last one.
One wonders how much bigger this promotion would be if they could manage to send email correctly.
And yes, I checked my spam folder.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Notch single-handedly raised the grand average purchase price by a cent. That's a pretty big difference for one person.
The mean is strongly influenced by outliers, which is why it's generally avoided in academic discussions about things like income. With the mean I can make a reasonable prediction about a *group* of buyers, but I can't make a reasonable prediction about a *single* buyer. For example, it's true that Linux users gave proportionally the most as a group, but you can't use the same evidence to say that Linux users are more generous in general.
Example: suppose you are given a mean sale of $9.20 spread across 70,000 buyers. You could achieve this average if each of the 70,000 paid $9.20. You could also achieve this average if 322 people spent $2000, and the remaining 69,678 people only spent $0.01. The averages are the same, but the people in the first group are much, much more generous than the people in the second.
The median is more constructive for this discussion. The median means that half of the people are above it, and half of the people are below it. If I know $9.20 is the median for Linux and $4.11 is the median for Windows, I *can* say that Linux users are generally more generous, because they are individually much more likely to pay more money than Windows users.
Use APIs that are common between them and 95% of the job is done.
Microsoft understood this and made it fairly easy to port games between Windows and Xbox 360. But what APIs are common between Mac and PS3, or between Linux and Xbox 360? Mac and Linux use only OpenGL; Xbox 360 uses only DirectX. PS3 was advertised as using OpenGL ES, but as I understand it, most games appear to use something much lower-level in order to get some measure of performance out of the odd architecture.
Or were you talking about model-view-controller, in which a separate graphics engine ("view") is developed for each platform, but they share the same game logic ("model")?
Everyone knows that Linux users don't pay for anything. Just read the comments on any article anywhere!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
It's interesting that the average price donated is inversely proportional to the number of games available on that platform.
It is not altogether unfair to say that the Humble Bundle is beginning to look a little stale and predictable.
The typical Humble Bundle game had a long run on the Windows platform --- and often sells at a discount. If it is the budget price that interests you most, there is Gog.com and other resources for the Windows gamer.
What is more telling is that less than a quarter of the payments are coming from the Linux gamer whose contributions averages $5 more than the Windows contributor and $2 more than the Mac.
That does not make a compelling case for the Linux port when the promotion ends and you return - as you must - to the retail market.
I should have posted this much earlier, but how about sending out some CONGRATULATIONS! to the Humble crew for proving again that, by putting together a bundle of good games (with good game play), one can not only make a damn decent amount of money but can also do it without encumbering the user with DRM or other restrictions. For that reason alone, I'd buy the bundle every time.
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That is a good idea. I think I'll buy a bunch of copies for $0.01 and resell them for $1 each.
Over 2/3rds of the donations are from Windows gamers, and that's why PC gaming still isn't dead, despite decades of desperate FOSSies and cultists wishing otherwise.
So part of the problem here is that for most of these game son Windows, the only people buying them from this are ones who are cheapskates of some measure. Reason is the games were available long before on Windows for sale, but at a higher price. I bought Frozen Synapse when it came out for $25. After looking at it, that seemed a reasonable price to me so I picked it up. Being a big computer gamer, I'm used to paying plenty for games. They are my main form of entertainment, it seems reasonable to me.
Well, this also means that I'm not going to participate in something like the Humble Bundle. I already own the games I want. I'm not paying again just to make a point. Even if I were to participate, I'd pay a lower amount since I figure they already got money from me.
Do the same!
And initially it was only 1 game, which really isn't a bundle.
You had it lucky. When I were a kid, we got 0 games in our bundles. And we liked it!
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I ordered some DVD's from eBay (the company that owns paypal and supposedly has a no-piracy policy).
They arrived in a pretty box, but were obviously bootleg knockoffs. The subtitles varied widely between discs, and some you could see the scan-line and fuzz where they were copied from an old VHS with bad tracking.
Paypal's response to my claim: The DVD's must be brought to a third-party (such as a pro or a video store) to verify that they were pirated. Nobody local was in any way willing to do that for less than the value of the video, so my case rather readily died and the seller continues to sell pirated DVD's.
anyone else notice that @notch (the creator of minecraft) was the largest contributor in terms of donation? kudo's to him for giving back to other communities.
These bundles are really great, which is measured by their outstanding success. Somehow they always pick the greatest indie games. I hope so to see Limbo in the next one.
The median is, itself, a statement about the probability distribution for the data. You can't say anything intelligent about a median based on a probability distribution you assumed, because the act of assuming a probability distribution also assumes the median.
this is the only humble bundle that I haven't bought because I am just not interested in the games. I have bought all of the previous ones though. The only game that looks halfway interesting to me is jack claw.
Congrats! Here's to you for more success. I can't wait to see what's in the next bundle.