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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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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.
It's interesting that the average price donated is inversely proportional to the number of games available on that platform.
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.
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.
Do you have any corroborating evidence to support this?
But I tried it out once and most of the games were pretty bad.
But I tried it out every time and most of the games were pretty good.
Either way they should slow down the number of bundles they're releasing. The novelty factor is dropping quickly.
Breakdown of sales figures:
Humble Indie Bundle #1: $1.27 million
Humble Indie Bundle #2: $1.8 million
Humble Frozenbyte Bundle (note the lack of "Indie" in the name): $700,000
Humble Indie Bundle #3: $2.17 million.
Contrary to your uninformed assertions, it looks like sales are on a phenomenal upward trajectory considering the nature of the enterprise. I'm sure they'll take your opinion into account before they make their next move though.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
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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Frozen Synapse is an excellent game, well worth it when I paid $20 for it when it came out. Trine is also excellent and has won a bunch of awards. All of the bundles have had some pretty good games, usually mixed in with a few mediocre to crappy games. Yea, none of them are Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto, but that doesn't mean they're not good. And considering the piles of money they've been making, I don't foresee a decrease in the number of bundles forthcoming. I don't think it was ever intended to be a "novelty".
Actually, the bundles have typically had games that I have either purchased, or was going to purchase. So for me, the games are pretty good.
I look at it like Steam's Christmas sale last year, though. If they keep having sales, why would anyone purchase at full price? Just wait for the inevitable sale.
Worse yet, some of the games aren't even launched yet... You'll lose all the money from the people who just have to have it at launch.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Humble Bundle Games are bad? World of Goo, Gish, Braid, Osmos, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Frozen Synapse, SpaceChem, Trine? Have you ever played them?
I had bought all of those listed above BEFORE seeing the bundle (in the case of Trine, 8 copies for friends, etc.). They're not top-of-the-range, graphics-card-pushing FPS from a top-name publishers, sure, but they're top-selling, professionally-produced games that were selling enough units on their own without the bundles.
Even this one's main game - Frozen Synapse - was on my computer and my brother's before it got close to the Humble Bundles. Sure, there's some crap in there too, but the majority of the games are extremely good, and already selling well in their own right via Steam normally. That's how they can afford to just let them be sold off, or open-sourced if HB makes enough money (in the case of Gish, etc.). Hell, I bought Gish god-knows-how-long ago - it must have made its costs back before the HB even existed.
The reason these things are popular is because it's a damn good deal - even if you assume the normal prices are way over-inflated (which they aren't), getting those games for even $10 is a bargain - there's HOURS of decent playtime in there for less than a 6th the price of a single full-price game. Redeemable on Steam, too, so no downloading and installing (just automatic double-click-and-wait).
I never mind supporting indie games anyway (hell, I paid way over what the bundle costs for the games inside it before it even existed), and the idea is novel but not unique (honesty boxes - they're even used in car parks in some places in the UK). People are buying it because the perceived value for money is enormous.
I just wish they would stop adding things in after - save that for the next bundle!
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.'"
I've bought each previous bundle, and while I still support the concept, this is the weakest bundle (assuming you own the previous ones).
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Goo is great. Gish is ass. Braid is meh at best. Osmos is fantastic. And wasn't there one more game in that bundle that sucked? Was that the one with Lugaru? What a tech demo that was.
I find the bundles to be highly hit and miss. But at these prices, I can take a chance, and the developers get a little money they might use to fix the game or make something better.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Braid is meh at best.
You lose the game of game criticism.
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.
Huh? Like every Bundle there's one or two games (Trine and Frozen Synapse in this case) that were successfully sold at $30+ dollars before their release. Then there's a few... I'm reluctant to say lower quality because they are often quite enjoyable, lets say less mainstream games that are, so far as I'm concerned, a free bonus. I got the #3 bundle for Crayon Physics and VVVVVV and ended up playing Hammerfight for hours. I won't be surprised if the same happens here.
All games drop in price eventually, why do PS3 and 360 games sell for $60 when everyone knows they'll be available for $30 this time next year?
Difficult question: If I were to, hypothetically, make a joke about outsourcing right now, would that be racist?
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I think the day this bundle started, there was only a single game. All the other bundles have had 5 games.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Shadowgrounds is actually pretty damn fun.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
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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wtf!? Gish was AWESOME! Let me guess, you never got the hang of jumping, did you? There's a lot of finesse there and if you don't have it, you can barely move around.
I guess Braid is for people that realize that the SET YOUR OWN PRICE model allows you to pay $1 and get Trine.
Well, it did while the event was going on at least...
"Indie" and "Amateur" are very different beasts. And one of the games from a previous bundle -- Atom Zombie Smasher -- is fantastic, even if it has simple graphics.
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.
Shadowgrounds was part of the previous bundle. If you purchased the previous bundle, then this bundle is only 3 games, and the smallest bundle to date. And initially it was only 1 game, which really isn't a bundle.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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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Not only did I not get the hang of jumping, but no one even tried to explain it to me. Being a good game is more than having good mechanics. After I swim through a crap menu, and arrive in awful-graphics land, if you want me to figure out some awesome new game mechanics, you're going to have to lead me by the hand from step to step like World of Goo did. Oh sure, sometimes I'm going to just get it. But I'm no stranger to timing jumps precisely, I grew up with a Nintendo too, and I beat Ninja Gaiden, and Strider :p
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ah yes, that reminds me, I need to check to see if they finally resolved the bug that kept Civ5 from crashing horrendously with my video card, and if they finally decided to include a hot-seat multilayer. You know, a professionaly made game...
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.
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.
Where is your evidence for either of your claims?
Firstly, way way too many copies our sold to account a big percentage to developers and the game sold through the bundles are some of the most successful indie games out there.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Does anyone know how the stats are collated? I made my purchase at work on a Windows machine to play on Linux at home and am wondering if there is a significant percentage of other purchases doing the same thing.
A game has objectives and is competitive, anything else is just play
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.
If you had said that a bundle of 5 ps3 games would definitely be available for whatever I wanted to pay, even $.01, that analogy might hold.
As it stands right now, they helped launch and explosion of Indie games, and the market is eating it up. But if they devalue them by setting an expectation of these bundles, it could set the whole thing back again.
(To be fair, Steam helped a lot, too, with their 5 for $5 bundles last Christmas... And repeating that event would be just as bad.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Congrats! Here's to you for more success. I can't wait to see what's in the next bundle.