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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.
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.
Yepp, that was the first thing that sprang into my eyes. In other words: if you offer a game also for Linux and Macs you can get +50% revenue.
So why are so few game companies doing it?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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!
or more likely, Windows users pay less because they have access to the ocean -- by far the greatest variety of affordably-priced software available to them already. Mac users live in a much smaller pond, and so they're willing to pay a bit more when they get a rarer chance to actually play something on their platform. And Linux users, once they've picked their jaw back off the table on finding somebody offering games for their platform, are the most willing to part with their cash in the hopes of seeing their relatively tiny puddle expanded.
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.'"
Hi, I'm an indie game developer supporting Linux. Supporting all the different distros isn't really that bad, you just have to avoid depending on anything distro-specific. That means including ALL dependencies (except hardware specific stuff like opengl, obviously). There's really nothing special about this, you do the same thing under Windows. You do have to watch your glibc version dependency though (since distributing or statically linking glibc is a bad idea), which is a little more work, but not really that bad. Best is to set up a chroot or VM with gentoo or something and do all your building in there. After the initial setup you can just do builds like normal and it all works out. That little bit of initial effort saves you a LOT of pain in the long run.
Also, Linux is about to get a good Steam-like game distribution platform: Desura.
The situation TheTurtleMoves described is one of the biggest issues with PayPal I hear about fairly regularly. They don't like something, they get a complaint, they'll yank money out of a linked account without even a pause to investigate, question it, contact you, etc. Everyone I've talked to in that situation then faces an uphill battle in which they try to convince PayPal to look again and handle the situation responsibly and fairly. Apparently contacting Paypal and getting a useful response is a miracle in and of itself.
Presently here, but not there.
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.
The reason I hate PayPal is that there is no transparency or even apparent logic to account freezes. I have worked with a number of non-profit organizations and small businesses that have had their PayPal accounts' frozen for reasons that were never explained. Then when we supplied the requested documentation, it was rejected with no apparent reason.
Discover Card recently teamed up with PayPal to allow sending money between people, but it fails randomly with no errors and even Discover Card's tech support has no idea what is wrong. (It turns out that the problem was that within that week, PayPal had suspended personal payments to that country with no reason given.)
I am generally opposed to government regulation of business, but if PayPal wants to act like a bank by holding on to people's money, it should be regulated like a bank.
The only reason I continue to use PayPal is that there is no comparable alternative. If there was, I would stop using PayPal.
According to their guide here:
https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=security/chargeback_guide#
They leave final resolution of the chargeback at the discretion of the buyer's bank.
So it's not a case of them just being dicks for no reason.
They're just pussies who won't stand up to the buyer's credit card processor.
Generally speaking I don't mind paypal or ebay. The combination of the two, and specifically the fact that ebay makes it incredibly difficult to impossible for you to accept an alternative option to accept credit card payments is evil because it abuses their monopoly position in the online auction market. Letting 1 or 2 other options in would completely erase any concerns I have about ebay or paypal.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
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.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Some of that stems from stories of PayPal supposedly freezing accounts with no notice whatsoever for charities, and often in Slashdot threads for FOSS projects.
In every case I investigated, PayPal did send notice, and we are required by law to obtain proof of non-profit status. If a non-profit doesn't provide that proof within a certain time frame, we are bound by law to freeze the account until they provide it.
For example X.org made a huge stink over that very issue, swearing to the world that PayPal never contacted them and offered them no way to get access to their account again. All the typical Linux/FOSS/technical sites made a stink about it. When it came out a few days later that PayPal had contacted X.org and they dropped the ball, no one reported on that.
The problem is that we hear complaints from angry people separated from their money, but we don't hear the other side, or any particular details. We don't hear the final outcome of these situations. So it is very hard to find if these claims have validity.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The Paypal fees are based on the fees charged to them by the credit card companies. There is simply no getting away from that, since Visa/MC insist on getting their points. The big plus with Paypal is they cater to small transactions, and they even offer an alternate fee structure that benefits those who primarily deal in microtransactions under $5. Good luck convincing the bank to open up a micro merchant account! The last time I accepted credit cards directly, I had to place a $10k security balance (to cover chargebacks!?), and while my per-transaction fee was slightly lower (2.2%), there were monthly fees for the account itself ($50), plus annual fees for the swipe readers and a separate fee for access to the e-terminal ($1800/yr). So I was paying about $2400 / year in bank fees just for the privilege of accepting Visa/MC, and I still had to pay 2.1% + 25 cents on each transaction.
With Paypal, they require no security deposit at all, no monthly/annual fees, and almost anyone can sign up (excluding some countries). As a consultant, I offer Paypal as an option to my clients now. Unless you're selling $250k a year, Paypal actually ends up being cheaper than having your own merchant account!
What most people consider evil is Paypal's policies when things go wrong. Some of this is due to poor communication. In one instance, I had received a large payment that presumably bumped my account past some threshold, so Paypal froze my account - not just the payment itself, but my existing balance as well - until I emailed in some photo ID and proof of address. It was the fact that they sprung it on me at the last minute that really set me off. The funds were quickly released once they had the info, but it shouldn't have happened in the first place. Had they asked for this up-front when I upgraded to a business account, it would have saved everyone a bit of grief. Their phone support reps were also rather clueless, just by the tone of voice, I could tell I was talking to some disaffected students at the other end, they knew even less about the company than I did. So Paypal needs a lot of work on that front... I wouldn't call them evil though. Ten years ago, sure, they were a trainwreck, but today they are far more well-behaved. If they're good enough for Steam, they're good enough for me.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
About two years ago my daughter broke my PS3 BluRay laser. She was shoving change in the disc slot. Otherwise, the PS3 worked. You could stream Netflix or home theater content. You could play games installed to the hard drive, access PSN, etc.
I listed it very clearly on eBay that what it could and couldn't do. Someone bought it from me, and then immediately disputed the purchase through PayPal. They said that I didn't make it clear it was out of warranty. If it was in warranty, I would have had it fixed/replaced. They apparently though they could buy a cheap broken PS3 on eBay and get a free replacement via Sony.
I showed my listing, that I shipped the PS3 and that the buyer received it. PayPal sided with me as the seller. So I don't accept the notion that PayPal always sides with the buyer, or that they don't have a dispute process since I've used it myself.
****
I've had to deal with dispute resolution with PayPal only once. My mother was the victim of a phishing attack and I tried to help her out. We contacted PayPal, and they got all her money back in 3 days and then went after the phishers.
I currently work in the customer service division at PayPal and I can tell you with absolute certainty that we do dispute resolution on non-eBay transactions.
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/cps/general/PPDisputeResolution-outside
Now, there could be several mitigating factors, such as if you waited too long to dispute the transaction, or if you weren't willing to do your part to provide evidence. But that would be standard practices for any company. What you're really saying is that a vendor screwed you over, and somehow you think that is PayPal's fault.
I'm officially calling you a shill on this one. Get your story straight.
I don't have a huge beef with ebay or paypal, though I do think both charge higher fees than are necessary for a reasonable profit. Fortunately for ebay I don't get to define what is a reasonable profit for them, their shareholders do. I'll even say that you are likely correct that some people have misplaced their hatred. To say their customer service is "good" against all the naysayers, however, is ridiculous.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
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.'"
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.