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New Humble Indie Bundle Goes Live

Posted by Soulskill on from the keeping-humble-regular dept.

Physicser writes "The latest Humble Indie Bundle has gone live, consisting of Super Meat Boy, Shank, Jamestown, Bit.Trip Runner, and NightSky. Also, if you beat the average price, you receive Cave Story+ and Gratuitous Space Battles. As always, the games are DRM-free, and this is the initial Linux release for all seven. I'm also curious to see what will be added later on, as has been the tradition of the Humble Bundles."

11 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. hmm.... by justforgetme · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think that humble bundle inc should slow down a bit..
    2 bundles in a month?

    I don't know if it's the games or just me but the last one I skipped because the games didn't intrigue me that much and this one seems about the same to me. It might also be that I'm just disenchanted because of the constant presence of some humble bundle to the point where it isn't something special anymore.

    Am I being a fart or do others think less frequency more quality would be nice?

    --
    -- no sig today
    1. Re:hmm.... by Mathinker · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I also skipped one of the bundles (Voxatron) because, yes, it isn't "special" anymore. I started to actually research the games to see if I am really interested enough to buy.

      However, the fact that it isn't special anymore is fascinating because it indicates:

      • It is a viable business strategy to sell DRM-less games for "pay what you want" (even if it's only after the first sales "surge" has finished)
      • Providing a Linux version has (at least some) marketing value
      • There are a lot more quality indie games out there than I was aware of
    2. Re:hmm.... by majesticmerc · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I actually agree, sort of. It's not that I have anything against indie developers getting their stuff out there, but the problem is that I find myself less willing to splash out on it. With the Introversion bundle and HIB4 in the same month, I spent less than $25 on both, but with the original bundle, I spent $25 for that on its own.

      By far my biggest gripe though is the "developer specific" humble bundles. Again, I don't have a problem with indie devs marketing their stuff, but the Humble Bundle was designed to be something special that gave obscure independent developers some coverage, and also do something nice for charity. With the advent of the Introversion and Frozenbyte bundles though, the whole thing just seems to become marketing noise (and I'm not even sure that Introversion needed the coverage, Darwinia was a fairly highly rated game back in the day).

    3. Re:hmm.... by blahplusplus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "I think that humble bundle inc should slow down a bit.."

      Compared to what the game industry right now is, everyone should want to keep these guys in business. Sure the games aren't that great but you need money to increase the quality of your games. The first games they release aren't going to be the greatest, games take huge amounts of money and resources to develop. Modern AAA games take teams of hundreds and years of development.

      These guys can't simply spend AAA budgets on games they have to find a viable business model before they can expand and grow to higher quality games. Gamers expectations are so high because of 50 million dollar games these guys have to start somewhere. We're seeing an industry reset in a way whether they will make enough money to make more AAA like games or they will just milk it for all it's worth remains to be seen how much money they can get and whether or not they want to grow or not.

    4. Re:hmm.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      These aren't AAA titles, with the budget to match. That doesn't make them mediocre. It may make the graphics less polished, the game a little shorter but it also allows for games that would never be possible in a AAA format (throw money, people see if it sticks now days).

      "Sure the games aren't that great" - many would disagree.

    5. Re:hmm.... by LighterShadeOfBlack · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yes there have now been three bundles in the last couple of months. But I've noticed lots of promotions and sales going on all over the place at the moment. It's almost as if there's some massive consumer holiday that's fast approaching that sellers want to take advantage of...

      --
      Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
  2. Re:One million! by lucidlyTwisted · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've had to do the odd wee bodge to get sound to work on Ubuntu, but that's mostly because sound is still a joke on GNU/Linux.
    As for .debs everywhere, that'll keep the Fedora users happy. :)
    I'm not buying this one for no other reason that I'm still playing through all the games I bought on the others and there's simply too many Humble Bundles coming. They're ruining a great idea through over-use. Which is kind of a shame as I really like the general idea and the fact these devs are playing fair. No DRM, ports to new platforms and even the source at times. Can't say fairer than that really!
    Hmm...maybe as a stocking filler....

  3. Re:Do we really need all of this advertising ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So keep up the great work Humble Bundle salesmen and indie developers, but please find more appropriate places to advertise.

    Do you have even the slightest fucking idea where you're posting at? This is a perfectly cromulent place for mention of HiB seeing as there are nerds, computer geeks, programmers and gamers among the denizens of slashdot. It ain't just all Linux circlejerking and Windows bashing here sonny.

    And you're concerned because this thread amounts to a little free advertising? Pull that stick out of your ass.

  4. Re:One million! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And here I was wondering why Linux is dead on the desktop.

  5. Where is EFF? by ElusiveJoe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't see it in the donation list. Where is EFF when it needed most? I may be an evil person, but I don't want to donate money to US and UK hospitals, I don't care.

  6. Re:One million! by TheTurtlesMoves · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The package management is really crap. You can't do user space installs easily and it makes all sorts of assumptions about how you must manage the whole system. Didn't we use to criticize windows for requiring admin rights to install anything?

    And know i don't want to just type "aptget crap whatever" and end up updating a whole bunch of stuff i don't want to update, or download. Your just hiding the symptoms of dependency hell, its not fixed and any forum quickly shows. And "i have no problems, must be PEBKAC" is not how you fix it.

    BTW i have slackware at home and SuSE is what is used at work. I haven't booted or used a windows machine in years. Slackware solves the problem for me by not requiring updating 2x a day. I update once every 2 years or so. I have had one security alert that needed something updating.

    But for a game what is wrong with just a plain old archive... or do we want every installer messing with our registry?

    --
    The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!