8 ms·

The Humble Indie Game Bundle

185 points by daniel_levine 16y ago

daniel_levine 16y ago
The games are World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, Penumbra Overture edit: removed some incorrect info
- stevenp 16y ago
  EFF and Child's Play are actually charities that your payment is split with.
  - daniel_levine 16y ago
    you're right, i was just copying the bar across, my bad
bseo 16y ago
I like this model. Surely the developers behind these games are going to get some new fans and customers. As an anecdote, I played World of Goo at a friend's once. He copied it on my USB stick and I played more at home. A few months later there was a "pay what you want" promotion for just World of Goo. I bought it to support the developers, even though I had already finished the game and there was nothing new to play with. It's a great game and I recommend it for a few hours of fun.
- patio11 16y ago
  I think they're going to get a huge influx of pathological users who mostly pay amounts which would amount to 80% off the face price of the cheapest game in the bundle.
  - bseo 16y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by "pathological users", though isn't 20% better than 0%?
    - benologist 16y ago
      They're making less per game than they would charging a lousy buck on the appstore. Given all the ways they can make whole dollars, as in plural, per purchase I'd say it's not better than 0% at all.
      - kevinh 16y ago
        This is free advertisement for indie developers, who have a very hard time getting publicity. Not only does it pay off in the short term (many of these are users who I can promise you would never have bought these games for anything more), it also pays off for the companies in the future. Wolfire, the creator of Lugaru, is currently working on the sequel, Overgrowth, which they have been funding exclusively by using preorders of the game. If someone buys Lugaru here and enjoys it, they may just preorder Overgrowth, which will net them more money. It's the same with Frictional Games (creators of Penumbra) and the game that they're funding through preorders, Amnesia.
        benologist 16y ago
        It seems like pretty expensive advertising actually - a normal sale makes them $x minus the ad or whatever that brought them the customer. Now $x is somewhere between $0 and $1.58 where it used to be up to $20 minus whatever advertising. They're not making more they're just selling more.
        kevinh 16y ago
        World of Goo did the same thing a while back. They made an incredible amount of money and reached a large amount of people. Yes, many people paid 1 cent, but they still made more than they would have otherwise. Read the attached article, it's their response to their sale: http://2dboy.com/2009/10/19/birthday-sale-results/ http://2dboy.com/2009/10/19/birthday-sale-results/
        bseo 16y ago
        Exactly. I mentioned this in my original post above. They already know whether the "pay what you want" sale works or not.
  - reitzensteinm 16y ago
    ...who almost certainly wouldn't have bought the games anyway. The exposure that some of these sales bring is immense, partly because they're novel. Who cares if a large percentage of people get the games for really cheap? They could easily get it for free at The Pirate Bay. The total is going up by over $300 a MINUTE right now.
    - bryanh 16y ago
      This is by far the biggest argument in favor of the "pay-what-you-want" model. It's an efficient way to capture customers that would have been priced out of your product. The other edge of the sword is the tendency of customers with the cash to skimp.
    - adriand 16y ago
      > ...who almost certainly wouldn't have bought the games anyway. Exactly. I just paid $15 just because I thought it was a neat idea. I don't know if I'll even play the games since I don't really play video games much any more these days. If I do, I won't spend much time on them, and I definitely wouldn't have ever purchased them. So my money to them is 100% money they would never have had otherwise.
    - SingAlong 16y ago
      "who almost certainly wouldn't have bought the games anyway" exactly. I bought World of Goo when 2D Boy had such an offer. And i had not heard of the others. Now after the video i want to try Lagaru HD
jaaron 16y ago
I know and love both World of Goo and Gish. Any reviews or recommendations on the others?
- daniel_levine 16y ago
  to be honest they're all pretty cool. Aquaria is an Independent Games Festival winner. Lugaru is sick if you're into awesome fighting rabbits. Penumbra: Overture is highly rated across a bunch of gaming sites including metacritic.
- kevinh 16y ago
  Lugaru is reminiscent (at least to me) of the Redwall books. It has awesome combat and you shouldn't miss it. Aquaria is an amazing adventure game that is somewhat reminiscent of Metroid in how you explore the environments. The environments are beautiful and the game play is fun. Penumbra Overture is a horror game that has scared me more than any other horror game I have played. It has an incredible atmosphere and is definitely worth the play through. The game ends on a cliffhanger, but the sequel is even better than the original, so I would recommend getting both.
benologist 16y ago
Average contribution of $8.64 for 5 games or $1.72 per game. It's a nice PR move but that's just disgusting I'm sorry.
- sadiq 16y ago
  Heh, it's even less than that if you leave it distributed evenly between the developers and two charities. $8.64 is $2.88 for the developers or about 58c/game.
  - jcl 16y ago
    It's a little better for the developers than that... like $1.23 per game: "By default, the amount is split equally between the seven participants (including Child's Play and EFF), but you can tweak the split any way you'd like."
- mikeyur 16y ago
  Depending on the total sales, they may get more than a MacHeist bundle. A few friends have been approached for MacHeist and only offered $1-10k depending on the bundle. A friend went through with it and got $2k cash and a few little extras for giving away his app to 400,000 people.
- levesque 16y ago
  The thing is that by making the prices so low (as low as one feels comfortable paying for them), they increase their sales number by much thus helping counter the low price. Without this event there would be close to no sales since some of these are pretty old games. 40$ * 10 sales is much worst than 2$ * 1000 sales. The iPhone app store runs on the same idea. Jeff Atwood also wrote an article about that : http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/software-pricing-are-we-doing-it-wrong.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/software-pricing-ar...
- heyitsnick 16y ago
  Well I just purchased it for $10 and I already own 2 of the games. And the other's I never would have considered buying if it wasn't for this bundle. And I'm pleasantly surprised with gish so far; already checking out the developer's site to see what else that have on offer. Other people might be paying that average and are only interested in 1 or 2 of the games in the bundle. You can't just say a blanket "5 games or $1.72 is disgusting".
samd 16y ago
They probably shouldn't put the average amount paid so far on the website. The idea is to get people to pay what they think the games are worth, not what other people think the games are worth.
- jcl 16y ago
  Still, it's a good idea to put some number for anchoring, and the current average is not a bad one. And a number that seems to come from other people could be more influential than a "recommended contribution". Edit: As others point out, there are already some other anchoring points on the page, so having an average lower than those may be hurting them. It might have been wiser to make the "Top contributors" tab the default (or only) tab in their realtime stats display.
- heyitsnick 16y ago
  For me, I made sure to pay something above the average so I feel more generous than the average. If other's think the same, the average will naturally grow :)
- rubinelli 16y ago
  I upvoted you, but I'm not entirely convinced. The creators of this site seem to know what they are doing: they told the "retail" price of the bundle in the second paragraph, then subtly suggested reasonable price points (the lowest being $10) in the form. Maybe they are expecting the $1 to $5 crowd to pay something closer to the average?
- patio11 16y ago
  Here's how I would have done it: http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/deep-discount-mockup.png http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/deep-disc... Anyhow, the idea was to simplify the workflow and simultaneously abuse the power of defaults and user psychology. I also intentionally ditched some parts of the offer which I don't think add business value, such as fine-grained control on the split. (I'd A/B test including "65% of people pay this much" on the #1 step, probably with a subtle yellow highlighting.)
  - 16y ago
albertzeyer 16y ago
Maybe they should combine the old Shareware model with this one. And make it all very easy. Like you download the full game and in the end of the first level, this payment stuff pops up where you can just pay whatever you want to proceed (whatever you think it is worth). The point is, I really don't know what these games are about and how much they are worth.
- levesque 16y ago
  These games all have a demo version.
BoppreH 16y ago
I don't usually buy things on the internet. Mainly because it requires money in a PayPal account or similar, and it's very hard for me to get that (I have some dollars from a freelancer work, but it's a hassle to transfer between my bank account and PayPal). If I had heard only about a "indie game bundle" containing those titles, I would probably have run straight to The Pirate Bay. But this one caught my attention. The devs are willing to give five high-quality games for whatever I want to pay. The guy even sang a song for the advertisement, for god's sake. I loved the ad. I loved the bundle. I even loved the website. This selfish pirate is reaching for his wallet. I will not pay the full $ 80 sum (though more than the average, for sure), but I'm one that would probably not have paid a penny otherwise.
barmstrong 16y ago
Haha...on the "no middle man" logo is that a condom (as in don't get screwed by the man) or a bomb. Can't tell :) Well executed idea!
- BoppreH 16y ago
  That looks like a tie for me.
BoppreH 16y ago
If you are worried about the process, don't. After filling the short form and login in my PayPal account, the email with the download page was sent instantaneously. Their bandwidth is excellent and all downloads are direct (no login, download token, download code, wait time, bandwidth limit or whatever).
nnutter 16y ago
Watch the video! So worth 2 minutes of your time.
- algorias 16y ago
  It rhymes!
JCThoughtscream 16y ago
In a vacuum, the Humble Bundle can't really be called a success. As I'm writing this, assuming equal split, each developer and charity gets an average of $1.09/purchase - hardly a windfall, though I'm sure the actual numbers actually favors the charities more. But it doesn't exist in a vacuum. I wonder how much attention the involved studios'll get for future projects as a direct result of this? Aquaria, especially, has been out for quite a while now - this can probably be more accurately considered a way of breaching access to any possible remaining audiences before launching their Next Big Things.
- aw3c2 16y ago
  You are thinking about it wrong. Digital copy distribution is basically free. With your $1.09 each party gets 30000 dollars. How is getting 30000 dollars for a quick sale not a success? Don't forget that these games are already "old" in terms of the normal gaming market. They already had their heyday.
NathanKP 16y ago
I would have bought it, yet the Amazon checkout refuses to let me pay using my Amazon gift card balance. It seems to want me to buy via credit card. If there is a way to buy it using my gift card balance I don't see it. Ah well, and I was willing to give the developers $20 or so.
Khao 16y ago
Wonderful! I just bought them for 50$! I only know of Gish and World of goo since I've played the demos and never got around to buy them, but now I just can't miss this incredible offer!
SingAlong 16y ago
The video could have been a little better while showing the games. I had to rewind a lot of times to view all the 4 squares for each game. Nevertheless, awesome offer and rap song :)
kevinh 16y ago
Seeing analogpixels.com being one of the top 10 donors made me wonder: How many people would donate more if the current top 10 paying people got a link to their website/product for the duration of the sale?
delluminatus 16y ago
Try submitting $0. Hilariousness ensues. edit: Yes, I would have bought it for $0 if they let me.
harada 16y ago
This is such a great idea. I donate to charity regularly anyway and I'm a sucker for games. Now I can have both! I ended up paying $100. Most of the money went to Child's Play but the devs still got $20 and the EFF $10.

185 points by daniel_levine 16y ago

daniel_levine 16y ago

The games are World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, Penumbra Overture edit: removed some incorrect info

stevenp 16y ago
EFF and Child's Play are actually charities that your payment is split with.
- daniel_levine 16y ago
  you're right, i was just copying the bar across, my bad

bseo 16y ago

I like this model. Surely the developers behind these games are going to get some new fans and customers. As an anecdote, I played World of Goo at a friend's once. He copied it on my USB stick and I played more at home. A few months later there was a "pay what you want" promotion for just World of Goo. I bought it to support the developers, even though I had already finished the game and there was nothing new to play with. It's a great game and I recommend it for a few hours of fun.

patio11 16y ago
I think they're going to get a huge influx of pathological users who mostly pay amounts which would amount to 80% off the face price of the cheapest game in the bundle.
- bseo 16y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "pathological users", though isn't 20% better than 0%?
  - benologist 16y ago
    They're making less per game than they would charging a lousy buck on the appstore. Given all the ways they can make whole dollars, as in plural, per purchase I'd say it's not better than 0% at all.
    - kevinh 16y ago
      This is free advertisement for indie developers, who have a very hard time getting publicity. Not only does it pay off in the short term (many of these are users who I can promise you would never have bought these games for anything more), it also pays off for the companies in the future. Wolfire, the creator of Lugaru, is currently working on the sequel, Overgrowth, which they have been funding exclusively by using preorders of the game. If someone buys Lugaru here and enjoys it, they may just preorder Overgrowth, which will net them more money. It's the same with Frictional Games (creators of Penumbra) and the game that they're funding through preorders, Amnesia.
      - benologist 16y ago
        It seems like pretty expensive advertising actually - a normal sale makes them $x minus the ad or whatever that brought them the customer. Now $x is somewhere between $0 and $1.58 where it used to be up to $20 minus whatever advertising. They're not making more they're just selling more.
        kevinh 16y ago
        World of Goo did the same thing a while back. They made an incredible amount of money and reached a large amount of people. Yes, many people paid 1 cent, but they still made more than they would have otherwise. Read the attached article, it's their response to their sale: http://2dboy.com/2009/10/19/birthday-sale-results/ http://2dboy.com/2009/10/19/birthday-sale-results/
        bseo 16y ago
        Exactly. I mentioned this in my original post above. They already know whether the "pay what you want" sale works or not.
- reitzensteinm 16y ago
  ...who almost certainly wouldn't have bought the games anyway. The exposure that some of these sales bring is immense, partly because they're novel. Who cares if a large percentage of people get the games for really cheap? They could easily get it for free at The Pirate Bay. The total is going up by over $300 a MINUTE right now.
  - bryanh 16y ago
    This is by far the biggest argument in favor of the "pay-what-you-want" model. It's an efficient way to capture customers that would have been priced out of your product. The other edge of the sword is the tendency of customers with the cash to skimp.
  - adriand 16y ago
    > ...who almost certainly wouldn't have bought the games anyway. Exactly. I just paid $15 just because I thought it was a neat idea. I don't know if I'll even play the games since I don't really play video games much any more these days. If I do, I won't spend much time on them, and I definitely wouldn't have ever purchased them. So my money to them is 100% money they would never have had otherwise.
  - SingAlong 16y ago
    "who almost certainly wouldn't have bought the games anyway" exactly. I bought World of Goo when 2D Boy had such an offer. And i had not heard of the others. Now after the video i want to try Lagaru HD

jaaron 16y ago

I know and love both World of Goo and Gish. Any reviews or recommendations on the others?

daniel_levine 16y ago
to be honest they're all pretty cool. Aquaria is an Independent Games Festival winner. Lugaru is sick if you're into awesome fighting rabbits. Penumbra: Overture is highly rated across a bunch of gaming sites including metacritic.
kevinh 16y ago
Lugaru is reminiscent (at least to me) of the Redwall books. It has awesome combat and you shouldn't miss it. Aquaria is an amazing adventure game that is somewhat reminiscent of Metroid in how you explore the environments. The environments are beautiful and the game play is fun. Penumbra Overture is a horror game that has scared me more than any other horror game I have played. It has an incredible atmosphere and is definitely worth the play through. The game ends on a cliffhanger, but the sequel is even better than the original, so I would recommend getting both.

benologist 16y ago

Average contribution of $8.64 for 5 games or $1.72 per game. It's a nice PR move but that's just disgusting I'm sorry.

sadiq 16y ago
Heh, it's even less than that if you leave it distributed evenly between the developers and two charities. $8.64 is $2.88 for the developers or about 58c/game.
- jcl 16y ago
  It's a little better for the developers than that... like $1.23 per game: "By default, the amount is split equally between the seven participants (including Child's Play and EFF), but you can tweak the split any way you'd like."
mikeyur 16y ago
Depending on the total sales, they may get more than a MacHeist bundle. A few friends have been approached for MacHeist and only offered $1-10k depending on the bundle. A friend went through with it and got $2k cash and a few little extras for giving away his app to 400,000 people.
levesque 16y ago
The thing is that by making the prices so low (as low as one feels comfortable paying for them), they increase their sales number by much thus helping counter the low price. Without this event there would be close to no sales since some of these are pretty old games. 40$ * 10 sales is much worst than 2$ * 1000 sales. The iPhone app store runs on the same idea. Jeff Atwood also wrote an article about that : http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/software-pricing-are-we-doing-it-wrong.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/software-pricing-ar...
heyitsnick 16y ago
Well I just purchased it for $10 and I already own 2 of the games. And the other's I never would have considered buying if it wasn't for this bundle. And I'm pleasantly surprised with gish so far; already checking out the developer's site to see what else that have on offer. Other people might be paying that average and are only interested in 1 or 2 of the games in the bundle. You can't just say a blanket "5 games or $1.72 is disgusting".

samd 16y ago

They probably shouldn't put the average amount paid so far on the website. The idea is to get people to pay what they think the games are worth, not what other people think the games are worth.

jcl 16y ago
Still, it's a good idea to put some number for anchoring, and the current average is not a bad one. And a number that seems to come from other people could be more influential than a "recommended contribution". Edit: As others point out, there are already some other anchoring points on the page, so having an average lower than those may be hurting them. It might have been wiser to make the "Top contributors" tab the default (or only) tab in their realtime stats display.
heyitsnick 16y ago
For me, I made sure to pay something above the average so I feel more generous than the average. If other's think the same, the average will naturally grow :)
rubinelli 16y ago
I upvoted you, but I'm not entirely convinced. The creators of this site seem to know what they are doing: they told the "retail" price of the bundle in the second paragraph, then subtly suggested reasonable price points (the lowest being $10) in the form. Maybe they are expecting the $1 to $5 crowd to pay something closer to the average?
patio11 16y ago
Here's how I would have done it: http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/deep-discount-mockup.png http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/deep-disc... Anyhow, the idea was to simplify the workflow and simultaneously abuse the power of defaults and user psychology. I also intentionally ditched some parts of the offer which I don't think add business value, such as fine-grained control on the split. (I'd A/B test including "65% of people pay this much" on the #1 step, probably with a subtle yellow highlighting.)
- 16y ago

albertzeyer 16y ago

Maybe they should combine the old Shareware model with this one. And make it all very easy. Like you download the full game and in the end of the first level, this payment stuff pops up where you can just pay whatever you want to proceed (whatever you think it is worth). The point is, I really don't know what these games are about and how much they are worth.

levesque 16y ago
These games all have a demo version.

BoppreH 16y ago

I don't usually buy things on the internet. Mainly because it requires money in a PayPal account or similar, and it's very hard for me to get that (I have some dollars from a freelancer work, but it's a hassle to transfer between my bank account and PayPal). If I had heard only about a "indie game bundle" containing those titles, I would probably have run straight to The Pirate Bay. But this one caught my attention. The devs are willing to give five high-quality games for whatever I want to pay. The guy even sang a song for the advertisement, for god's sake. I loved the ad. I loved the bundle. I even loved the website. This selfish pirate is reaching for his wallet. I will not pay the full $ 80 sum (though more than the average, for sure), but I'm one that would probably not have paid a penny otherwise.

barmstrong 16y ago

Haha...on the "no middle man" logo is that a condom (as in don't get screwed by the man) or a bomb. Can't tell :) Well executed idea!

BoppreH 16y ago
That looks like a tie for me.

BoppreH 16y ago

If you are worried about the process, don't. After filling the short form and login in my PayPal account, the email with the download page was sent instantaneously. Their bandwidth is excellent and all downloads are direct (no login, download token, download code, wait time, bandwidth limit or whatever).

nnutter 16y ago

Watch the video! So worth 2 minutes of your time.

algorias 16y ago
It rhymes!

JCThoughtscream 16y ago

In a vacuum, the Humble Bundle can't really be called a success. As I'm writing this, assuming equal split, each developer and charity gets an average of $1.09/purchase - hardly a windfall, though I'm sure the actual numbers actually favors the charities more. But it doesn't exist in a vacuum. I wonder how much attention the involved studios'll get for future projects as a direct result of this? Aquaria, especially, has been out for quite a while now - this can probably be more accurately considered a way of breaching access to any possible remaining audiences before launching their Next Big Things.

aw3c2 16y ago
You are thinking about it wrong. Digital copy distribution is basically free. With your $1.09 each party gets 30000 dollars. How is getting 30000 dollars for a quick sale not a success? Don't forget that these games are already "old" in terms of the normal gaming market. They already had their heyday.

NathanKP 16y ago

I would have bought it, yet the Amazon checkout refuses to let me pay using my Amazon gift card balance. It seems to want me to buy via credit card. If there is a way to buy it using my gift card balance I don't see it. Ah well, and I was willing to give the developers $20 or so.

Khao 16y ago

Wonderful! I just bought them for 50$! I only know of Gish and World of goo since I've played the demos and never got around to buy them, but now I just can't miss this incredible offer!

SingAlong 16y ago

The video could have been a little better while showing the games. I had to rewind a lot of times to view all the 4 squares for each game. Nevertheless, awesome offer and rap song :)

kevinh 16y ago

Seeing analogpixels.com being one of the top 10 donors made me wonder: How many people would donate more if the current top 10 paying people got a link to their website/product for the duration of the sale?

delluminatus 16y ago

Try submitting $0. Hilariousness ensues. edit: Yes, I would have bought it for $0 if they let me.

harada 16y ago

This is such a great idea. I donate to charity regularly anyway and I'm a sucker for games. Now I can have both! I ended up paying $100. Most of the money went to Child's Play but the devs still got $20 and the EFF $10.