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Humble Bundle #3 is Live
- joshuacc 15y agoThe way that they preselect an amount $1 above average is extremely clever. It appeals to people's need to see themselves as above average without costing them anything substantial. Screenshot: http://screensnapr.com/v/QciSbr.png http://screensnapr.com/v/QciSbr.png
- janzer 15y agoand looks like they're a/b testing it; http://i.imgur.com/NsjwG.png http://i.imgur.com/NsjwG.png
- joshuacc 15y agoYep. The JS looks like they are doing it with Visual Website Optimizer.
- alastairpat 15y agoA/B/C testing: http://goo.gl/68ZXm http://goo.gl/68ZXm I'd be curious to know which version was the most effective in the end.
- shazow 15y agoOh, I totally would have fell for that! I got the scenario that janzer posted, and I opted for $5 since I wasn't too excited about any of the games and just wanted to support the cause. I felt a little cheap because the cheapest example was $10, but felt justified based on the selection of games. If $5.81 was the default option with "above average" label, I would have went with that.
- ElliotH 15y agoIndeed, and I went for it in a shot - worked very well.
- sheriff 15y agoAnd it will gradually increase the average every time someone chooses that option.
- malvim 15y agoI thought the same when I saw it. Weirdly enough, though, the average was at about $4.40 when I saw it earlier today, and it is $4.27 now. Wonder if this technique might be driving some people to pay more (I will do it as soon as I get home), but not enough to offset all the people that just want lots of games for no money at all.
- joshuacc 15y agoThere is also the possibility that it is cannibalizing their higher-paying customer base. For instance, perhaps if I hadn't been presented with that option I would have paid $10 instead. In that case it would drive the average down rather than up. Presumably that's why they're A/B testing it. :-)
- sheriff 15y agoIf the average is currently $X after N purchases, that means they have taken in $(N * X). When the next person pays $(X + 1), the total is now $((N * X) + (X + 1)) == $(((N + 1) * X) + 1). The new average is $(X + (1 / (N + 1))), which is guaranteed to be higher than the old average.
- sheriff 15y agoIf the average is currently $X after N purchases, that means they have taken in $(N * X). When the next person pays $(X + 1), the total is now $((N * X) + (X + 1)) == $(((N + 1) * X) + 1). The new average is $(X + (1 / (N + 1))), which is guaranteed to be higher than the previous average, even if $(X + 1) < $10.
- joshuacc 15y agoYes, the average after purchase (AAP) would be greater than the average before purchase (ABP). However, the AAP of $10 is greater than the AAP of $X+1. The question is to what extent the $X+1 purchases depress greater purchases, as well as to what extent the $X+1 purchases increase smaller purchases. The answer can only be determined by actually testing it.
- patio11 15y agoI'd love to be a fly on the wall for the A/B test, but I still think something a wee closer to http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/deep-discount-mockup.png http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/deep-disc... would kill both the A/B tested options. Bringing in people's psychological need to be above average is great, but I might do that by putting a nice 37Signals style yellow highlight on one of the expensive options (for some value of expensive which would pay for more than a Big Mac) and say "24% of people went for this"
- shazow 15y agoI'd love to see your variation tested too but the data-driven "above average" feels much less accusatory and supportive than subjective labeling of "poor student" and "valued contributor". Makes me wonder if poor students are less valued? Also the fine-grained payment distribution scrollbar controls make me feel empowered and better about my participation in this cause. Getting rid of them would disappoint me. This reminds me of someone's donation button on some open source project, it was something like: Donate [$5 — buy me a beer] [$20 — buy me dinner] [$100 — buy me a gadget]
- ZoFreX 15y agoPersonally, "Tired of overpriced games from soul-crushing megacorps laden with spyware and DRM?" really puts me off.
- blake8086 15y agoAre you tired of underpriced games from small indie dev shops without spyware or DRM?
- sliverstorm 15y agoIt's a somewhat antagonistic statement, and those can rankle.
- lazerwalker 15y agoIf you don't mind me asking, what did you use to make that mockup image?
- jentulman 15y agoThese bundles are all great. I keep pointing them out to my non-gaming friends as much as possible. I've dumped my consoles in the last year and moved to finding 'indie' game devs like these because, as the old saying goes, 'It's not about graphics, it's about gameplay'[citation needed] and I don't care how many polygons you can throw at /next big game/ it is almost invariably yet another FPS.
- estel 15y agoI don't think it's fair to say it's "yet another FPS". I think that people who only play Indie titles are missing out just as much as those who only play huge AAA releases.
- dasil003 15y agoWhat about people who only play Dwarf Fortress?
- sorbus 15y agoYou're missing out too - and I say this as someone who used to only play DF. DF is amazing, but there are tons of other games that are just as amazing or nearly so (Minecraft, Fallout, Terraria, Portal, Spacechem ... dear deity, Spacechem. If you buy one game this year, buy it). None of them really compare to DF in learning curve or sheer complexity, but they're all really good.
- dasil003 15y agoWho's got the time though?
- Dysiode 15y agoI view it similarly to any other varied hobby. If you like to cook you can either choose to cook American food all the time or you can branch out and try different styles. Although, the difference is that hunger and food are pretty constant in relation to each other where as there are just masses of video games. But I think the principle is close enough :)
- chanux 15y agoLinux version pays the best average amount. Is there any message?
- DasIch 15y agoThis has probably more to do with the fact that Linux users are quite often part of a community that promotes this kind of thing. Also the statistic don't account for people with multiple systems. Windows on the desktop for games, Linux in the desktop for development and OS X on the MacBook is not an uncommon setup for developers.
- cookiecaper 15y agoYou can have your contribution factored into all three operating systems, apparently.
- Uchikoma 15y agoYes, Windows and MacOS users spend more money on buying software so their budget is already stretched, while Linux users have money to spent. Or Linux users cannot assess the worth of software as they are not used to buy software. Both probably not what you wanted to hear, and probably not the real reason. I just wanted to point out that we can project everything into the fact that Linux version pays best average amount.
- StavrosK 15y agoOr "I'll pay more for this to reward these people for making games for my platform, and more developers will hopefully follow."
- darrenkopp 15y agoOr more likely because linux has very few games, where as windows has vast amounts. I have bought every humble bundle but never played a single game, I just give them $10 each time to support the idea. I typically spend ~20 hours a week playing games.
- 15y ago
- Indyan 15y agoThe average is less than 5 bucks. That's simply pathetic. If I remember correctly, it was a couple of bucks higher in the earlier editions.
- redxaxder 15y agoPeople haven't started paying $2000 for it yet. It may still grow.
- Indyan 15y agoYeah, in the Frozenbyte bundle Notch and Garry helped in a big way.
- citricsquid 15y agoPathetic, how so? The people paying that amount could already own the games, they could already donate to charity. This is pay what you want for a reason, a large portion of people purchase just because it's a donation thing. If someone has a spare $5 why don't they spend it here? It isn't pathetic, it's better than nothing.
- Dysiode 15y ago"It's better than nothing" Agreed. Introversion managed to stay alive through selling their four games for $5 on Steam. That's ultimately not too much better than the current average bundle sale (http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=2512 http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?...). These deals tap into the reservoir of people who aren't invested enough in the games to pay full price (I forget the exact term for that), and these games certainly aren't new, and each has been on sale on Steam at least once so the people who were going to buy for full price likely already have.
- Wilduck 15y agoPrice discrimination. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
- r0s 15y agoHammerfight is an excellent game, very fun and beautifully rendered. I hope they make a sequel.
- sequoia 15y agovvvvvvv is awesome by the way. You can try it here (assuming you have flash installed/enabled): http://www.kongregate.com/games/TerryCavanagh/vvvvvv-demo http://www.kongregate.com/games/TerryCavanagh/vvvvvv-demo
- BrianBerk 15y agoNot only that, but they just upgraded to VVVVVV 2.0, which has a level editor and bunch of really good new levels. I'm a huge fan of the game, and this is like the best thing that happened to me today.
- CMay 15y agosnagged in this bundle after mostly ignoring it despite people raving. i played Metal Storm on the NES and nothing i saw from vvvvvv looked like it trumped that, but i plan to try it out. i'm sure it has more charm that doesn't come through in most people's videos demoing it.
- voyvf 15y agoI'd like to thank the Wolfire crew for making these marvelous games available at a reasonable price - and especially for the Linux support. :D
- kin 15y agothese are awesome, i just do a $25 and let them decide how to balance it all out. question though, any chance for an iOS humble indie bundle!?
- seanalltogether 15y agoapple doesn't allow for 3rd party sales, best you could hope for is a jailbroken humble bundle.
- alanfalcon 15y agoThink creatively. Create a humble bundle 4 app with an interface that allows you to play any of the included games within the app. Have it be a free download with IAP of various amounts to allow people to show their support that way. Apple's 30% cut would be a downer, but it could be done.
- ryanpetrich 15y agoIt could be three apps with buttons to activate the purchase in the other apps (or one could create a separate pasteboard just to store activation data)
- malvim 15y agoDidn't Capcom did something like that with their old console games? I think they had an app with some demos and were selling their games as IAP. Might work!
- shoota 15y agoThen the apps wouldn't be DRM free which for me is one of the selling points of the Humble Bundles.
- SageRaven 15y agoLame question: What techniques are used to show real-time stats like that on a web page? I assume those are truly real-time, anyway. I'm no web developer, but this feature really strikes me as cool in this particular instance. I rarely fancy overly-busy web pages, but these stats seem very nicely executed; interesting in and of themselves, yet clean and nice visual presentation.
- joshuacc 15y agoThey are using some form of AJAX (JavaScript talking directly to their server without reloading the page). In this case they appear to be using PubNub. http://www.pubnub.com/how-it-works http://www.pubnub.com/how-it-works
- AdamTReineke 15y agoThey're constantly requesting a JSON file about once a second. Example contents, formatted: http://pastebin.com/uMv7d8xS http://pastebin.com/uMv7d8xS
- watty 15y agoSeems like excessive transfers. I achieved a "real time" counter by having requests return a start value and a rate of change per second. The GUI would then update every second with the estimated values. My AJAX requests would happen much less often and update the start and rate of change.
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- BenSS 15y agoThis is always absolutely awesome. I chipped in over average this year but I'm dismayed by the people throwing in less than a buck, you're just making the developers pay the CC companies!
- palish 15y agoSurely they wouldn't put the transaction through unless they were getting money from it though?
- rcfox 15y agoThat's a good point! If they're not going to make any money, there's no sense in even taking it. Though, it might be illegal to sell something and then not accept payment. (Fraud? Money laundering? I don't know, but it seems potentially sketchy.)
- jrockway 15y agoIt's not fraud or money laundering. You don't see people refusing payment for the simple reason that most people would never give their stuff away for free.
- rcfox 15y agoI didn't mean to say that it is fraud or money laundering, just that it might look like it. Anyway, what's the difference between giving something away for free, and selling something and receiving $0?
- Dysiode 15y agoI recall hearing that's the reason Proun requires at least a $2 payment
- slowpoke 15y agoAs sad as it may sound, I know some... let's call them pathetic individuals... who pay 0.01$ exactly because of this fact. But oh well, they are usually pretty laughable with their feeble attempts at trolling, anyways, so I stopped bothering quite some time ago.
- cookiecaper 15y agoAlways excited to see another Humble Bundle. I purchased right away and gave a greater proportion to Wolfire in hopes of encouraging further bundles sooner (not that I paid that much, but I don't have that much money right now :\). The Linux support is what makes this such a happy deal for me.
- hesdeadjim 15y agoThese guys rock, they always do a great job on the pitch video too and this one might be their best.
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- duck 15y agoGlad they have the option for the gift code. Will be giving that away in my next issue of Hacker Newsletter.
- neovive 15y agoI wonder how the Mac App Store and any upcoming App Stores for Windows will impact these various software bundles. Does the Mac App Store allow bundling? If not, this would be a nice add-on feature.
- slowpoke 15y agoAs awesome as this is, I'm quite bothered with the payment options. As it stands, I can't pay even if I wanted. I don't have a CC and all of Paypal, Amazon and Google are utter no-gos for me. It makes me a sad panda that options like PaySafeCard aren't as widespread as I would like them to be.
- sanswork 15y agoWhy are Paypal, Amazon and Google all no goes for you? I've heard a lot of negativity about Paypal for example but that is entirely from the merchants position.
- slowpoke 15y agoFor Paypal (and partially for Amazon): You might have heard of the shit they pulled with Wikileaks (freezing accounts, withholding money, kicking them out of the service for no reason etc). And that wasn't the first time they did something like this, at least for Paypal. I refuse to fund such - in my opinion - criminal activities. And for Google: Call me paranoid, call me stubborn, but I'm one of those people who avoid Google like the plague and are extremely critical of them in general (I'm not a hater, though, there are quite some good things which Google does, I just refuse to use their services).
- MichaelGG 15y agoWhat about a prepaid Amex card? (I'm assuming you consider VISA and MasterCard to be criminal as well due to their Wikileaks behaviour.)
- brianleb 15y agoI think HIB did due diligence by offering CC, PayPal, Amazon, and Google. I honestly think you're an extreme outlier and would fall into a fraction of a percent of their users. I'm not saying that it's OK to marginalize you, but if I were them, with complete honesty I would have thought that those four options would cover everybody, and then doing something like Bitcoin would be going an extra mile. I've never heard of PaySafeCard (not to say that it can't be cool if I haven't heard of it, because it is), so I think it may have a long way to go before it's widely accepted. Edit: You elucidated why you aren't using these services here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2809572 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2809572, but really you've painted yourself into a box. It's not that you can't use those services, it's that you won't. I understand why you don't want to (really, I feel you, I'm an idealist too), but at a certain point I just have to bite the bullet and if I want something bad enough and I can only pay for it in certain ways, then I'm going to do it.
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- listic 15y agoA commenter on habrahabr.ru+ noticed (http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/gdev/124990/#comment_4110999 http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/gdev/124990/#comment_4110999) that there are Russian black marketers buying bundles for $ 0.01 and reselling for around 50 rubles ($1.50) that, unfortunately, may drive the average price down. Supposedly, people who can't be bothered to get a credit card or Webmoney account buy from them. I'm worried how the pay-what-you-want model accommodates this behaviour? I hope clients buying directly for a reasonable price will always outnumber the black marketers or people intentionally buying for $0.01 to cause loss, but I don't know for sure. + habrahabr.ru is Russian IT news blog filled in large part with content translated from Hacker News.
- nickzoic 15y agoSince there's no DRM you can't help it if people are buying one key and then burning a bunch of CDs, but that won't affect the average price much. Seems to me that if they're selling license keys for $1.50, the best way to counter this is to change the download screen title to: Thanks for purchasing the Humble Indie Bundle #3 for $0.01! ... if the customer thinks that's fair, so be it, but it might at least encourage the "resellers" to pay slightly more. Alternatively, I don't think setting the minimum payment to $1 would be at all incompatible with the "pay what you want" slogan & worthwhile if it eliminates the payment fees problem. (But what would I know? I've bought all four, and last time 'round I felt like I got my money's worth just out of Braid.)
- TeHCrAzY 15y agoThey seem to have cottoned on to this: if enter a price of less than a dollar, you need to fill out a re-captcha. Orders under $1 must authenticate with reCAPTCHA to help cut down on costly abuse.
- twakefield 15y agoThe promo video is fantastic. Reminds me of those car demolition show commercials: THIS WEEKEND...CARASAURAUS REX...THE FIRE BREATHING...CAR EATING...ROBOT MONSTER DINOSAUR! Live at the civic center, tickets available now!
- jrockway 15y agoInteresting stats. There appear to be as many Mac users as Linux users, and Linux users pay 2x more than Mac users. I guess Mac users spend all their money on OS upgrades :)
- 2muchcoffeeman 15y agoThis is a really interesting statistic actually. I got the last 2 bundles and I'm a Mac user. I am definitely pro-Mac OS. Seeing those stats made me pay a little more. I am also an iOS dev and try and keep up on trends. I'd wager most Mac users are also iOS users. And current stats indicate that most iOS users are willing to spend money on software. So why the stinginess here!?
- yurifury 15y agoiOS users get many chances to spend money on games. Linux users only get a few chances, so when a Humble Bundle rolls around, they jump on the opportunity. You can bet that iOS users spend more money (total, not per-game) on games than Linux users, because of the App Store.
- xenophanes 15y agoLike avg $15 a year lately...
- thristian 15y agoFor people who are interested in the business story behind the Humble Indie Bundles, the creators gave a talk covering Bundles 1 and 2 at the 2011 Indie Games Summit: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014437/The-Humble-Indie http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014437/The-Humble-Indie One of the take-away messages they had was "always target Mac and Linux, because it's a bit more work but you'll double your revenue".
- benjohnson 15y agoAs a Windows user - seeing that the software available for different architectures says to me that the code is more than likely robust and well debugged.
- Aissen 15y agoThe thing is you have no guarantee that the Windows binary have been generated after the port was done. Also, no guarantee it's the same source tree and not different forks of the same base.
- mgkimsal 15y agoAnyone else get 'cogs' to work on the mac? 10.6.6, 13" 2010 mbp, and cogs won't start.
- JoshCole 15y agoThe youtube video showing the youtube video was a nice touch. Recursion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4c6PWtE9mI&feature=player_detailpage#t=95s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4c6PWtE9mI&feature=playe...
- tete 15y agoI don't consider myself to be a fan of that kind of music, but I always enjoy the Humble Indie Bundle ad. It's so awesome. :-)
- tobylane 15y agoI'm starting to feel foolish every time I look at a indie game in the steam store. Bought all four bundles, which are about a quarter of the steam games I own.