13 ms·

Introducing the Humble Indie Bundle 6

101 points by vibragiel 14y ago

sswezey 14y ago
I love this, even if you aren't a huge fan of games, it's a great way to donate to EFF and Child's Play and get free games.
nuttendorfer 14y ago
I feel like the last Humble Bundle might have set the bar too high for the following bundles.
- duck 14y ago
  I know this would wreck their whole sales strategy ("X amount of time left"), but I wish you could go back and buy an old bundle for something like double the average or whatever made sense for them.
  - TillE 14y ago
    I doubt the developers want to have their games available permanently on sale. So unless you really want to pay $50-60 for old bundles, it won't happen. It makes more sense just to buy the stuff you want directly from the developers. Or wait for another sale.
  - gonnakillme 14y ago
    They pretty reliably give the previous bundle for free if you pay more than the average for the current bundle, but don't bet on it.
jiggy2011 14y ago
These games look pretty good, unfortunately I literally can't spare any more money this month. Would it be a dick thing to do to pay $0 for this bundle and promise myself to pay a lot more for the next bundle (even if the games suck)?
- Flimm 14y ago
  No. They're offering you the games at whatever price you can afford, you're allowed to take them up on their generosity! If I were you, I'd pay the minimum $0.01, use the torrents to minimize their costs, and increase the amount you're paying later.
  - batiudrami 14y ago
    As an alternative to torrents, if you're playing on Windows you can just take the keys they give you and put them into Steam, rather than downloading off HIB servers.
    - dlat 14y ago
      You have to pay $1 to get a steam key.
- stonemetal 14y ago
  The default split gives a large chunk of money to the devs. The devs involved in the next bundle maybe(usually are) different than the devs involved in this bundle. You would stiff someone but overpay someone else. If you give it all to charity, their charities stay pretty stable across bundles.
- lucian1900 14y ago
  You can increase your payment later, usually.
Tichy 14y ago
Uh oh - I wasted a lot of hours on Torchlight. Luckily I had to return it (complicated story). I think I should pass on this bundle, too dangerous.
oliveoil 14y ago
can someone explain to me how you can make money on a game like Rochard (one of the games in the bundle)? There is such an incredible amount of detail in the background in each scene, it looks like few thousand hours of work just that.
- bornon5 14y ago
  A lot of those backgrounds look procedurally generated or tiled in some way. They're still wonderfully crafted - just not necessarily hand-modeled or hand-painted down to the pixel.
  - TillE 14y ago
    Well, it's a 3D scene with a fixed camera. So a lot of it is about textures and lighting.
- jsnell 14y ago
  Basically you don't. Most of the games business is a high risk, high reward gamble. New IP much more so than working with an existing franchise. This is in no way unique to a game like Rochard, it'd apply equally much to $0.99 iPhone games or AAA games launching on all platforms and needing to sell 3 million copies to break even. In this case the original target market was the PS3 store, and my understanding is that the very highest selling indie games there have lifetime sales in the half million unit range. And the sales figures are likely obeying a power law, with the median sales in the thousands of units. It does seem like a pretty horrible place to be selling to. For Rochard, we can try to make a rough estimate of the cost. First of all the studio making the game was formed for an overly ambitious project (Earth No More), which was scrapped after several years. Mostof the team dispersed, but a skeleton crew started on a new game, and shipped Rochard around 1.5 years laters. The credits show 15 people, but I doubt they would all have been on the project full time. So let's guess 10-15 man-years of work. On the funding side, clearly they won't have had much if any money left at the start of the project. Early on they sold some part of the rights to the game to an outside investor for 400kEUR. Even if we ignore overhead, the cost of things like voice acting, and assume Finnish pay levels, it seems clear that the team wasn't working for full market salaries. Maybe they just really wanted to work on games rather than CRUD apps. Or they all had significant equity, and were hoping to hitting it big with that 1% surprise hit. Judging by Rochard not appearing on the top 20 most sold lists on the PSN, it seems like a fair bet that it did not make a profit there. I don't know whether it flopped completely or had mediocre sales. For the purpose of making money, it doesn't really matter. There's a good chance that they'll make more from the Humble Bundle than from PSN. Even so, it doesn't look like a project that would have broken even for the investors, or for anyone working on it at below market wage. (Edit: Which is a shame. It was one of my favorite games last year, and I certainly didn't mind paying for it again as part of the bundle).
ashray 14y ago
It's interesting to see that Linux users ($8.92) on average donate around 40% more than everyone else ($5.36). Also, Windows users are cheaper than Mac users. This is from the average donation amounts on the page.
- pflats 14y ago
  There are fewer Linux users than Mac users, and fewer Mac users than Windows users. Thus, the mean sale price for Linux users is more strongly affected by any single big sale than the mean sale price for Mac or Windows users. I'd be curious to see the median sale prices.
  - powrtoch 14y ago
    Also any random Linux user is more likely to be a developer, which likely motivates them more to support the indie devs. And since Macs are 2-3 times as expensive as their PC counterparts, owning one tends to imply you have money to throw around.
    - sanswork 14y ago
      Macs aren't 2-3 times as expensive as their PC counterparts. Not even 1.5x as expensive. If you spec out a system with the same components and build quality from any of the PC builders you'll end up with roughly the same price. People just ignore things like screen quality and memory speed when pricing stuff out and then compare consumer PCs to workstation macs. Feel free to post a Mac that is 2-3x its equal though you'll be the first person in any of the times I've posted this reply that will be able to do it.
      - powrtoch 14y ago
        Well, finding 2 computers that are exactly equal in specs is more effort than I care to put in, but here's the first reasonable comparison I see at Best Buy: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Toshiba+-+Satellite+14%26%2334%3B+Laptop+-+6GB+Memory+-+750GB+Hard+Drive+-+Champagne+Silver/5560019.p?id=1218704973366&skuId=5560019 http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Toshiba+-+Satellite+14%26%2334%3... Compare it to the 13" Macbook Pro (for the sake of being generous towards the Mac). It's just over half the price, has a bigger screen, more ram, a larger hard drive, and seemingly identical processor and graphics. Naturally there are give and takes on both sides (just about everything is inferior to Apple in terms of "build quality", though this is tough to put a price on), but I don't think it's unreasonable to say this is a comparable laptop, and the specs easily make up for it being $50 over half price. I don't say this to disparage Apple, I've got a MBP myself, but whenever I look at PCs with comparable specs, I do find that they tend to be about half the price. I'll withdraw 3x though, that probably is too high and even if I could hunt around and find one example, it's not like that would prove the point.
sequoia 14y ago
Negative Nelly warning: I've bought a couple of these bundles but won't buy another. One big selling point of the bundles is that they are cross-platform compatible, and that's one of the reasons I buy, as I have Ubuntu on my home computer. Unfortunately, at least some of the games which are advertized as working on Linux simply did not work for me, Trine in particular (which is sad because that game was the main reason I bought the Frozenbyte bundle). I initially had issues on an older machine & updated ubuntu, followed the threads (it was a common issue), followed the debug & fix steps, but to no avail. I chalked it up to the hardware but with a brand new linux box and new (months later) download of Trine it still didn't run. I haven't bothered spending another hour searching down and going thru all the fix steps. It looks like there might be a new, possibly working version by now but it's been months and months and I've basically forgotten about it. I don't expect everything to work OOTB in linux, but I'm using a popular distro, many of the games work fine, and if I'm paying for a "Linux compatible" game I expect it to be Linux compatible with a reasonable small number of clear steps without spelunking thru a dozen forum threads &c.. This is not "free" software, I paid for it and expect it to work. I want to support humble bundle but it's too frustrating to buy a game and have it not even load.
- bibinou 14y ago
  you should buy a non-free operating system to go with you non-free game, I'm pretty sure it'll works. please also forward this post to the manufacturer of your non-free video card, which is the most likely culprit.
- samdk 14y ago
  If you're worried about this, you can get the bundle for free, and then increase your contribution later (for as long as the bundle is still going on) once you're sure all of the games work on your computer.
- Tichy 14y ago
  Fair warning. I only tried to run Braid on Ubuntu a while ago, and it didn't work because of some complicated driver issue (perhaps solvable for an expert, but not for me). However, I think it might work by now - at least those games are rather timeless, so you can still try again at a later time :-/
JoshTriplett 14y ago
In the past, Humble Bundle has occasionally used strong sales of a bundle as a reason to release some of the games in that bundle as Open Source. If they'd consider pre-committing to that based on target thresholds, I'd donate to this in a heartbeat; we need more good Open Source games.
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  Open-sourcing some games seems like a really good idea, but I think a lot of the Humble Bundle games typically fall into a category where design is much more significant than technology. It's one thing to allow modding on the Source engine, which would otherwise be out of reach for most developers. But given the code for Braid, how would the community improve on it? It's clearly the vision of one man, and it's been developed fully. A lot of indie games focus on fine game balance, distinctive graphics design, or plot to differentiate themselves, where I think of Open Source as a very technically-oriented model. Do you have examples of games you think would benefit from being opened up?
  - JoshTriplett 14y ago
    I can see two major cases where it seems like a particularly big win. First, quite a lot of indie games build an engine and then numerous variations of levels to support a plot. Braid, Bastion, Iji, Super Meat Boy, Gish, World of Goo, and many more where those came from follow that model: impressive engine, pile of well-designed levels, plot. In those cases, the ability to create more levels and add some technical variations can nicely extend the lifespan of a game. Second, and even more importantly, the much broader space of design ideas in indie games means many more interesting components with unusual variations. Braid has a physics engine that supports time-based mechanics. Super Meat Boy has an extremely impressive record-and-replay mechanism (used to great effect at the end of each level to show you all the ways you died simultaneously). Several indie games have very impressive lighting models. The Bit Trip games have music syncing engines. Many indie games have impressive dynamic-content-generation engines. The more of these components that become readily available, the more impressive the starting point for any future indie game.
evolve2k 14y ago
'Pay more than the average of $5.50 to unlock Dustforce!' Genius. This should just keep pushing the price up and up as each person pays more than the average. Wondering how this will work out.
- bryanlarsen 14y ago
  Those paying less than $5.50 are probably paying a LOT less than $5.50, so the average may stay fairly stable.
  - evolve2k 14y ago
    The bundle is fascinating as the page gives many different pricing signals. Other factors being equal I think people don't like to miss out on things. Mentally as this one game has a unlock restriction it 'must be a better game', I think the risk of missing out in the best game by going under $5.50 will encourage people to pay over the average and still be able to mentally reconcile their pricing reasoning as to why 'they' got a good bargain. People paying a lot less are also already factored into the average and I see no specfic factor driving low payers to be greater in quantity than usual. Hence why I love this approach.
sfaruque 14y ago
I keep hoping that they will release Trine 2 as part of the bundles. I know it's only been less than a year since Trine 2 came out. Humble Bundle introduced me to Trine 1, which was the first game I've completed in ages.
jebblue 14y ago
I'm a FP gamer, if some of these were FP I'd love to buy them.
emilioolivares 14y ago
I keep buying these and never seem to have time to actually play all of the games :(.

101 points by vibragiel 14y ago

I love this, even if you aren't a huge fan of games, it's a great way to donate to EFF and Child's Play and get free games.

nuttendorfer 14y ago

I feel like the last Humble Bundle might have set the bar too high for the following bundles.

duck 14y ago
I know this would wreck their whole sales strategy ("X amount of time left"), but I wish you could go back and buy an old bundle for something like double the average or whatever made sense for them.
- TillE 14y ago
  I doubt the developers want to have their games available permanently on sale. So unless you really want to pay $50-60 for old bundles, it won't happen. It makes more sense just to buy the stuff you want directly from the developers. Or wait for another sale.
- gonnakillme 14y ago
  They pretty reliably give the previous bundle for free if you pay more than the average for the current bundle, but don't bet on it.

jiggy2011 14y ago

These games look pretty good, unfortunately I literally can't spare any more money this month. Would it be a dick thing to do to pay $0 for this bundle and promise myself to pay a lot more for the next bundle (even if the games suck)?

Flimm 14y ago
No. They're offering you the games at whatever price you can afford, you're allowed to take them up on their generosity! If I were you, I'd pay the minimum $0.01, use the torrents to minimize their costs, and increase the amount you're paying later.
- batiudrami 14y ago
  As an alternative to torrents, if you're playing on Windows you can just take the keys they give you and put them into Steam, rather than downloading off HIB servers.
  - dlat 14y ago
    You have to pay $1 to get a steam key.
stonemetal 14y ago
The default split gives a large chunk of money to the devs. The devs involved in the next bundle maybe(usually are) different than the devs involved in this bundle. You would stiff someone but overpay someone else. If you give it all to charity, their charities stay pretty stable across bundles.
lucian1900 14y ago
You can increase your payment later, usually.

Tichy 14y ago

Uh oh - I wasted a lot of hours on Torchlight. Luckily I had to return it (complicated story). I think I should pass on this bundle, too dangerous.

oliveoil 14y ago

can someone explain to me how you can make money on a game like Rochard (one of the games in the bundle)? There is such an incredible amount of detail in the background in each scene, it looks like few thousand hours of work just that.

bornon5 14y ago
A lot of those backgrounds look procedurally generated or tiled in some way. They're still wonderfully crafted - just not necessarily hand-modeled or hand-painted down to the pixel.
- TillE 14y ago
  Well, it's a 3D scene with a fixed camera. So a lot of it is about textures and lighting.
jsnell 14y ago
Basically you don't. Most of the games business is a high risk, high reward gamble. New IP much more so than working with an existing franchise. This is in no way unique to a game like Rochard, it'd apply equally much to $0.99 iPhone games or AAA games launching on all platforms and needing to sell 3 million copies to break even. In this case the original target market was the PS3 store, and my understanding is that the very highest selling indie games there have lifetime sales in the half million unit range. And the sales figures are likely obeying a power law, with the median sales in the thousands of units. It does seem like a pretty horrible place to be selling to. For Rochard, we can try to make a rough estimate of the cost. First of all the studio making the game was formed for an overly ambitious project (Earth No More), which was scrapped after several years. Mostof the team dispersed, but a skeleton crew started on a new game, and shipped Rochard around 1.5 years laters. The credits show 15 people, but I doubt they would all have been on the project full time. So let's guess 10-15 man-years of work. On the funding side, clearly they won't have had much if any money left at the start of the project. Early on they sold some part of the rights to the game to an outside investor for 400kEUR. Even if we ignore overhead, the cost of things like voice acting, and assume Finnish pay levels, it seems clear that the team wasn't working for full market salaries. Maybe they just really wanted to work on games rather than CRUD apps. Or they all had significant equity, and were hoping to hitting it big with that 1% surprise hit. Judging by Rochard not appearing on the top 20 most sold lists on the PSN, it seems like a fair bet that it did not make a profit there. I don't know whether it flopped completely or had mediocre sales. For the purpose of making money, it doesn't really matter. There's a good chance that they'll make more from the Humble Bundle than from PSN. Even so, it doesn't look like a project that would have broken even for the investors, or for anyone working on it at below market wage. (Edit: Which is a shame. It was one of my favorite games last year, and I certainly didn't mind paying for it again as part of the bundle).

ashray 14y ago

It's interesting to see that Linux users ($8.92) on average donate around 40% more than everyone else ($5.36). Also, Windows users are cheaper than Mac users. This is from the average donation amounts on the page.

pflats 14y ago
There are fewer Linux users than Mac users, and fewer Mac users than Windows users. Thus, the mean sale price for Linux users is more strongly affected by any single big sale than the mean sale price for Mac or Windows users. I'd be curious to see the median sale prices.
- powrtoch 14y ago
  Also any random Linux user is more likely to be a developer, which likely motivates them more to support the indie devs. And since Macs are 2-3 times as expensive as their PC counterparts, owning one tends to imply you have money to throw around.
  - sanswork 14y ago
    Macs aren't 2-3 times as expensive as their PC counterparts. Not even 1.5x as expensive. If you spec out a system with the same components and build quality from any of the PC builders you'll end up with roughly the same price. People just ignore things like screen quality and memory speed when pricing stuff out and then compare consumer PCs to workstation macs. Feel free to post a Mac that is 2-3x its equal though you'll be the first person in any of the times I've posted this reply that will be able to do it.
    - powrtoch 14y ago
      Well, finding 2 computers that are exactly equal in specs is more effort than I care to put in, but here's the first reasonable comparison I see at Best Buy: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Toshiba+-+Satellite+14%26%2334%3B+Laptop+-+6GB+Memory+-+750GB+Hard+Drive+-+Champagne+Silver/5560019.p?id=1218704973366&skuId=5560019 http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Toshiba+-+Satellite+14%26%2334%3... Compare it to the 13" Macbook Pro (for the sake of being generous towards the Mac). It's just over half the price, has a bigger screen, more ram, a larger hard drive, and seemingly identical processor and graphics. Naturally there are give and takes on both sides (just about everything is inferior to Apple in terms of "build quality", though this is tough to put a price on), but I don't think it's unreasonable to say this is a comparable laptop, and the specs easily make up for it being $50 over half price. I don't say this to disparage Apple, I've got a MBP myself, but whenever I look at PCs with comparable specs, I do find that they tend to be about half the price. I'll withdraw 3x though, that probably is too high and even if I could hunt around and find one example, it's not like that would prove the point.

sequoia 14y ago

Negative Nelly warning: I've bought a couple of these bundles but won't buy another. One big selling point of the bundles is that they are cross-platform compatible, and that's one of the reasons I buy, as I have Ubuntu on my home computer. Unfortunately, at least some of the games which are advertized as working on Linux simply did not work for me, Trine in particular (which is sad because that game was the main reason I bought the Frozenbyte bundle). I initially had issues on an older machine & updated ubuntu, followed the threads (it was a common issue), followed the debug & fix steps, but to no avail. I chalked it up to the hardware but with a brand new linux box and new (months later) download of Trine it still didn't run. I haven't bothered spending another hour searching down and going thru all the fix steps. It looks like there might be a new, possibly working version by now but it's been months and months and I've basically forgotten about it. I don't expect everything to work OOTB in linux, but I'm using a popular distro, many of the games work fine, and if I'm paying for a "Linux compatible" game I expect it to be Linux compatible with a reasonable small number of clear steps without spelunking thru a dozen forum threads &c.. This is not "free" software, I paid for it and expect it to work. I want to support humble bundle but it's too frustrating to buy a game and have it not even load.

bibinou 14y ago
you should buy a non-free operating system to go with you non-free game, I'm pretty sure it'll works. please also forward this post to the manufacturer of your non-free video card, which is the most likely culprit.
samdk 14y ago
If you're worried about this, you can get the bundle for free, and then increase your contribution later (for as long as the bundle is still going on) once you're sure all of the games work on your computer.
Tichy 14y ago
Fair warning. I only tried to run Braid on Ubuntu a while ago, and it didn't work because of some complicated driver issue (perhaps solvable for an expert, but not for me). However, I think it might work by now - at least those games are rather timeless, so you can still try again at a later time :-/

JoshTriplett 14y ago

In the past, Humble Bundle has occasionally used strong sales of a bundle as a reason to release some of the games in that bundle as Open Source. If they'd consider pre-committing to that based on target thresholds, I'd donate to this in a heartbeat; we need more good Open Source games.

alanctgardner2 14y ago
Open-sourcing some games seems like a really good idea, but I think a lot of the Humble Bundle games typically fall into a category where design is much more significant than technology. It's one thing to allow modding on the Source engine, which would otherwise be out of reach for most developers. But given the code for Braid, how would the community improve on it? It's clearly the vision of one man, and it's been developed fully. A lot of indie games focus on fine game balance, distinctive graphics design, or plot to differentiate themselves, where I think of Open Source as a very technically-oriented model. Do you have examples of games you think would benefit from being opened up?
- JoshTriplett 14y ago
  I can see two major cases where it seems like a particularly big win. First, quite a lot of indie games build an engine and then numerous variations of levels to support a plot. Braid, Bastion, Iji, Super Meat Boy, Gish, World of Goo, and many more where those came from follow that model: impressive engine, pile of well-designed levels, plot. In those cases, the ability to create more levels and add some technical variations can nicely extend the lifespan of a game. Second, and even more importantly, the much broader space of design ideas in indie games means many more interesting components with unusual variations. Braid has a physics engine that supports time-based mechanics. Super Meat Boy has an extremely impressive record-and-replay mechanism (used to great effect at the end of each level to show you all the ways you died simultaneously). Several indie games have very impressive lighting models. The Bit Trip games have music syncing engines. Many indie games have impressive dynamic-content-generation engines. The more of these components that become readily available, the more impressive the starting point for any future indie game.

evolve2k 14y ago

'Pay more than the average of $5.50 to unlock Dustforce!' Genius. This should just keep pushing the price up and up as each person pays more than the average. Wondering how this will work out.

bryanlarsen 14y ago
Those paying less than $5.50 are probably paying a LOT less than $5.50, so the average may stay fairly stable.
- evolve2k 14y ago
  The bundle is fascinating as the page gives many different pricing signals. Other factors being equal I think people don't like to miss out on things. Mentally as this one game has a unlock restriction it 'must be a better game', I think the risk of missing out in the best game by going under $5.50 will encourage people to pay over the average and still be able to mentally reconcile their pricing reasoning as to why 'they' got a good bargain. People paying a lot less are also already factored into the average and I see no specfic factor driving low payers to be greater in quantity than usual. Hence why I love this approach.

sfaruque 14y ago

I keep hoping that they will release Trine 2 as part of the bundles. I know it's only been less than a year since Trine 2 came out. Humble Bundle introduced me to Trine 1, which was the first game I've completed in ages.

jebblue 14y ago

I'm a FP gamer, if some of these were FP I'd love to buy them.

emilioolivares 14y ago

I keep buying these and never seem to have time to actually play all of the games :(.