November 4th, 2011 | By Dale Beerling
Tagged in: A great success | Awesome | charity | Cross-Platform | Humble Bundle 5 | indie developers | Indie Royale | Indie Summer Sixpack | linux game | mac | May 2010 | pay what you want | The Humble Indie Bundle | The Indie Bundle | windows
“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.’ ~Aesop
‘The Humble Bundle‘. It’s a known term in the indie gaming world. Almost everyone somehow involved in indie games knows about it. In this post, I will be talking about why the Humble Bundle has gotten to be so successful, and talk about some of the things that we discovered, by looking at the sale statistics of the Humble Bundles.
The Humble Bundle started of in May 2010 (if I’m not mistaking) with the very first Humble Indie Bundle. They made an astounding amount of cash for the developers and for charity. The first Bundle, brought up nearly 1.3 million dollars.
After the success of the first bundle, they decided to launch a second one to see what would happen. The second release topped their previous bundle with over 1.8 million dollars! Then they launched a 3rd bundle, this time only containing games from Frozenbyte and was therefore called: ‘The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle‘. It raised a nice 900 thousand dollars.
They must have thought at that point, “why stop now?” As expected, they launched a 4th bundle, raising over 2.1 million dollars, a new record. Next up, the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle. By many it was seen as just a quick bundle to gain some attention for Frozen Synapse, but it actually sold great. Another 1.1 million dollars harvested from the Humble Bundle.
And now, October 2011 (okay, last month, not actually ‘NOW’) they launched the 6th Humble Indie Bundle. Or actually, it is called the Humble Voxatron Debut. Since it is just one game, and therefore cannot be called a bundle anymore. As I write this, I can see the donation counter rise.
As you can see, at the moment that I took this screenshot, the total amount of payments were at $222,804.14. That’s a lot less than the previous Humble Bundle‘s, but it’s only one game. So If you would do the math, this game brings up a lot more cash then some of the previous games in the bundles.
The Humble Bundles have raised a lot of money. That is something that can’t be questioned. But how? Some people doubt the idea of offering a bundle of games, or just a game, for a price to be determined by the customers. They question it because people can and obviously will take advantage of this. They will pay the minimum amount required to pay, which usually is $/€0,01. If everybody would do that, the developers would only lose money by doing a pay what you want action.
The statistics we have gained from the several Humble Bundle actions, show that even though some people pay the minimum, there are quite a lot that choose not to. These people sometimes donate a few thousand dollars, and that makes up for the people who don’t pay more than the minimum amount. Of course, it stays a huge guess. Who says that people will actually want to pay anything at all for your game?
Another mind-boggling fact that the statistics of ALL the Humble Bundles show, is that Linux users tend to pay the must for games when it’s Pay What You Want. Mac users tend to pay above average, but still, not as high as Linux. And Windows has a shameful last place.
Why is this? My theory is quite simple, correct me if I’m wrong, but there are a lot of games that can be played on a windows running computer. So, these people have less money to spend. Mac users also have a lot of choices, but a great amount of games only run on windows. The Humble Bundle is Cross-Platform. Meaning that Linux finally has some games to play, since there are barely any games capable of running on Linux, they have more money to spend.
Of course, there are a lot of people trying to change that, but Linux isn’t seen as a gaming operation system. With the Humble Bundle, Linux users immediately have a couple of games to play, and with all their money not spent on games, they can afford to pay more when they actually do find some Linux games. Of course there are plenty of other theories, but until those are proven, I’m sticking with mine.
Even though what the non-believers said and still say, the Humble Bundles are a raging success. A great addition to the Pay What You Want category, if you ask me. Take a look at their website to buy the latest Humble Bundle.
After searching for a couple of hours, I found several other indie bundles. One of which is still running and the other two are not.
-The only still running bundle in this list-
The Indie Royale Bundles are a total of four bundles, sold through a not so often used system: Buy Early and Save. The price starts low, but as more people buy it, the price goes up. If you pay more than the minimum, the price goes down. Nice people do this to knock it down for others, of course this happens a lot less than people paying less than the minimum. Only one bundle is on sale at the same time, the other bundles will follow soon. The games included in the bundles are not shown until the specific bundle is actually up.
They had a summer bundle including these six indie games: Aztaka, City Rain, Puzzlegeddon, Bob Came In Pieces, Vizati and Lylian Paranoid Friendship. The sale is over now, but subscribe anyway, who knows if they will have another bundle soon.
Two bundles, six games each and an all-in-one bundle. This bundle was also very popular, but unfortunately already over. Check out their site anyway, maybe you see some cool indie games that you want to try outside of a bundle?
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What’s your opinion on the Humble Bundle and Pay What You Want in general? Does it benefit the developers? Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time.
Dale Beerling (10 posts)
Dale Beerling, writer at IGM and going by under the nickname GrafixGFX, has many interests. Ranging from designing websites and such to photography and writing. One of those interests, is indie games. They fascinate him, almost at an unhealthy level. Even though he plays games on the pc as well, he thinks nothing can replace an old-school controller and console. Follow Dale on twitter: @GrafixGFX (Be Warned: he tends to tweet in Dutch)There is currently no description for this author...