Humble Indie Bundle
The Humble Indie Bundles or Humble Bundles are a series of game bundles, that are sold and distributed online at a price determined by the purchaser. The games are multi-platform, DRM-free, and independently developed, and buyers can set the revenue split between the developers, charities and humble bundle organizers.
The first bundle was organized and managed by Wolfire Games. Beginning with the second bundle a separate company spun-off, Humble Bundle, Inc., with the sole purpose of making bundles. The bundles are made available for purchase during limited time frames. Purchasers are able to set how much they wish to pay for the bundles and how they want their money to be distributed between the games' developers and two charities: Child's Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The games in the bundles run on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux-based systems and are digitally distributed initially without digital rights management (DRM) controls. Although the bundles are still advertised as DRM-free, three recently included games require product keys for their multi-player modes, generally considered a form of DRM. Seven bundle drives have been held to date, breaking over $7 million in total sale and charitable donations.
Concept
History
Humble Indie Bundle #1
Humble Indie Bundle #2
Humble Frozenbyte Bundle
The third Humble Bundle sale started on April 12, 2011, and features five games from the indie developer Frozenbyte, including Trine, Shadowgrounds, and Shadowgrounds Survivor, for Microsoft Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. It also contained an executable version along with source code for an unfinished game, Jack Claw, and a pre-order for their upcoming game, Splot. Within three days of the launch of the sale, it had raised more than $550,000. By April 22, 2011, the Bundle had surpassed $700,000, at which point Frozenbyte added the source code for both Shadowgrounds games, a level editor for Trine, Mac OS and Linux versions of Jack Claw (in addition to the Windows version), and a demo for Splot. The timeframe for purchasing this bundle ended at midnight on April 26, 2011.
As to the origins of the third bundle, Frozenbyte had been considering raising money for its continued game development through a pay-what-you-want sale for quite some time, but was unsure how to implement such a payment and distribution system and were worried that if they attempted to do such a sale on their own it would not generate enough interest. Impressed by the previous bundles, they contacted John Graham and Jeffrey Rosen who agreed to the idea of making a bundle entirely composed of Frozenbyte titles. Most of the money generated by the sale will go to finishing the development of Trine 2.
Humble Indie Bundle #3
Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle
On September 28, 2011, the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle was announced. Originally the bundle only included the game Frozen Synapse. On September 30, the game Trauma was added as a free bonus; the game SpaceChem was added in a similar manner on October 5. Paying more than the average price would also entitle the purchaser to the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle games. The bundle closed with more than $1.1 million in total revenue.
Humble Voxatron Debut
On October 31, 2011, the Humble Voxatron Debut was released. One game, by , was initially included. The bundle ran for 14 days. At the time of the bundle's release, the game was labeled as Voxatron Alpha. The Binding of Isaac and were added on the following day. On November 9, 2011, four more games were added to the bundle as a free bonus, three from the developers of Voxatron - Zen Puzzle Garden, Chocolate Castle and Jasper's Journeys, and one co-developed by one of The Binding of Isaac developers, Gish. At closing, the debut raised $902,453.
Humble Introversion Bundle
On November 22, 2011, the Humble Introversion Bundle was released. The bundle included four games by Introversion Software: Darwinia, Multiwinia, DEFCON and Uplink. If the average price was beaten, two more games were given to the buyer: Aquaria by Bit Blot and Crayon Physics Deluxe by Kloonigames. Two technology demos by Introversion were also included, for Windows only, one including destructible Voxel buildings, the other showing the procedural generation of a city. On November 29, 2011, an additional game was added, Dungeons of Dredmor by Gaslamp Games. The source code of all the released Introversion games (excluding the technology demos) was also made available to the buyers.
Analysis
Success
The first promotion was considered to be very successful. Rosen noted that they considered the million-dollar goal as a best-case scenario, but once the sale actually started, "it was immediately clear that we were on to something". Rosen would later attribute part of the success to Ars Technica writer Mike Thomspon, stating that he "immediately saw the potential" of the Bundle in an article written for the website just prior to the Bundle's sale period. Brandon Boyer of Boing Boing believed that it provided a model that "seems it could and should be repeated". The move to offer games in a price and manner that consumers were willing to buy was contrasted to larger software publishers that place artificial limitations on their content; Mike Masnick of Techdirt believed the Humble Bundle promotion worked as it "focus[ed] on giving people real reasons to buy, rather than just feeling entitled to define the terms under which they buy and looking for ways to limit those who want to interact with you in a different manner". The source for the promotion's website has been requested of Wolfire by several other groups, according to Rosen; Rosen continues that he believes that many similar charitable sales can be seen in the future from the Humble Bundle's success. For future Bundles, Rosen desires to include lesser-known titles in contrast to World of Goo and Braid, but has had to already reject some developers' requests to be included in a Bundle, claiming the games' quality may tarnish the Humble Indie Bundle branding. Instead, he believes smaller games with no wide profile and are "legitimately good" would be ideal for inclusion in future Bundles.
In April 2011, it was announced that Sequoia Capital had provided venture capital of $4.7 million towards future Humble Indie Bundle development.
Piracy
Despite the ability to get the games at nearly zero cost, Wolfire Games estimate that 25% of the traceable downloads for the first Bundle have come from software piracy by links provided in some forums that bypass the payment screen to access the games; Wolfire further surmises additional piracy occurred through BitTorrent-type peer-to-peer sharing services. Rosen noted they purposely removed much of the DRM associated with games to appeal to those that would otherwise engage in software piracy, through both having the games ship without DRM and by having only limited copy protection on their website. Rosen also stated that for about ten users that emailed Wolfire about being unable to pay for the software, he personally donated on their behalf. Rosen comments that there may be legitimate reasons for those that appear to be pirating the game, including the inability to use the payment methods provided or that they had made a single large donation for multiple copies. However, he also considered that there are players that would simply forward the download links to "take pleasure in spreading the pirated links to their friends or anonymous buddies for fun". Wolfire Games did take action to stop predatory sites, such as the closely named "wollfire.com", from selling illegal copies of the bundle.
While aware of the presumed software piracy, Rosen says that Wolfire will take no steps to limit it, believing that "making the download experience worse for generous contributors in the name of punishing pirates doesn't really fit with the spirit of the bundle". Rosen noted that by offering the source code of the games as an incentive, they would hope that "the community will help build them up with the same vigor that crackers tear DRM down". David Wong of Cracked, in considering several reasons for the negative stereotypes for video game players, used the Humble Indie Bundle as an example of demonstrating the "sense of entitlement" that some video game players have, pointing to the high rate of piracy and use of bandwidth as alternatives to spending "even one penny".
In preparing for the second Humble Indie Bundle sale, John Graham acknowledged that some may still download the game through illegal means, but also said that the organizers of the bundle gave their best effort to make the process of purchasing the games simple, and they also wished to create a social impact with the sales by including contributions to Child's Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. An anonymous survey conducted by Wolfire for those who felt it necessary to acquire the second Bundle from other illegitimate sources showed that some preferred the option of using peer-to-peer sharing services like BitTorrent to improve the speed and reliability of the download; as a result, Wolfire added the option to download the games through BitTorrent, hoping to entice more people to acquire the game legitimately.
Software "counterfeits"
Several games in the Humble Indie Bundles have been released as open-source software as a result of the Bundles reaching certain sales levels. One such game was Wolfire's own Lugaru HD, where they released the engine under the GNU General Public License, and also included the various art assets, level designs, and other creative elements under a freely redistributable license for personal use. Their intent was to allow programmers to experiment and improve the game's engine using the associated assets. Wolfire later began selling the title Lugaru HD on the Mac App Store for $9.99. However, some time afterwards, another company, iCoder, used the open-source resources to recreate the same game for the App Store, charging only $0.99 for their version Lugaru. iCoder claims they have the right to recreate and charge for the game under the GNU license, but Jeffery Rosen notes that this did not apply to the art assets. Also, the GPL license is not compatible with Apple's AppStore. The iCoder version was taken down from the App Store after about a week since Wolfire notified them of the issue, though so far no explanation has been given by Apple. As the iCoder version of the application was popular, being the 60th most downloaded game application prior to its removal, Wolfire offered those that purchased the iCoder version a free copy of their version and codes to unlock the game from within Steam.
Rosen notes that the incident may discourage developers from releasing their source in the future.
Criticism
Alexander Zubov of Kot-in-Action Creative Artel who developed the Steel Storm games complained in an interview about the trouble he had getting his games accepted into the Bundles, originally trying to push their game's first episode as a free bonus for the second Bundle, and then trying to get their full game into the third. Zubov recalls that he had heard "nothing back" until they made a "last minute decision" to include Steel Storm: Burning Retribution in the Humble Indie Bundle 3. Even then, Zubov further described his dissatisfaction with how payment was handled, saying that they were "offered a tiny-tiny fraction of what HIB3 made, a very small (compare to the profits of HIB3) fixed amount of money" even though, according to Zubov, "when Steel Storm was released as a bonus, their sales jumped up significantly." He also mentioned that despite claims by the organizers that their sales would "sky rocket just because [they] were in the HIB3", their actual amount of sales remained relatively constant.
Zubov did however note that their inclusion in the third bundle "did get a lot of users who redeemed their copy of Steel Storm on Steam and Desura" and that they hoped this would help keep their "current user base, which we gained with HIB3, interested in our upcoming games". He concluded his comments about his experiences by saying that "only time will tell if HIB3 was [an] awesome deal or not. Maybe, maybe not. If it works out as a long term investment, it will be awesome indeed. If not, I will never ever participate in such capacity (as a bonus item for a small fixed payout) in the future HIB bundles. We all do have bills to pay and families to feed, don't we?"
The technology website Phoronix has also reported that there has also been some detractors of the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle, with editor Michael Larabel claiming that the Bundle does not seem to be "as popular as some of the past bundles" and that "the pace of sales isn't as fast as some of the other bundles." More importantly, he also explains that the "bundle has actually resulted in some complaints among gamers", with most of the complaints centred around that fact that originally there was "just one game being officially part of this bundle". Larabel does note that they did later add more games to the bundle as bonuses and that "adding more value to the bundle may generate some additional sales", but does conclude that the initially small offer has caused there to be less "interest among gamers this time around."
List of games offered
References
See Also
External links
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